Introduction
This essay critically evaluates Coen Heijes’s paper on power differences in cross-cultural perception and how power imbalance across diverse organizational and national contexts result in various cross-cultural perception between two particular ethnic groups, namely European Dutch and African Curacaoans. To be more specific, this review is critically discussed for the following parts. First of all, the theoretical framework development is briefly examined from dimensional approach to contextual approach. After that follows the research approaches that Heijes adopted and puts forward the advantages and disadvantages, as well as, considering the limitations of them. Eventually, the potential implications for individuals should be involved and particularly whether they positively relates to intercultural working in cross-cultural management.
Brief description of the article
In this article, Heijes (2010) presents a comparative analysis of cross-cultural perception between European Dutch and African Curacaoans in Netherlands and Curacao respectively, as well as including two organizations namely the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the police, each of which owns diverse power dynamics. Through using the exploratory case studies, which enable to test the “emerging findings in wider survey-based research” (Cassell and Symon, 2004, p.327), the author tends to illustrate how power differences impact on cross-cultural perception.
In order to provide more exactly evidence, Heijes applied a set of various methods in collecting data. Most of data were gathered from interviews between Curacaoan and Dutch employees in IRS and police. Moreover, choosing different interviewers was taken into consideration with the purpose of avoiding interviewer bias; it