Page 131 - Cultures and Organizations

110 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Along with harmony, another important concept in connection with
the collectivist family is shame. Individualist societies have been described
as guilt cultures: persons who infringe on the rules of society will often feel
guilty, ridden by an individually developed conscience that functions as a
private inner pilot. Collectivist societies, on the contrary, are shame cul-
tures: persons belonging to a group from which a member has infringed on
the rules of society will feel ashamed, based on a sense of collective obliga-
tion. Shame is social in nature, whereas guilt is individual; whether shame
is felt depends on whether the infringement has become known by others.
This becoming known is more of a source of shame than the infringement
itself. Such is not the case for guilt, which is felt whether or not the misdeed
is known by others.
One more concept bred in the collectivist family is face. “Losing face,”
in the sense of being humiliated, is an expression that penetrated the Eng-
lish language from the Chinese; the English had no equivalent for it. David

Yau-Fai Ho, a Hong Kong social scientist, defined it as follows: “Face is
lost when the individual, either through his action or that of people closely
related to him, fails to meet essential requirements placed upon him by vir-
28
tue of the social position he occupies.” The Chinese also speak of “giving
someone face,” in the sense of honor or prestige. Basically, face describes
the proper relationship with one’s social environment, which is as essential
to a person (and that person’s family) as the front part of his or her head.
The importance of face is the consequence of living in a society that is very
conscious of social contexts. The languages of other collectivist cultures
have words with more or less similar meanings. In Greece, for example,
there is a word philotimo; Harry Triandis, a Greek American psychologist,
has written:

A person is philotimos to the extent in which he conforms to the norms and
values of his in-group. These include a variety of sacrifi ces that are appro-
priate for members of one’s family, friends, and others who are “concerned
with one’s welfare”; for example, for a man to delay marriage until his
sisters have married and have been provided with a proper dowry is part
of the normative expectations of traditional rural Greeks as well as rural
Indians (and many of the people in between). 29

In the individualist society, the counterpart characteristic is self-
respect, but this again is defined from the point of view of the individual,