Cultural difference and educational cooperation. At the beginning, I am very hesitating whether to touch the cultural aspects in my thesis or not since the cultural part requires a thorough understanding of each country. However, the importance of culture for the cooperation relations between two universities is obvious and sure. So, from this perspective, I have to make some efforts on this parts and to explore the role played by culture in all the processes the cooperation involved. In this thesis, I would like to apply Xxxxxxxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxxxx’s cultural dimensionstheory to analyze the cultural difference because it is the mostly used tool for culture-value analysis. This theory is famous for describing the effects of a society’s culture on the values of its members and for analyzing how these values relate to behavior. Xxxxxxxx developed his original theory by classified culture into four dimensions in his early work, namely power distance, masculinity-femininity, individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance. Later, he added two more dimensions, they are long-termorientation and indulgence-self-restraint respectively. But in my thesis, I would ignore the latter two and put my focus on the first four dimensions of culture because long-term orientation and indulgence-self-restraint are very hard to measure so that their influence on educational cooperation lacks credibility in this thesis. So, in the following paragraph I would take a closed look at each of the four aspects of culture in the two countries and compare them step by step. In order to find out a common tool for measuring the degree of difference in cultural dimensions between countries, Xxxxxxxx suppose a score system which can efficiently show the extent of the cultural dimensions in different countries and regions. The total score for each dimension is 120 and xxxxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx would give a score based on the information he got from his research. Under his research, higher score in power distance means more imbalance of power distribution within organization, the more score individualism has, the less people admire heroism; Also, masculinity with higher grade stands for more inequality between genders. Meanwhile, higher uncertainty avoidance score means much more scare of uncertainty. Table 3 list the basic scores of the four dimensions of Norway and China. Table. 5 Scores of different cultural dimensions of Norway and China Norway China Power distance 31 80 Individualism 69 20 Masculinity 8 66 Uncertainty avoidance 50 40 Source: C...
