National Cultures , Organisational Forms and Group Support Systems

1 INTRODUCTION Group Support Systems (GSS) have been in use for over ten years now and a considerable number of research papers have been published. Much of this work has been carried out in North America, where, equally, GSS software has been developed for the most part. This North American-centric perspective, however, creates fresh problems for researchers who work in other cultural environments, especially those that are not so similar to North America. In this paper we describe two approaches to national culture and one approach to organisational culture in an attempt to gain a broader cultural perspective. We also make frequent references to our own cultural environment-that of Hong Kong, attempting to describe how GSS might be implemented in Hong Kong. GSS are designed so as to improve participation in meetings, thereby increasing the number of ideas available for discussion, increasing decision quality and meeting productivity. Participants in GSS meetings are often more satisfied with the processes and outcomes of the meetings (Nunamaker et al., 1989). It has been shown, for instance, that GSS enable more divergent, minority views to be 2 expressed, thereby permitting a wider range of options to be considered and better decisions to be reached (Ocker et al., 1996). Culture is a term that has been defined in many different ways. In a narrow sense, it may refer to 'civilisation', 'refinement of the mind' and the outcomes of such refinement: 'art' 'literature' and 'education' (Hofstede, 1991, p.5). Hofstede also provides a much broader definition of culture, referring to it as "a collective phenomenon, because it is at least partly shared with people who live or lived within the same social environment, which is where it was learned. It is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another" (ibid., original emphasis). Thus, culture is something we grow up and live with, and learn. It comes from the social environment, not directly from our ancestors. An important qualifier of culture is that "there are no scientific standards for considering one group intrinsically superior or inferior to another" (ibid., p.7). In other words, no one culture is relatively better, or worse, than any other culture. While we may use our own standards to judge our own culture, we should think twice before using those standards to judge another culture, or activities that take place within it. Inside …