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Fitting socially in Fortress Europe: understanding, reaching, and impressing Europeans

Business Horizons - November 1, 1992

Analyses abound about the attractiveness of the markets of Europe 1992, the new restrictions that may apply to American companies, and the enhanced competition they will encounter there. These matters have to be scrutinized and translated into timely moves, but having the best products, services, and plans will not be enough. The minds and hearts of "Fortress Europe's" occupants--regulators, customers, suppliers, competitors, partners, colleagues, subordinates--have to be understood, reached, and won over for the best business strategies to succeed.

Many American executives have become familiar with Western Europe through vacations, studies, and business visits. They know that Europeans are more similar to Americans than are the Japanese and Arabs, because of common ancestries and a shared Western civilization. Yet quite a few Americans are baffled by how Europeans think, feel, and behave toward them; others barge ahead, unaware of misunderstandings and faux pas. A better social fit between Americans and Europeans demands skills that reach beyond a mere knowledge of etiquette and customs. Indeed, it requires making sense of European social structures and relationships to perform more effectively in Western Europe.

"EUROPEAN" OR "EUROPEANS"?

European nationals are certainly not alike on all counts, even though they all differ from Americans in significant ways. Thus, a social psychologist such as Hofstede (1984) sees Europe as more culturally diverse than the United States.

Based on some critical attitude variables, Americans stand somewhere in the middle of three distinct European clusters: (1) Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, and the United Kingdom; (2) Holland, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, and Austria; and (3) Spain, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Greece (Ronen and Shenkar 1985). For sociologists, Sweden exhibits more social mobility than the United States and Britain, whereas Germany, Italy, Spain, and France exhibit less social mobility (Health 1981, Marceau 1989).

The social structures and mobility patterns examined below are representative of "Latin" Western Europe--particularly, Belgium, France, and Central-Northern Italy. These countries are important if only because they belong to the six founding members of the European Community, and because the EC bureaucracy is based in Brussels (Belgium) and led by a Frenchman (Jacques Delors). Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian nations have had somewhat different social histories, but they share enough traits to justify aggregating them with the Latin Europeans to contrast all of them with the United States in terms of dominant social patterns.

DIFFERENT SOCIAL BREEDS

With these caveats in mind, the main thing to understand is that Europeans have a different class system into which many Americans do not readily fit, irrespective of apparent similarities.

American Social Structure

In the United States, the social structure is dominated by a huge set of "middle classes" above a "poor" category and below a tiny "elites" group (see Figure 1). Most importantly, social mobility is based primarily on income: one can be born poor and still end up in the upper-middle class. Education helps people obtain greater wealth and higher status, but it is insufficient for bringing Americans to the top all by itself (consider college professors). Even uneducated entrepreneurs can become "upper-middle class" on account of their large income (consider self-made rich people).

To be sure, new behaviors have to be learned to fit into higher strata, but most upwardly mobile Americans adjust. They find it relatively easy to move to better homes and neighborhoods, drive classier cars, dress more elegantly, practice fashionable sports (tennis, squash, golf, sailing), belong to the appropriate clubs and organizations, take fancier vacations, and--more recently--stop smoking, a practice now associated with the lower classes. Not everybody makes it to the top of the American middle classes, to be sure, but large numbers of Americans have achieved that status.

Reaching elite status in the United States is more difficult because it derives mostly from the accomplishments and properties of ancestors, not those of the living individual; moreover, it takes time as well as the proper moves. Actually, the American elite group resembles the European upper classes.

European Social Structure

In Europe, the social structure is dominated by a sizeable bourgeoisie[1] located between a tiny aristocracy at the top and a huge set of lower/working classes at the bottom (see Figure 2). U.S. managers and professionals in Europe interact mostly with the middle (moyenne) bourgeoisie, but most of them do not belong to that category--notwithstanding their middle-middle or upper-middle affiliation in the United States and the superficial resemblance between the two social structures. Why not?

The key reason is that acceptance and integration into the middle bourgeoisie is not immediately based on income, education, and professional success. Getting out of the European working classes requires one of two moves. First, a lower-class European can become an independent business person by owning a small or medium-sized enterprise. Second, he can become a technocratic manager or professional--mainly through education, although sheer job performance can also propel one upward. These avenues, however, allow him to join only the bourgeoisie's first level of petty (petits) bourgeois--also called "the new class" (Clegg 1990). To reach the middle bourgeoisie, another break has to be made.

In the United States, a successful executive can boast that his or her father was a poor immigrant who had to take menial jobs, but whose offspring, through skills, ambition, and hard work, rose quickly from the social bottom to the upper middle class. This is not possible in Europe, where moving up requires a change of occupation for the father or the offspring and where only one social rung can be climbed per generation. It takes at least two generations for a European worker's descendants to become truly middle bourgeois. Hence the frequent lethal European question: "What does (did) your father do?" These harsh requirements strike Americans as being undemocratic and not performance oriented. Europeans reason differently, and the following analogy may help non-Europeans understand them.

Imagine an American who visits Japan for the first time in his early twenties. He falls in love with that country and settles there for the rest of his life--learning the language, working for a local firm, shunning other foreigners, and associating exclusively with Japanese people, whose habits he adopts. He marries a Japanese woman and raises a family with her, cutting off all contacts with his American background. Sixty years later, he passes away. Would that man die "Japanese"? No. Irrespective of his thorough assimilation of Japanese culture, he would have missed two essential ingredients: having Japanese parents, and growing up during his crucial formative years in a Japanese environment.

These are the only ways of truly becoming a Japanese--and so it goes for becoming part of the European middle bourgeoisie. If your father was a lower-class European, he gave you that background and milieu, in which you grew up and by which you were marked. No learning of etiquette and aping of your betters (fancier home, car, clothing, vacations, clubs, and so forth) can eradicate that situation. A high income makes you only a nouveau riche (newly rich). Even education at the best European universities or top schools by itself still leaves you with a working class or petty-bourgeois grounding.[2] In Europe, an individual is still largely evaluated and propelled by the social status and respectability of his or her family rather than by individual achievement.

Belonging to the European top grande bourgeoisie demands that one be a rentier--someone living off the income from his wealth (land, real-estate, or stock ownership)--a much rarer breed nowadays because of high income and inheritance taxes. Aristocrats, of course, are born within their class, apart from those few who are ennobled by their king or queen.

Altogether, Americans will meet several kinds of European managers, professionals, and entrepreneurs who should not be assumed to belong to the same classes that would encompass them in the United States. Superficially, both groups have the same descriptors in terms of position, education, income,[3] and lifestyle. However, they often do not have similar fathers or grandfathers; and some 50 to 80 percent of top executives in large Western European firms are truly middle bourgeois who differ in social status from the American upper-middle class.

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