Beware of the simplicity of Kipling’s East is East and West is West!

On Friday, at the BIG Conference, I saw an interesting presentation form Jonathan Fletcher, which looked at the differences in cultures between different countries and drew inferences for marketing and market research. The presentation drew heavily on the work of anthropologists and thinkers, such as Emmanuel Todd and Francis Fukuyama, and identified four key cultural dimensions, which Fletcher reported as vertical discipline, cultural dynamism, trust, and control dependence.

Whilst I felt it was great that Fletcher was reminding researchers that there are differences between countries, and that culture is a key dimension, I would like to push the issue much further. I think there is an endemic problem of too many people in Europe and North America of assuming that the East (or, similarly, the developing markets) are similar to each other, in the way that the West is a meaningful term – for example in Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West, where he asserts that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”.

In contrast I’d like to make two key assertions, the second being a corollary of the first.

1. The differences between, for example, Japan and China, and between Indonesia and Vietnam, are as big as the differences between these four countries and the West.
2. The differences between USA, UK, France, and Germany are tiny compared to the differences between many of the countries we (in the West) use generalisations for, such as the East or developing markets.

There are a number of different and competing academic strands that, in my view, support the two positions set out above, even though those disciplines/traditions would not necessarily agree with each other on the why and the how.

Those academics/thinkers who believe the key issue is the economy (and in particular the relationship between people to the means of production) would identify radical differences between countries with capitalist backgrounds, countries with or without a tradition of property, and between countries where there is a surplus value of labour and those where there was not.

The discourse analysts who follow in the tradition of the likes of Foucault would expect to find that different languages and discourses create different realities.

Similar studies dating back, and probably beyond, the likes of Emile Durkheim, illustrate the impact of different religions on society.

The first part of my case is that the West is staggeringly homogenous. At present Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand are largely extensions of Europe, settled by Europeans, with European religions, and European languages (mostly English). Europe (and the settled regions) all share a religious background based on 1000 years (and in some cases more) of Christianity. The languages in Europe tend to belong to the Indo-European group, with most of them being either Romance or Germanic, and almost all use the same script. Europe has tended to have a shared form of government, first the Roman Empire (which fell in 476 in the West, and 1453 in the East), then the Holy Roman Empire from 962 until 1806, with a background of Papal oversight, and short involuntary unifications under Napoleon and Hitler.

By contrast the countries we frequently refer to as the East show great differences. India has several major religions (including Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh) and many languages (including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, and Marathi). In Japan the two leading religions Shintoism and Buddhism are  simultaneously followed by many Japanese individuals, the script for the language is unique (although some elements are borrowed from the Chinese characters), the language is very different from most other languages in the region (but similar to Korean). In China the recent experience is one of being in a communist country for 60 years, before that the major religious groupings were Daoism and Buddhism, the language is very tonal, utilises a pictogram script, which results in people who speak Mandarin and Cantonese being able to understand each other’s written language, but unable to understand the spoken language.

Why do we tend to group the East?

My feeling is that what is happening is two well-known phenomena:

1. We tend to focus on the small differences between people we are close to us.
2. We tend to group people into like us versus not like us, which can lead to an assumption that the ‘not like us’ constitute a group.

Within a family siblings will often make a great play of the differences between them, similarly political parties within a country fall out over their differences, and the falling out tends to be the most bitter between the groups that are the most similar. In Europe, France and UK, or Italy and Germany put great stress on their differences, but from Beijing, Tokyo, or Jakarta they appear very similar.

When Western companies or anthropologists study other countries they use terms and comparators they are familiar with. Notions of power, coherence, and family are taken from the West and the other countries are assessed in terms of these criteria.  As an analogy, let’s assume that we play American Football and we want to assess all the other sports in the world. We might measure all other games/sports on questions such as: Do they have two teams? Do they use a ball? Do they wear protective headgear? Do they have professional players? Do they have a referee?

This sort of framework would find it quite easy to describe a range of games such as soccer, rugby, Gaelic football, and field hockey as being broadly similar to American Football. But it would tend to classify athletics, swimming, gymnastics, show jumping, hunting with hawks, rock climbing, as being similar to each other – because they are not like American Football. Anthropologists describe this dichotomy in terms of etic and emic. Etic accounts seek to make sense of phenomena in terms of what the observer understands, emic accounts seek to explain phenomena in terms that are meaningful to the people being observed.

Another problem for researchers trying to categorise countries is the arbitrary units of measurement, i.e. countries. For example, in the study Fletcher illustrated, the data treated Sweden, Norway, and Denmark as three separate countries, leading to a high correlation between the characteristics of these countries and their performance. By contrast, India is treated as a single country, as is China. Francis Fukuyama has spoken about the way that countries such as France, USA, and Mexico have all had a chance to develop a national identify through struggles, wars, and an emergent coherent structure – and that this happened over centuries. By contrast countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan have not developed a national identity, and are still collections of different tribal and religious differences – rather than coherent nations in the Western European sense.

So, what does this mean for market researchers? As Fletcher points out we need to be aware that countries are different and that we need to take culture into account. However, I think it means more than that, we need to be aware that frameworks designed in the West may not be relevant in all markets and we need to avoid assuming that there is a such a place as the East, Africa, or the developing world, and most importantly we need to validate what we do in terms of both etic and emic accounts.

 

Comments

[DavidYingHonHo]

Ray, you have always raised interesting topics. To weigh in a few thoughts:

- "The East" and "the West" are two words that are so simple, seemingly straightforward semantically and symmetrical. That invites people to simplistically contrast the two groupings of civilizations. If we inspect history, do some linguistic/anthropological comparisons and some cultural studies, it is easy to notice that the East was much less homogeneous in the beginning and did not move together in history.

- To be fair, it is hard for Westerners to get insights into non-Western cultures due to language barriers and lack of exposure. For instance, most people on Earth have seen tons of Hollywood movies but how many Westerners have seen more than a couple of Chinese, Indian or Korean films?

- I am so fascinated by different cultures that I have learned with different levels of success of more than 10 East Asian, South East Asian, South Asian and European languages. Your examples above are all good ones. But they reveal just my point above - hard to overcome language barrier and get sufficient exposure. For instance, the truth to the relation between Mandarin and Cantonese is that Cantonese speakers are forced by politics and cultural history to write in Mandarin when they write. If Cantonese is written verbatim, Mandarin speakers still cannot understand!

- The East is still a useful grouping to me. When we measure or group things, it really depends on our required level of specification. Say, I often use the term "soy sauce culture" to describe the cultures of CJKV, Thai, Laos. Despite the differences within this group, there are indeed a lot of similarities too. But in some circumstances, they can hardly be placed together. Say if you analyze the culture shown by the Japanese in the earthquake in March, I cannot avoid to say that Japanese culture is unique in those respects of discipline and resilience. My conclusion: Groupings like Asia, Emerging markets... are still useful but when we researchers use them, we need to remark. We have the responsibility to ensure our readers are not mistaken. No words are perfect. We still need these concepts to efficiently communicate.