THE CULTURE OF FRANCE

The Culture of France

The culture of France

The Culture of France

Introduction

The largest among the nations of Western Europe, France boasts a long history of world leadership in the arts, sciences, and industrialization. As the first decade of the 21st century nears its end, France remains an influential nation with a Gross Domestic Product of $2,124 billion, and the sixth largest economy in the world. The nation's moderate climate and its ample agricultural land have made it the European Unions largest agricultural producer, ranking second only to the United States in the world market (Moore, 2007).

Discussion

Its varied coastlines, mountain ranges, vineyards, and cities rich in culture and tradition make France one of the most popular tourist sites in the world. Like other wealthy Western nations, France has been confronted with the problems attending urbanization, industrialization, and the loss of open space. In 1971, France created the Ministry of the Environment to develop solutions to these problems on a national level; later, the country became a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and to two-dozen other international efforts to address the problems on regional and world levels (Kroft, 2007).

The idea was taken up anew in the middle of the 20th century and extended to organizations, this time using the term culture, which had been borrowed from cultural anthropology. For example, Crozier analyzed the influence of French culture on the functioning of organizations in France, and Abegglen did the same in Japan. Hall's research dates from this same time frame. Although not centered on the functioning of organizations, it concerns them directly. For example, he contrasts cultures, such as the American culture where the role of the implicit is relatively reduced (low context) to others, such as Japan, where its place is much larger (high context). This difference affects issues of coordination within organizations.

A turning point was reached in the 1960s, when a conception of culture borrowed from social psychology was used. In this perspective, a culture is conceived as characterized by a set of attitudes. These are grasped by using attitude scales. These scales are constructed by using questionnaires that include a set of selected questions (of the type where respondents are asked the extent to which they agree with a proposition and are expected to indicate the range of their agreement through a response set that runs completely, a little, hardly at all, not at all). The comparison between cultures ...