Open – Mindedness, Empathy And Gender Issues: Going Beyond National And Corporate Cultures

It has become commonplace to speak about national culture and corporate culture. In last ICED, a workshop ended up by a debate about the impact of deeply rooted national culture characteristics on designers' attitudes. We decided to focus in this paper on the evolution of the perception of the concept of culture. Does the difference made between national vs. corporate culture still make sense in today's working environments? Which are the new trends regarding the concept of culture when used by corporations in understanding knowledge sharing, diversity or design processes? We present here a gender oriented point of view of the perception of culture in design environment. This proposition is based on the analysis of cross-disciplinary research references about culture and on answers given to a survey by executive women engineers. 1 INTRODUCTION In an era of intellectual and geographical globalization, binary debates about the impact of national cultures or corporate cultures on corporate vision, strategy and human relations, seem outdated. Most of the referenced sources indicate that national cultures have a stronger effect on managerial attitudes than corporate culture does or that collected evidence show that individual differences can be much more prominent than cultural differences. But is there any widely shared idea of what corporate culture means, how it emerges and is transmitted, of how long a coherent corporate culture can last? Culture and pragmatic, short lasting business practices and attitudes are they not being mixed up? Do gender approaches, linked to quantitative or qualitative thought streams, can contribute to the rise and development of professional cultures and open mindedness?