Toyota Culture
Toyota Culture: through the eyes of an associate Growing up in America and working for Toyota, a Japanese company has really shown me the differences in culture and the importance of how we communicate. I work for The Raymond Corporation which is owned by Toyota and is a world leading manufacturer of electric lift trucks among other things. In this essay I am going to explain several concepts involving different types of cultural communications and how these concepts affect me and my everyday life. I’m going to talk about culture and what it is, I’m going to give an example of Ethnocentricity (the belief one’s culture is better than others), I’m going to talk about my own cultural learning experiences and explain my first hand dealings with Worldview and East vs. West cultures. In order to first understand a person’s or sometimes an entire country’s way of thinking or thought process we first must understand what is culture? Culture in general is a very diverse and commonly used term which is also frequently misunderstood. In an essay by McDaniel, Samovar
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and Porter (2012) they explain what culture is its components, and its effects on everyday life. They go on to explain that culture is learned, it is transmitted generation to generation, its symbolic, it is dynamic and finally it is ethnocentric. To me culture is a blend of your surroundings while growing up in a particular part of the world or particular part of a country. Working for Toyota in America makes the ethnocentric part really stand out for me. All too often I see a clash in the way we (Americans) think and the way the Japanese think. I once witnessed an argument between a Japanese executive and his American counterpart. The argument was over the way a particular part of the business was being managed. Toyota’s philosophy on production is level smooth flow from one end to the other and everybody works in syncration, so if one process stops everybody stops. American culture at
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and Porter (2012) they explain what culture is its components, and its effects on everyday life. They go on to explain that culture is learned, it is transmitted generation to generation, its symbolic, it is dynamic and finally it is ethnocentric. To me culture is a blend of your surroundings while growing up in a particular part of the world or particular part of a country. Working for Toyota in America makes the ethnocentric part really stand out for me. All too often I see a clash in the way we (Americans) think and the way the Japanese think. I once witnessed an argument between a Japanese executive and his American counterpart. The argument was over the way a particular part of the business was being managed. Toyota’s philosophy on production is level smooth flow from one end to the other and everybody works in syncration, so if one process stops everybody stops. American culture at
References: McDaniel, E.R., Samovar, L.A., Porter, R.E. (2012). Using Intercultural Communication: The Building Blocks. In Intercultural Communication: A Reader, 13th ed, (pp. 4-17) Saint-Jacques, B. (2012). Intercultural Communication in a Globalized World. In Intercultural Communication: A Reader, 13th ed, (pp. 45-54) Ishii, S., Klopf, D., Cooke, P. (2012). Worldview in Intercultural Communication: A Religio-Cosmological Approach. In Intercultural Communication: A Reader, 13th ed, (pp. 56-63)