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honestly I think the main thing is that they think that everyone will backstab everyone if push comes to shove
That’s what stupid dishonest people believe, I agree. The thing is that you live on after you do the backstab and your quality of life depends directly on how trustworthy and honest people think you are.
no, your quality of life depends entiarly on how usefull you are, if you are dishonest and can steal the credit from honest people then it is you that get's the highest ranking
everyone stabs everyone in the back, the people who say otherwise are the worst since they want people to believe that they won't and either they don't and they'll drown or they do and they stab the ones who trusted them the most
overall, I'm not a fan of multinationalism, the responsability get's too watered down
if shit hits the the fan then there should be a bad guy who was too greedy and should be hanged
The examples you list are in no specific order: respect for the law, customs and dialects.
I mean I can give plenty of examples where people didn't backstab 1 another specifically among families.
Can you explain what you mean by using culture in 'concrete terms'?
Why do you think you were taught to put your napkin on knees as opposed to inside your shirt? Why do you act in this way rather than that way? The customs and traditions that you abide to which makes up who you are determined by your cultural environment. I would not describe use culture as an abstraction but rather a non-exclusive, non binding set of obligatos, traditions and customs that determine someone's identity. There are no necessary conditions to be culturally X rather than culturally Y- not race, not religion not even language. Moreover if your are of one culture that does not necessarily exclude from being of other cultures. I am culturally British but I am also culturally English.
Now being culturally English, I thus have a general tendency to act and behave in certain ways that are typical of the behaviors that English people are taught- the traditions and customs that distinguish us from any other culture. Again I stress that there are no necessary conditions to being culturally English- there is not one aspect about be that must conform to any typical conception of Englishness in your head. But there are plenty of sufficient conditions which are the ones you can probably imagine, e.g. speaking english, practicing Anglicanism.
What your failing to realise is that culture supersedes ethnicity or race. Race and ethnicity often play a role in cultural identities but they are not wholly and completely reliant upon it. You will notice even in the most extreme societies like Nazi Germany where there was a strong tie between ethnicity and culture it still wasn't completely dependent. The Nazi movement also celebrated and cherished other cultural qualities of Germans that made them unique aside from their ethnicity e.g. their discipline, their history.
In Alsace these peoples will have cultural characteristics of both Germans and French given there situation. Like I said these are not mutually exclusive.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, but I heartily disagree with you. Once upon a time I might have been inclined to agree with you, but then I started working with better people and better organizations. Not everybody stabs everybody in the back. It's simply untrue. The happiest and most successful people work to help everyone succeed as often as possible. No organization can work at it's best if it's divided internally by people who fail to work together.
Your quality of life definitely does have some connection on how useful you are but it's not a be all and end all. There are other factors that are far more important. At any rate, you aren't making an argument that people should be useful either. You are making the opposite argument that being a useful person is a fools errand. You can get very wealthy by being a greedy dishonest backstabbing douchenozzle, which is what you suggest is the 'optimal' way to go about being a human. But at some point, you have to live life, as opposed to merely accumulating wealth and physical objects. To live life requires that you interact with other people. Other people choose to interact with you in different ways based on your past record of honesty and fair dealing (or lack thereof) It's going to be extraordinarily difficult to create a pleasant happy life for yourself when everyone around you is unwilling to work with you, enter into close personal relationships with you, or trust you in any way for any thing because of the horrific things you have done to people who allowed themselves into situations where you exploited others in the past. Essentially you end up physically and socially isolated, stuck in a prison created by the way you got the things and the money you have.
A backstabber is:
Someone who when assigned work together in a group context, contributes very little or no effort, but takes credit for results.
Someone who always blames any failure of any kind on other people without any critical introspective thought to determine if they may have contributed to the failure
Someone who assigns projects to subordinates, then presents the finished products as theirs without giving any credit to the work that anyone else contributed.
Someone who presents themselves to upper management as competent and capable (their actual competence and capability are irrelevent), and does anything required to maintain that facade without regard for the damage it may cause to to other co-workers.
Someone who will take ideas from other people and present them as their own thoughts without giving any credit to the other people who formulated or helped to formulate them
Obviously this isn't an exhaustive list, but it's a representative one.
Alsatian here;
Usage of Alsatian is in decline among all kind of people but those that work in agriculture & restauration, with parents prefering to have their children learn "Hoch-deutsch" in school instead.
When speaking alsatian, the amount of words directly imported from French is astonding, even more so in modern/technical domains.
As for culture, people tend to think they got the best of both worlds, with French art de vivre and German efficiency both highly valued.
To amplify this:
If you backstab as a way of life, people will catch on. And while certain people might find you useful regardless or because of the backstabbing, they will also be wary of you, less they become the next Person to be backstabbed.
So in the long run you might well make yourself a career by backstabbing but you will have to temper this; backtabbing relies on people trusting you enough that you get the chance to position the knife. Once you are known to be a habitual, almost compulsive, backstabber to all comers a cordon sanitaire will quickly establish around you significantly stunting your success in life.
Backstabbing, as everything, is useful as a tool under the right circumstances.
To cite a German example, Merkel backstabbing Helmut Kohl during the donation scandal of the CDU was what made her career, while Schäuble's longer adherence to Kohl made sure that he will never reach certain posts (for example Bundespräsident). At the same time there are quite a few politicians whose careers ended because they had the stigma of 'Königsmörder' 'king's murderer' for backstabbing a superior.
So, in short, backstabbing as a way of life is not smart.
