| Over the past fifty years, scholars in social psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior have agreed on the importance of articulating culture using universal conditions. They apply this reasoning to conceptions of culture at various cultural levels: societal, national, organizational, occupational, ethnic, linguistic, group and family. However, they have not agreed on the characterization or nature of these universal conditions or core domains that inform cultural values, practice, behaviors, and artifacts.; This dissertation proceeds from theory to practice. I propose a three-dimensional binary cube matrix that identifies eight basic types, defined in terms of semantic content borrowed from eight trigram archetypes in the ancient Chinese classic, the I Ching. Together, this binary matrix and semantic content form the Binary Archic Matrix typology (BAM).; I apply this typology to a reanalysis of the data from Hofstede's study of culture, conducted with IBM (Hofstede, 1980 and 1991). In this study, Hofstede argues that his data identified four universal dimensions of culture. My analysis of his dimensions and data yields a more accurate, parsimonious, meaningful, and useful representation of culture. In this way, culture can be more readily understood in terms of traditional Chinese yin-yang cosmology, philosophy, and thought.; My methodology is closely related to the interpretive approach called architectonics, a comparative global hermeneutics developed by Walter Watson (1985/1993), and elaborated and deployed by David Dilworth (1989). These authors develop a typology for interpreting and ascertaining the universal characteristics of major world philosophical texts and their authors. Furthermore, they argue that the whole notion of culture can be treated as text, which is subject to systematic interpretation and profiling. My dissertation applies the BAM typology as a method for interpreting the texts of Hofstede and the I Ching.; My thesis is an interpretation that translates one idiomatic view of culture, represented by Hofstede's survey, into another idiomatic view of culture, represented by the I Ching. The BAM typology is the method whereby these idiomatic views of culture are then translated into a new, incorporative, bi-cultural synthesis. This typology expands on conceptions of culture which can help improve cross-cultural collaboration and problem solving. |
