The Lewis Model



Richard Lewis predicts that there are 3 plots that the countries should be categorized by according to the cultural facts. Here are the 3 different plots:
1-      Linear-actives — those who plan, schedule, organize, pursue action chains, do one thing at a time. Germans and Swiss are in this group.
2-      Multi-actives — those lively, loquacious people who do many things at once, planning their priorities not according to a time schedule, but according to the relative thrill or importance that each appointment brings with it. Italians, Latin Americans and Arabs are members of this group.
3-      Reactives — those cultures that prioritize courtesy and respect, listening quietly and calmly to their interlocutors and reacting carefully to the other side's proposals. Chinese, Japanese and Finns are in this group.
Personally, I believe that as I person, I fit into being in the Reactives group myself too. Even from here, we can actually see that Richard Lewis’s model can explain all the cultures in the world in a much easier way.  Turkey, my own country I must say can be more in the middle somewhere around Multi Actives and Reactives, even probably a bit closer on the Multi Actives side.
Lewis Richard also states that by focusing on the cultural roots of national behavior, both in society and business, we can foresee and calculate with a surprising degree of accuracy how others will react to our plans for them, and we can make certain assumptions as to how they will approach us.
When you think about this, it is true. Many people might not come to realization by this but when we look at many industries around the world that are successful, I must say that they are using this technique, foreseeing people’s opinions and that is why they know what will come their way. So everything is planned out so that the business can approach with the right communication skills to become successful.
As a person that is living in Finland for a couple of months now, I can definitely see that Finnish people are exactly Reactives, they like to listen and understand what is going on, they are extremely calm about any situation and they try to find a way to help without worrying or making the situation worse. With that said, I find myself perfectly fitting in with this!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Edward T. Hall’s Cultural Iceberg Model

Image
One of the things I was very much interested in when I came to Finland was the culture. As we all know and as I have written about in my previous posts, culture differs from people to people. I find culture as a very important impact in my life and growing up, I have always been through many different cultures. I must say that I do have many different influences on me caused by these cultures. For me, a culture is a new person, a different character. So, this made me take in interest in Edward Hall’s Iceberg Model. In this model, we can see that many cultures have many important opinions about different topics. For example, some cultures have religion, some have people, and some have animals. It all differs and makes every culture unique in its own way. Along this, Edward Hall really pointed out how we have a surface culture and a deep culture. These all differ very much from people to people. I find it very interesting and think that it is a good way to reflect who we are to o...
Read more

Salmiakki Ice Cream

Image
Let’s talk about something I really love in general: Ice Cream. Now, I must say that summer has officially come (not to Finland in this case since it was basically raining and snowing a couple of days ago) but, summer is out there. And here we are still wearing coats. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t have ice cream! Ice cream is life. One of the best things about summer is, you can have ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can even make your own ice cream or popsicles. I remember making these lovely strawberry popsicles last summer, they were healthy too! Overall, everyone loves a bit of ice cream. Coming to ice cream flavours, I am a great bitter chocolate, normal chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and another ice cream type they have fan. As long as it is ice cream, I have no problem gobbling it down. But…Salmiakki ice cream? We need to talk. First of all, as we had tried Salmiakki which you can check out from the video up there! It wasn’t the sweetest f...
Read more

Finnish Is Hard!

Today, I wanted to write about something I have not written in a long time but wanted to write about. Let’s talk about the Finnish language! The first thing I would like to state out is, as knowing English for many years myself, it is very easy for me to be able to predict what other languages mean and to figure out their sentences or words to their meanings. As you understand a language more, you realize that you start to understand other languages too…well that changed now but still.This year, like every other year, my goal was to learn something new which can be information wise or starting something new but this year, I learnt one very major thing : Finnish cannot be predicted. You can’t make out any words or sentences in Finnish. In fact, you can’t even remember the words you learnt in Finnish after a couple of minutes! Why is it so hard? What I have seen is the fact that Finnish has words in words which means, there are separate words, than if you want to say something that ...
Read more