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The past vs the future | Course Web

from The Cultural Dimension of International Business
by Gary Ferraro

A U. S. fertilizer manufacturer headquartered in Minneapolis decided to venture into the vast potential of third-world markets.  They sent a team of agricultural researchers into an East African country to test soils, weather conditions, and topographical conditions in order to develop locally effective fertilizers.  Once the research and manufacturing of these fertilizer products had been completed, one of the initial marketing strategies was to distribute, free of charge, 100-pound bags of the fertilizer to selected areas of rural farmers.

It was thought that those using the free fertilizer would be so impressed with the dramatic increase in crop productivity that they would spread the word to their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Teams of salespeople went from hut to hut in those designated areas, offering each male head of household a free bag of fertilizer along with an explanation of its capacity to increase crop output. Although each head of household was very polite, they all turned down the offer for free fertilizer. The marketing staff concluded that these local people were either uninterested in helping themselves grow more food and eat better or so ignorant that they could not understand the benefits of the new product. The fertilizer company failed at designing and implementing their marketing plan in the cultural context of East African, a common mistake that many US companies make in their overseas business missions.

In this case, although the fertilizer company did a good deal of research in developing its products, it was woefully lacking in cultural information that would have enabled the company to successfully market their product.

First, the company tried to convince the village men to accept an agricultural innovation, when in fact it was women who were the farmers. [See image above.]  That they failed to understand this basic ethnographic fact did little for their general credibility.

Second, many East Africans have two important beliefs that can help explain their reaction: a) the theory of limited good, which assumes that there is a finite amount of good in the world (such as fertility), and b) witchcraft, the notion that evil forces embodied in people can harm members of the community.

Given these two beliefs, any individual East African farmer would never participate in any scheme that promises to produce considerably more per acre than her neighbor, for to do so would open her up to charges of having bewitched the fertility from the neighbor’s soil.  In short, to continue to grow the same amount as one had in the past is a far preferable alternative to being killed for witchcraft.

from Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson

Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

"Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying -- which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements -- books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to 'follow the plot' instead of learning to lead."

I am always doing what I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
-- Pablo Picasso