WATER OF LIFE

Culture Type research

During research for my book, Where in the World Do I Belong??, most people were enthusiastic about telling me about their culture or at least accommodating. Americans were a little resistant to answer my questions or wanted to get into a debate about the logical validity of my research - obviously an extroverted thinking culture.

People in Hawaii didn’t give me a uniform answer about the local culture in Hawaii; some tried to answer for the Hawaiians, others for the area they grew up in. I gave up on trying to determine the culture type for the overall local culture (with all the ethnic groups mixed in) and determined the ethnic Hawaiian culture type to be ESFP. This was verified by the fact that all the pacific islands turned out to be ESFP!

My research breaks free of the corporate centered mindset of MBTI research and cross-culture research. Although I have read Hofstede and love his work on Masculinity and Femininity, I feel corporations don’t represent people and cultures well. However, at the end of Where in the World Do I Belong??, I do make correlations between my Culture Type results and the cultural dimensions Hofstede assigned to those countries.

One thing that I want people get from Where in the World Do I Belong??, is the concept of equal reward for gifts differing (maybe this is my own personal, INFP, utopian vision). Reward meaning monetary but also in other forms. Isabel Briggs Myers, the creator of the Myers-Briggs personality test, took her book title, ‘Gifts Differing‘, from the Bible (Romans 12:6) and believed that each type has different gifts to offer. And type expert Bernie Ostrowski has mentioned a couple times about people needing to have an opportunity to use those gifts. I take it a step farther: we are all created equal and our differing gifts should be rewarded equally.

Finally, I would love to have more input from people from other countries.

Buy Where in the World Do I Belong??: Which country’s culture type fits your Myers Briggs (MBTI) personality type?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Personality type, Culture Shock! Hawaii, Culture, Culture Types, Inequality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.