This article describes briefly the Hofstede model of six dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/ Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once it had become a paradigm for comparing cultures, research efforts that followed and built on it. The article stresses that dimensions depend on the level of aggregation; it describes the six entirely different dimensions found in the Hofstede et al. (2010) research into organizational cultures. It warns against confusion with value differences at the individual level. It concludes with a look ahead in what the study of dimensions of national cultures and the position of countries on them may still bring. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8

https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=orpc

Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context

Individualism and collectivism

Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World.

Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World

This paper reports on a recent review of the literature of “information behaviour” as it is studied in a variety of disciplines, other than information science. As a result of the review, areas of research interest to information science are identified and a general model of information behaviour is proposed.

Information behaviour: an interdisciplinary perspective

The last several decades have witnessed a steady, irreversible trend toward the globalization of business, and of software-intensive high-technology businesses in particular. Economic forces are relentlessly turning national markets into global markets and spawning new forms of competition and cooperation that reach across national boundaries. This change is having a profound impact not only on marketing and distribution but also on the way produces are conceived, designed, constructed, tested, and delivered to customers. The author considers how software development is increasingly a multisite, multicultural, globally distributed undertaking.

Global software development

Despite calls for better co-operation between countries and different cultures, there is still confrontation between people, groups and nations. But at the same time they are exposed to common problems which demand co-operation for the solution of these problems. This book helps to understand the differences in the way strategists and their followers think, offering practical solutions for those in business to help solve conflict between different groups.

Cultures and Organizations, Software of the mind. Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for survival

Long- versus short-term orientation, a national value dimension originally found by Bond among students in 23 countries, became Hofstede's (1991) fifth dimension of national cultures. Recent analyses by Minkov (2007) of World Values Survey data, collected from representative samples of national populations, allow the calculation of a new version of this dimension, this time across 93 countries. National scores on the dimension correlate with certain family values, with school results, with business values, with environmental values and, under favorable historical conditions, with economic growth. In 1988 the dimension scores led to a prediction of China's economic success. The new scores allow new predictions for economic developments in different parts of the world.

Long- versus short-term orientation: new perspectives

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to provide a mature reflection upon the work of Hofstede by tracking various subtleties in the evolution of his thought and dispelling prevalent misconceptions.Design/methodology/approach – The goal of the paper is achieved by analyzing Hofstede's output from 1970 to the present day in parallel with contemporary research and criticism.Findings – The paper arrives at the conclusion that the recent expansion and update of Hofstede's doctrine is indebted to the original groundbreaking work of the 1970s yet a key strength of Hofstede's work has been its ability to adapt and remain progressive.Originality/value – The paper offers insights into the evolution of Hofstede's doctrines.

The evolution of Hofstede's doctrine

Based on research with Bond’s Chinese Values Survey (CVS) across 23 countries, Hofstede added a fifth dimension, Long- versus Short-Term Orientation (LTO), to his earlier four IBM-based dimensions of national cultures. The authors attempted to replicate this dimension by analyzing World Values Survey (WVS) items that seemed to capture the concept of LTO. Their factor analysis of 10 such items across 38 countries resulted in two factors. One was strongly correlated with the original LTO, whereas the other resembled Hofstede’s individualism dimension. The first factor’s nomological network was identical to that of the CVS-based LTO: It predicted national economic growth and national school success in mathematics. These findings show that a dimension very similar to the original LTO can be derived from the WVS and that Chinese and Western research instruments can produce similar dimensions of culture.

Hofstede's Fifth Dimension: New Evidence From the World Values Survey

Although many cross-cultural studies have used nations as the units of analysis, the concept of national culture has been challenged on various grounds. One objection is that there may be significant cultural diversity within some countries and similarities across national borders, compromising the concept of national culture. This objection has little empirical support. We used latest World Values Survey data and found that 299 in-country regions from 28 countries in East and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Anglo world overwhelmingly cluster along national lines on basic cultural values, cross-border intermixtures being relatively rare. This is true even of countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, or Mexico and Guatemala, despite their shared official languages, religions, ethnic groups, historical experiences, and various traditions. Even the regions of neighboring African nations, such as Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Mali, do not intermix much when they are clustered on the basis o...

Michael Minkov

Papers

Cultures and Organizations, Software of the mind. Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for survival

Long- versus short-term orientation: new perspectives

The evolution of Hofstede's doctrine

Hofstede's Fifth Dimension: New Evidence From the World Values Survey

Is National Culture a Meaningful Concept?: Cultural Values Delineate Homogeneous National Clusters of In-Country Regions