>Gurnek Bains
Cultural DNA
CULTURAL
DNA
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION
GURNEK BAINS
Cover design: C. Wallace
Cover image: Balloon Earth © iStock.com/xochicalco
Copyright © 2015 by Gurnek Bains. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bains, Gurnek.
Cultural DNA: the psychology of globalization / Gurnek Bains.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-92891-2 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Cultural intelligence. 2. Leadership – Psychological aspects. 3. Career development. 4. Culture and globalization. I. Title.
HM621.B343 2015
303.48'2 – dc23
2014044837
Acknowledgments
From the start this project has been a family affair. My wife Kylie has provided much support in generating ideas. Her Australian cultural DNA has also ensured that the project actually happened, rather than staying a piece of “Indian reflective enquiry”. My two teenage children, Akal and Aman, have also helped. Akal's interest in economics and Aman's in psychology has meant that I have been able to give them significant sub-projects, in what we quickly discovered was a very ambitious undertaking.
I also want to thank everyone at YSC who has contributed and all of our global offices for their local insights. Our research department has also undertaken painstaking analysis of our database. I also want to thank Evgeniya Petrova, who did much of the literature research and Rosemary Burke-Kennedy who helped bring the manuscript to fruition.
Gurnek Bains
London 2015
Introduction
We live in a world that is becoming flatter and flatter. Global business and trade, the ease of air travel and the unending flow of information and communication are all combining to create a kind of homogenized, cultural soup into which we are all being inexorably pulled. Whether you are in Beijing, Dubai, or Reykjavík, the ubiquity of global brands and the extent of cultural fusion can make everything around you look and feel comfortingly familiar, if somewhat blandly uniform. Backpackers know this and go to great lengths, admittedly sometimes in a self-defeating, cattle-like manner, to discover corners of the world that our global culture has not yet infiltrated or homogenized.
However, one theme emerges with surprising regularity when you talk to people who have moved to a different culture and lived there for some time – this surface similarity is something of an illusion only held by the transient tourist or business traveler. “You don't realize just how different this place really is once you have been here some time,” people who have deeper experience will often say. While things can appear familiar on the surface, over time a gradual realization sinks in that the deeper psychological and cultural instincts of different societies really are different in profound and nonsuperficial ways. You find that while it might have been easy to engage the culture initially, you eventually hit a permafrost layer through which an outsider cannot penetrate. Over time, you often become aware of just what you don't know or can't comprehend. The initial surface familiarity can be deceptive; just because people in Shanghai wear Gucci or Missoni or carry Prada handbags, it doesn't mean that they are Italians at heart.
The same happens when people from different cultural backgrounds marry or form long-term relationships, as is increasingly the case in our globalized village of a world. Initial assumptions around the similarity of values are tested over time and it frequently begins to dawn on people that their partner's original culture is more ingrained in them than they might have assumed. Subtle differences in attitude and orientation begin to emerge once the fog of early infatuation and surface familiarity lifts. This is not to say that relationships across cultural barriers are doomed or problematic. I myself, being Indian and married to an Australian, know and appreciate the richness that is inevitably a part of cross-cultural relationships. However, both my wife and I have realized over time that I am more Indian than I might have thought in my deepest instincts and actually she is more Australian – despite the fact that both of us on the surface appear to be quintessential exponents of middle-class British mores and values.
The central argument of this book is that while there is much that is common between humans, there are also subtle but profound differences between the psychological instincts of different cultures. Furthermore, the ultimate causes of these differences frequently lie buried in the past – often in the very early period when that part of the world was being settled by the first human migrations. It is this echo from distant times that fundamentally affects each culture's psychological outlook. Like a distant drumbeat, this cultural DNA reverberates through the society, affecting the historical cycles it has experienced, its economic performance, political institutions, business ethos, and just
