Page 86 - Cultures and Organizations

68 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

from other societies as lacking intensity. When children grow up, they
start relating to their parents as friends, or at least as equals, and a grown-
up person is not apt to ask his or her parents’ permission or even advice
regarding an important decision. In the ideal family, adult members are
mutually independent. A need for independence is supposed to be a major
component of the mental software of adults. Parents should make their own

provisions for when they become old or infirm; they cannot count on their
children to support them, nor can they expect to live with them.
The pictures in the two preceding paragraphs have deliberately been
polarized. Reality in a given situation will most likely be in between the
opposite ends of the power distance continuum: countries score somewhere
along the continuum. We saw that the social class and education levels
of the parents, especially in the small-power-distance countries, play an
important role. Families develop their own family cultures that may be at
variance with the norms of their society, and the personalities of individual
parents and children can lead to nontypical behavior. Nevertheless, the two
pictures indicate the ends of the line along which solutions to the human
inequality dilemma in the family vary.
The Eurobarometer, a periodic survey of representative samples of
the population in member countries and candidate member countries of
the European Union, collected data in 2008 on the sharing of full-time
and part-time work between parents in a family. In countries with larger
power distances, more often both parents worked full-time; in countries
with smaller power distances, more often only one of the parents worked
full-time, while the other worked as well but part-time. Except in the
poorest countries, these differences were independent of the countries’
national wealth. They imply a closer contact between parent and children
in smaller-power-distance cultures. 20

As the family is the source of our very first social mental program-
ming, its impact is extremely strong, and programs set at this stage are

difficult to change. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are aware of this
importance of one’s family history but not always of its cultural context.
Psychiatry tries to help individuals whose behavior deviates from soci-
etal norms. This book describes how the norms themselves vary from one
society to another. Different norms mean that psychiatric help to a person
from another society or even from a different sector of the same society is a
risky affair. It demands that the helper be aware of his or her own cultural
differences with and biases toward the client. 21