E-Book Overview
This is an innovative way of looking at cultures! Van de vliert is definately a genius in mapping out the world's cultures with an extensive ecological touch. It has been a long debate recently reagrding the future research in cross-cultural studies. The popularity of ecology has been advocated under the new attempt of defining culture with the concern of environment at large. Van de Vliert uses Climate and cash as controlable variables to explain the different value systems. His focus on the categorization of self expression, survival and easy-going cultures will in my opinion becomes a futuristic approach for clustering the cultures. This will be an avnat garde version of the traditional dimension based approach. A very good reading indeed for any one whom into the inter-cultural communication and cross-cultural management. Linjie Chou
E-Book Content
This page intentionally left blank climate, affluence, and culture Everyone, everyday, everywhere has to use money to cope with climatic cold or heat to satisfy survival needs. This point of departure led to a decade of innovative research based on the tenet that climate and affluence influence each other’s impact on culture. Evert Van de Vliert discovered survival cultures in poor countries with demanding cold or hot climates, selfexpression cultures in rich countries with demanding cold or hot climates, and easygoing cultures in poor and rich countries with temperate climates. These findings have implications for the cultural consequences of global warming and local poverty. Climate protection and poverty reduction are used in combination to sketch four scenarios for shaping cultures, from which the world community has to make a principal and principled choice soon. Evert Van de Vliert received his PhD from the Free University in Amsterdam in 1973 and held teacher and researcher positions at the same university, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and at the Royal Military Academy in the Netherlands. He served as chairman of the Dutch Research Association of Social and Organizational Psychologists (1984–1989) and as research director of the Kurt Lewin Institute (1993–1996). He has published more than 200 journal articles, chapters, and books including Complex Interpersonal Conflict Behaviour: Theoretical Frontiers (1997). In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association for Conflict Management. At present, he is professor emeritus of organizational and applied social psychology at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands and research professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway. His current research concentrates on cross-national comparisons, with an emphasis on the impact of cold, temperate, and hot climates on national and organizational cultures. culture and psychology Series Editor: David Matsumoto, San Francisco State University As an increasing number of social scientists come to recognize the pervasive influence of culture on individual human behavior, it has become imperative for culture to be included as an important variable in all aspects of psychological research, theory, and practice. Culture and Psychology is an evolving series of works that brings the study of culture and psychology into a single, unified concept. Ute Scho¨npflug, Cultural Transmission Evert Van de Vliert, Climate, Affluence, and Culture Climate, Affluence, and Culture Evert Van de Vliert University of Groningen and University of Bergen CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9