Cultural Default: Application And Implication In Hofstede's Theory

People are now living in an age of globalization, and are increasingly in contact with people from other cultures as a result of the rapid development of economy and technology. The increasing intercultural communication requires people living in this "global village" to improve our own multi-cultural awareness to enhance our understanding of other people from different civilization, their living styles, beliefs, traditions and cultural backgrounds.Culture plays a commanding and crucial role in every aspect during the intercultural communication. So the paper begins with defining culture, cultural default and identifying the framework of this paper. Cultural default, due to diverse cultural difference, is a common term in translation theory. From the analysis of culture and its components, we get the root of cultural default—value system, as we can deal with this topic from the deep structure of culture, which is relatively steady. Being multidimensional and changeable, culture value difference may appear in various aspects. The value dimensions developed by the Netherlands anthropologist Greet Hofstede: power distances, uncertainty avoidance, individualism\ collectivism, masculinity\ femininity, are adopted to be the standards to classify those complicated cultural defaults. It is worth mentioning that the value dimension of Hostede was widely accepted and used in intercultural communication, intercultural management and the conflict in intercultural management since the 1980s, for which the author choose this theory framework.According to these four contrasting pairs of Hofstede, power distances, uncertainty avoidance, individualism\ collectivism, masculinity\ femininity, diverse cultural defaults will be analyzed in detail as well as their application in those value dimensions, including in social life, family relation, work organizations, education systems, political circles, and etc. through those analysis , this chapter can help people understand those different culture patterns, such as why some people value collectivism whereas others value individualism or why some people try to be modestwhereas others try to be straight forward. They are also helpful in developing an objective attitude an avoid ethnocentrism, which is a tendency to view people "unconsciously by using one's own group and one's own customs as the standard for all the standards. Furthermore, as intercultural contacts have been growing in both frequency and intensity with "the process of globalization, this integrated trend is inexorable. So their future development and some popular cultural phenomenon are also mentioned in this chapter.For the purpose of minimizing the negative effect rooted from cultural default, in the last chapter of this paper, Chinese culture value will be discussed according to Hofstede's value dimensions. Without doubt, Chinese culture belongs to high power distance, high uncertainty avoidance and group in terms of Hofstede. Some measures .will be figured out aiming at minimizing those negative consequences: encourage students speaking out and insisting on their own ideas, challenging traditional power or authority;explore unknown, fields and unclear problems;give emphasis on group, more focus should be shifted to individual and unique personality. All these measures are expected to become our creation resource in today's China.In the conclusion part of this paper, the author summarizes the whole study of the paper, and proposes that due attention should be paid to children's early education.