[MUSIC] In the last two segments, we talked a little bit about objective and subjective cultural differences between countries. The point of understanding cultural differences, of course, ultimately, is to be able to go beyond them in bridging across cultures. And so, in this last segment, I want to talk briefly about the personal implications of. What we've discussed. And in particular how you might think of stretching yourself in a way that allows you to reach beyond your own national origins and deal more effectively with people from other countries. And this is just a start of the discussion that we're going to continue throughout this course. And in particular, are going to come back and wrap up the globe course with, in session number eight. So, for the moment, a couple of interim thoughts about how you can apply some of these ideas. To personal transformation, as opposed to just thinking about economic interactions between countries or companies operating across national borders. First and most obviously the point is, you do have to pay attention to these differences to have any hope. Of actually accommodating and stretching past them. And that's why the first segment of this discussion started off with cultural globalony. Because if you are prey to cultural globalony, if you do believe that cultural differences don't matter or soon won't matter. It's very, very unlikely that you're going to be doing a good job of actually reaching out to other cultures. A second sub-point that's worth stressing though. Which often gets overlooked in the vast literature on cross-cultural intelligence. Is this notion that the differences across countries that matter are more than just purely cultural. So we're going to, in the next three sessions of this course, spend time talking about the other categories of differences. The administrative, geographic, and economic distances. That also have to be taken into account if you really do want to try and at least partially transcend your national origins. Third, reaching out or stretching out beyond your own cultural or national cultural origins, requires more than just an intellectualized knowledge of differences. And in fact, what we're going to see, in later sessions of this course, is that it seems that empathy and humility are essential correlates to actually being able to operate effectively across cultural divides. And while all this material will be discussed in much more detail in later sessions. Particularly session eight. For now, it's probably worth noting that information flows tend to help alleviate some of these kinds of cultural barriers, suggesting that openness in terms of information and to information flows. Is one way of at least partially inoculating again, yourself against the kind of cultural biases that we saw reflected in the very limited levels of cultural globalization that we started out by recapping. So what this slide suggests is that. And when a country has a lot of cross border informational interchange with the rest of the world, the people of that country are relatively less likely to consider themselves culturally superior. And, therefore, relatively less likely to consider their culture as needing protection. Which can end up being a huge barrier to, not just cross-cultural economic interactions, but cross-cultural understanding at a personal level. So, to recap this session, session one of this whole course focused on what globalization isn't. It isn't complete. Session two introduced some material on what globalization is, under the rubric of the CAGE distance framework, and more broadly the law of distance. It suggested that countries that are close to each other along these dimensions. Tend to have more interactions with each other than countries that are far apart. This section has drilled deeper into the C in CAGE. The cultural factors. And tried to explain some of the cultural factors both objective and subjective. That seem to influence the kinds of interactions we see taking place across national borders. And the three sessions to come are going to deal with the three other dimensions of distance built into the CAGE framework, with the objective of really giving us a rounded view. Of all the differences that really do affect the structure of globalization today. [MUSIC]
