User:Zinnmann

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Zinnmann was born around 1966. Nowadays he lives near Munich, Germany. His interests are linguistics, mythology, ethnopsychopharmacology, history, music and many many other things. Since his peformance in english writing is somewhat poor he dedicates himself to fixing and placing interwiki links.

[edit] Your edit to the Bavaria article

Hello Zinnmann,

You recently edited my entry on the Bavaria page, removing the text:

Social behaviour: In comparison to the elaborate formality in the rest of Germany, Bavarians can be extremely egalitarian and folksy, to the point of sometimes giving strangers the impression of coarseness.

I'd like to discuss your edit and see if we can't agree on reinstating the text in some form. Like yourself, I have lived in Bavaria. I have also lived elsewhere in Germany, being resident uninterruptedly since the beginning of 1989. My work requires me to assess cultural adaptation of candidates for international positions, and I have lectured on national cultural differences in universities in France and Belgium.

In fact, the entry on the extreme egalitarianism of Bavarian culture is not just a subjective perception. It is grounded in the analysis of Geert Hofstede. In his book "Cultural Consequences", Hofstede reported on a careful statistical analysis of many thousands of survey responses measuring the attitudes of people from all over the world. Bavaria, together with the Scandanavian countries and Israel were unusual in their extremely egalitarian attitude. In contrast to denizens of the latin countries, for instance, decisions are arrived at on the basis of consensus. Bavarians also speak up confidently to authority figures without experiencing feelings of anxiety.

You may have good reason why you wanted to adjust the text, but your comment that's nonsense doesn't do justice to the thinking behind the entry. I invite you to respond on my talk page, or on the edit page of the original article. We can reach some agreement and move forward.

(I hope you are ok with my writing to you in English. After reading your introduction on the talk page I thought about addressing you in German. But since you chose edit an English language article, I decided that writing in English was the right approach.)

--Philopedia 14:43, 27 November 2005 (UTC)