It obviously Salut is. After all, Germans use it. In more than one context. We have a 'Salut' as a military greeting, 'salutieren' as a verb form of the same, 'Salutschüsse' as gun salute, etc.
Which brings to the question whether languages are to be defined descriptivly or prescriptivly but we are wandering far afield here.
So you realize the statement is false. It is a statement about modern standard German 'Hochdeutsch' not about the entirety of the German languages.
Which goes back to my point:
This is dumbing down.
You communicate some things better or 'amplified' but obscure or distort other truths.
It is a necessary evil to communicate in anything approaching a time efficient manner but it nevertheless means that the second statement is factually wrong.
It is quite a different thing to say something is an approximation useful to avoid faux pas and another to say "These are truths about this culture and this is how they impact what they do!"
The first realizes that you might very well meet lots of Chinese who are willing to make allowances for you, for various reasons, if you gift a clock but that there are also those who won't, and that, since those who are more tolerant of your faux pas won't be insulted if there is no clock in the giftbasket, it is, all considered, safer to not include clocks.
If that however escalates to 'Never give a Chinese person a clock as a gift' we have left behind the carefully weighed and considered behavior rule and have gone into the realm of dumbed-down untruth.
I did explain what I meant with "using culture in concrete terms":
"The only times we use culture as concrete, defined terms are when we A). talk about neolithic pottery B.) The cultivation of plants and fungi and C). In organization theory."
Those are the subject where "Culture" is defined in a technical terminology.
Well I was taught to place the napkin on my knee because my parents deemed it suitable to do so, which the were probably thought to think because that's how the gentry did, the gentry placed their napkin on the knee because that's how the nobility did and the nobility did it because that's how the French nobles did it. Is me placing a napkin on my lap in Sweden an expression of Swedish or French culture in your mind? Race, Ethnicity and Culture in the sense you use the word are interchangeable concepts neither is scientifically relevant and all of them are solely concerned with cataloging prejudice.
In the Netherlands, these 'qualities' are often assigned to American corporate culture (and, occasionally, American academic culture). It stands to reason that Dutch people inclined to this way of working would, when moving to the USA, expect this behaviour and take steps to 'stab first', thereby being much worse backstabbers than the Dutch local average.
Of course, in cliché methodology the fact that this is a cliche about American culture means it's true
But seriously, my experience as a Dutchman working at a Dutch department of a US company shows the terrible people rising through the ranks while the nice/decent managers end up hitting a glass ceiling just about the point where persistent interaction with the US management becomes critical. So a person looking at us from the US perspective would end up seeing only the backstabbers, because they apparently get judged more highly by US management at the points where promotion decisions are made.
In the Netherlands, these 'qualities' are often assigned to American corporate culture (and, occasionally, American academic culture). It stands to reason that Dutch people inclined to this way of working would, when moving to the USA, expect this behaviour and take steps to 'stab first', thereby being much worse backstabbers than the Dutch local average.
Of course, in cliché methodology the fact that this is a cliche about American culture means it's true
But seriously, my experience as a Dutchman working at a Dutch department of a US company shows the terrible people rising through the ranks while the nice/decent managers end up hitting a glass ceiling just about the point where persistent interaction with the US management becomes critical. So a person looking at us from the US perspective would end up seeing only the backstabbers, because they apparently get judged more highly by US management at the points where promotion decisions are made.
The most likely scenario is that this is a problem is with the corporate culture of that particular company, rather than a norm for American companies. Honestly, I have never seen US corporate culture as characterized as particularly treacherous. In the finance and banking sectors, I will agree with you completely, but otherwise, it's usually pretty cooperative. Not German level cooperative, or anything though, but certainly more so than a lot of other places seem to be. Do Dutch companies place an unusually high value on the ability to get along with others? That could lead to the few social malcontents all finding work as expats. Just a thought. I have met plenty of Dutch people, and on average they seem perfectly normal. It's just the managers who are Dutch at multinationals. This doesn't seem to be confined only to people who are Dutch who work for non Dutch companies. I know a bunch of people who work for Shell, and almost universally they hate nearly all the Dutch managers. Even the Dutch employees hate the Dutch managers.
At least our school culture (and ground floor working culture) places excessively low value on leaders, and high value on everyone - not cooperative, because we do not mind bickering (unlike, say, Belgians), but we do have a tendency towards equality; we absolutely expect the 'expert' who actually worked on something to occasionally correct the manager (provided they're present, so once companies reach more than 2 levels of management this effect reduces). It might be indeed that those who try to stab backs to get ahead quit Dutch companies in frustration, because even when they reach their boss position, the ground-floor employees they stabbed 5 years ago are still treated as relevant to their current functioning.
And as you say, it's probably partly our own company culture too (we're mostly owned by venture capital, to tick off the cliche box there too) - but the cultural sense of corporate Americans as backstabbing profit-obsessed donkeys who are basically to blame for all the terribleness of multinational capitalism still remains from before I ever joined this company.
The tendency towards bickering if it can be characterized as that would by American standards usually seem argumentative.
One major factor in all of these 'stereotypes' is that it's usually the profit hungry lean and mangy companies and people that look to make international expansions. The other people stay at home. This is true even in companies that don't 'normally' have that reputation, as the employees of said company may self select.
Oh yes, we are absolutely seen as argumentative and rude by foreigners; and that judgement we happily support while arguing we are simply critical and straightforward which weak foreigners interpret as argumentative and rude
that bickering allows us to arrive at the correct conclusion, you guys just end up at a conclusion that nobody wants