A Company is a system.....

The atomistic attitude of Westerners extend to their understanding of the nature of social institutions. In their survey of the values of middle managers, Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars asked whether their respondents thought of a company as a system to organize tasks or as an organism coordinating people working together.

About 75 percent of Americans chose the first definition, more than 50 percent of Canadians, Australians, British, Dutch, and Swedes chose that definition, and about a third of Japanese and Singaporese chose it. Germans, French, and Italians as a group were intermediate between the Asian and the people of British and northern European culture. Thus for the Westerners, especially the Americans and the other people of primarily northern European culture, a company is an atomistic, modular place where people perform their distinctive functions. For the Easterners, and to a lesser extent the eastern and southern Europeans, a company is an organism where the social relations are an integral part of what holds things together. ~ Excerpt: Page 84 (The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett)