Dimensions of Culture
Geert H. Hofstede was born on October 2, 1928 in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He received his M.Sc. from the Delft Institute of Technology in 1953, his Ph.D. (cum laude) from Groningen University in 1967. Hofstede served in the Netherlands Army from 1953 to 1955. In 1955, he married Maaike A. Van den Hoek. They’ve also “lived happily ever after”, but I’m not sure where (probably Brussels, Belgium).
Hofstede is most well known for his work on four dimensions of cultural variability, commonly referred to as “Hofstede’s Dimensions.” These include: Uncertainty Avoidance, Power Distance, Masculinity-Femininity, Individualism-Collectivism, Confucian Dynamism. These dimensions were arrived in his 1980 publication, “Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values.” The study took existing survey data (sample size of 116,000) collected from a multinational corporation (IBM). The result was a score in each of the dimensions for 40 different countries.
During 1978-83, the Dutch cultural anthropologist Geert Hofstede conducted detailed interviews with hundreds of IBM employees in 53 countries. Through standard statistical analysis of fairly large data sets, he was able to determine patterns of similarities and differences among the replies. From this data analysis, he formulated his theory that world cultures vary along consistent, fundamental dimensions. Since his subjects were constrained to one multinational corporation’s world-wide employees, and thus to one company culture, he ascribed their differences to the effects of their national cultures. (One weakness is that he maintained that each country has just one dominant culture.)
In the 1990s, Hofstede published a more accessible version of his research publication in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind [Hofstede]. His focus was not on defining culture as refinement of the mind (or “highly civilized” attitudes and behavior) but rather on highlighting essential patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that are well-established by late childhood. These cultural differences manifest themselves in a culture’s choices of symbols, heroes/heroines, rituals, and values.
Hofstede identified five dimensions and rated 53 countries on indices for each dimension, normalized to values (usually) of 0 to 100. His five dimensions of culture are the following:
• Power-distance
Power Distance reflects the degree to which a culture believes how institutional and organizational power should be distributed (equally or unequally) and how the decisions of the power holders should be viewed (challenged or accepted). In other words, people in high power distance cultures are much more comfortable with a larger status differential than low power distance cultures.
Predictors of Power Distance:
• Climate, measured by geographical latitude. Cultures in high-latitude climate (moderate or cold climates) tend to have low PDI scores. Cultures that have tropical climate tend to have high PDI scores.
• Population. Generally, the more people within the culture, the greater the power distance is likely to be.
• Distribution of Wealth. The more unequally the wealth is distributed within a culture, the greater the culture’s power distance.
Consequences of Power Distance: most evident are family customs, the relationships between students and teachers, the young and the elderly, language systems and organizational practices.
• Collectivism vs. individualism
Individualism-Collectivism describes the degree to which a culture relies on and has allegiance to the self or the group.
Predictors:
• Economic development. Wealthy cultures tend to be individualistic, whereas poor cultures tend to be collectivistic.
Climate. Cultures in colder climate tend to be individualistic
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