The last three videos involve the classic east meets west cultural boundaries. We'll be seeing later that cultural boundaries become apparent even in the case of seemingly simple mergers in the business world. Moreover, as more and more companies globalize, cultural boundaries are also part of the internal operation of a corporation. And they can cause problems when they're not recognized for what they are and dealt with accordingly. In this video, I want to tell you about one globalized company I had the opportunity to examine, and the interesting culture differences that turned up inside it. For purposes of maintaining privacy I'll give the company a pseudonym, Scandinavian Technologies. It is a good sized company with more than 5000 employees, but not a huge company, say like Toyota, which has about 350,000 employees. Scandinavian Technologies is based in Denmark, but it has branches in different countries, most importantly in the US. The important difference turned out to hinge on an aspect of Danish culture of which, until I looked into the matter, I'd really been unaware. The company was experiencing some difficulties even though it was a profitable company. Employees in the American branch were feeling frustrated because they felt their important contributions to the company were undervalued by the central administration. The Danish central office in turn worried that the overall company was becoming too Americanized. They wanted to make sure that control remained in Danish hands. Further exploration of the company turned up an aspect of Danish culture of which I'd been unaware. I'll call it here the Law of Jante, or Jante Law. The name refers actually to a novel, entitled A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. It was written by Aksel Sandemose, and was first published in 1936. The Jante Law has been seen many Danes as an expression of Danish culture. And I should say not only by Danes. By this American, it also seemed to me an expression of Danish culture. Here's the English translation of this set of laws or rules. First, you're not to think you are anything special. You're not to think you're as good as us. You're not to think you are smarter than us. In fact, another law, you're not to convince yourself that you are better than us. You're not to think even that you know more than us. You're not to think you are more important than us. You're not to think you are good at anything. You're not to laugh at us. You're not to think anyone cares about you. You're not to think you can teach us anything. Whoa, let's stop and think for a minute about these laws as if they were the culture you learned growing up in Denmark. I think we would conclude that this is not a culture in which self promotion is highly valued. Boasting and bragging would be considered bad, maybe even offensive. Intentionally attracting attention to oneself or valuing oneself more highly than others would be frowned upon. If this were the orientation of the central office of Scandinavian Technologies, how would the American branch of the company appear? And here I should add that most of the employees in the American branch were actually born and raised as Americans. Would the Americans seem to be braggarts and blowhards, always tooting their own horn, talking about how good they are? Would they appear to be calling attention to themselves, asserting their superiority over the Danish central office? Would they be thinking of themselves as smarter, more important than those in the central office? Would they in short be violating Jante Law? And notice here that we're not talking about east meets west. Probably most Americans would not think there would be much in the way of cultural differences between Danes and Americans. After all, many Americans have ancestors who are from Scandinavia. The cultural boundary here should also lead us to reflect on what kinds of things are cultural. In this case, they are representations of the self. They should also cause us to think about how we should respond to discovery of cultural boundaries. We'll begin to talk about that in the next lecture on cultural relativity.
