Page 293 - Cultures and Organizations

262 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

mathematics of students in high-LTO-CVS cultures refutes this assump-
tion. What Western minds interpret as rote learning may in fact be a way
toward understanding. Teaching and learning are culturally conditioned,
and apparently similar behaviors may have different deep meanings. 61

Basic mathematics poses well-defined problems in which goals are
62
explicitly stated—that is, “formal” rather than “open” problems. Students
from high-LTO cultures prove to be well equipped for solving such prob-
lems. Professor Gordon Redding, who spent many years at Hong Kong
University, wrote:

The Chinese student, if he has been initially educated in his own culture,
and in his own language, will have begun to use a set of cognitive processes
which give him a “fi x” on the world of a very distinctive kind. . . . It is
possible to see some rationale for the noticeable tendency of Chinese to excel
in certain subjects, particularly the applied sciences, where “the individual
and the concrete” is paramount, and for their tendency not to move natu-
rally into the abstract realms of philosophy and sociology.
It is a common question why an active tradition of scientifi c investi-
gation failed to develop in China in the way it did in the West. The most
appealing explanations for it center upon differences in cognitive structures
of a fundamental kind. 63

A talent for the concrete implies a talent for solving practical problems.
What works is more important in high-LTO cultures than why it works.
China’s Chairman Deng Xiaoping is credited for the dictum “What does
the color of the cat matter as long as it catches mice?”

Long- and Short-Term Orientation and

Economic Growth
After World War II (1939–45) the victorious powers claimed a new world
order led by the United Nations, with universal human rights. The fi rst
issue on the world’s agenda in the 1950s and ’60s was political independence.
The colonial era ended, and many former colonies of rich countries became
new states. Around 1970 priorities shifted to economic development. Three
international organizations already founded in 1944—the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization
(WTO)—made a commitment to end poverty.