Page 425 - Cultures and Organizations

390 IMPLICATIONS

too), the scores of the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking regions on the
four dimensions of the IBM studies were fairly similar, and both regions
scored rather like France and different from the Netherlands. This fi nding

reflects Belgian history: the middle and upper classes used to speak French,
whatever the language of their ancestors, and tended to adopt the French
culture; the lower classes in the Flemish part spoke Dutch, whatever the
language of their ancestors, but when they moved up in status, they con-
formed to the culture of the middle classes. The IBM studies included a
similar comparison between the German- and French-speaking regions of
Switzerland. In this case the picture was different: the German-speaking
part scored similar to Germany, and the French-speaking part scored
similar to France. Switzerland’s historical development was different from
Belgium’s: in Switzerland the language distribution followed the cantons
(independent provinces) rather than the social class structure. This also
helps to explain why language is a hot political issue in Belgium but not in
Switzerland. 11
Without knowing the language, one will miss a lot of the subtleties of
a culture and be forced to remain a relative outsider. One of these subtleties

is humor. What is considered funny is highly culture-specific. Many Euro-
peans are convinced that Germans have no sense of humor, but this simply
means they have a different sense of humor. In intercultural encounters
the experienced traveler knows that jokes and irony are taboo until one is
absolutely sure of the other culture’s conception of what represents humor.
Raden Mas Hadjiwibowo, the Indonesian business executive whose
description of Javanese family visits was quoted in Chapter 4, has written
an insightful analysis of the difference between the Indonesian and the
Dutch senses of humor. One of his case studies runs as follows:

It was an ordinary morning with a routine informal offi ce meeting. They
all sat around the meeting table, and found themselves short of one chair.
Markus, one of the Indonesian managers, looked in the connecting offi ce
next door for a spare chair.
The next door offi ce belonged to a Dutch manager, Frans. He was
out, but he would not mind lending a chair; all furniture belonged to the

firm anyway. Markus was just moving one of Frans’s chairs through the
connecting door when Frans came in from the other side.
Frans was in a cheerful mood. He walked over to his desk to pick up
some papers, and prepared for leaving the room again. In the process he