Indian Collectivism Revisited: Unpacking the Western Gaze

Abstract

The terms individualism and collectivism are culture- general constructs that have distinct elements. Numerous studies in business and workplace communication give the impression that collectivism and individualism are universal; the former usually used to describe Eastern cultures especially Japanese, Korean, Chinese, but also Indian, and the latter to describe North American and North Western European cultures such as the British, French, German and Nordic. Asians are generally viewed homogenously as collectivist across cultures, despite much variation and differences in context dependent cultural practices. There have been studies that examine collectivism emically from culture- specific contexts, such as those of India (Dumont, 1970; Marriott, 1976; Daniel, 1984) and Japan (Hamaguchi, 1985). However, attempts to understand collectivism from an emic perspective have not resulted in descriptions that differ very much from a culturegeneral understanding of the term either. The term ‘across cultures’ may even be dangerous as such applications deny ‘the uniqueness of (the) phenomena and the context dependency of (the) meaning and interpretation’ of the occurrences ( Bargiela- Chiappini, 2005, p. 220).