Does Country Equate with Culture? Beyond Geography in the Search for Cultural
Boundaries
By: Vas Taras, Piers Steel, Bradley L. Kirkman
Taras, V., Steel, P., & Kirkman, B. L. (2016). Does Country Equate with Culture? Beyond
Geography in the Search for Cultural Entities. Management International Review. 56(4): 455-
472.
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Management
International Review. The final authenticated version is available online at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11575-016-0283-x.
Abstract:
Traditionally, cultures have been treated as though they reside exclusively within, or perfectly
overlap with countries. Indeed, the terms ‘‘country’’ and ‘‘culture’’ are often used
interchangeably. As evidence mounts for substantial within-country cultural variation, and often
between-country similarities, the problem with equating country and culture becomes more
apparent. To help resolve the country-culture conundrum, we evaluate the extent to which
political boundaries are suitable for clustering cultures based on a meta-analysis of 558 studies
that used Hofstede’s (Culture’s consequences: international differences in work-related values.
Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, 1980) cultural values framework. The results reveal that
approximately 80 % of variation in cultural values resides within countries, confirming that
country is often a poor proxy for culture. We also evaluate the relative suitability of other
demographic and environmental characteristics, such as occupation, socio-economic status,
wealth, freedom, globalization, and instability. Our results suggest that it may be more
appropriate to talk about cultures of professions, socio-economic classes, and free versus
oppressed societies, than about cultures of countries.
Keywords: Culture | Cultural values | Cultural regions | Cross-cultural management
Article:
Introduction
Traditionally, cultures have been assumed to reside within countries. From the earliest studies of
cultural differences dating back over two centuries (Darton 1790, see Fig. 1) to more recent
research by Hofstede (1980) and the GLOBE team (House et al. 2004), the unit of analysis in
cross-cultural studies has typically been country. The focus on national cultures has appropriate
applications, but its dominance in research has led to a lack of attention to other plausible
organizing units of culture. Equating cultures with countries and using country of origin and
individual culture interchangeably became a common practice (Brewer and Venaik 2012).
However, the appropriateness of this trend depends on answers to two questions, including: (1)
are countries good proxies for cultures, and (2) could other factors be superior for describing
boundaries of cultural regions or groups of people who display similar cultural values?
Culture is a multi-faceted construct. First, the word culture has many meanings, from a
collective of people who share a common history, language and traditions, to characteristics of
such a collective in terms of its artifacts, practices, and value systems. Illustrating the
pervasiveness and possibly ambiguity of the term ‘‘culture,’’ a Google search for ‘‘culture’’ and
its derivatives returns 1.5 billion hits, making it one of the most popular words on the Web. More
than 60 years ago, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) found 164 distinct definitions of culture.
Despite the variety of definitions, several elements are common across most of them, principally
that culture is: (1) a relatively stable, (2) multi-level construct comprised of values, beliefs,
norms, traditions, and artifacts that (3) are shared in a given population (cf. Taras et al. 2009).
Early empirical research on cross-cultural differences has been largely qualitative and focused on
describing artifacts, rituals, and social institutions. However, following the publication of
Hofstede’s (1980) seminal book, Culture’s Consequences, the focus shifted to cultural values. As
noted by Taras et al. (2009), ‘‘culture is values’’ has become one of the commandments of
crosscultural management research.
Fig. 1 Page from one of the earliest studies into cultural differences by William Darton (1790)
The almost exclusive focus on cultural values is often justified, but also problematic and
limiting in many ways, particularly if measured using Hofstede’s (1980) framework, one that
was developed based on a survey not actually originally intended for cultural analysis (cf.
Baskerville 2003; McSweeney 2002; Taras and Steel 2009 for reviews of problems with
Hofstede’s framework in general and for studying ‘‘culture’’ in particular). For the purpose of
the present study, however, the question of whether or not the Hofstede’s framework is suitable
for studying culture due to its limitations is secondary because most empirical research on
culture over the past 35 years has relied on Hofstede’s framework. As Taras and Steel (2009)
concluded, since the publication of Culture’s Consequences (Hofstede 1980), research on culture
effectively became research on values.
Indeed, reviews of cross-cultural research published in management, psychology and
related disciplines confirm that empirical measurement of what is called ‘‘culture’’ has almost
exclusively focused on assessing cultural values, usually by the means of self-response
questionnaires (Caprar et al. 2015). Subsequent models following Hofstede’s work primarily
refined his framework (e.g., House et al. 2004 (GLOBE); Schwartz 1994) rather than
substantively altering it. Even though this work changed the wording of items and the list of the
dimensions, the underlying practices remained the same and are subject to the same limitations
(McSweeney 2013). Accordingly, the outcome of just about every major cross-cultural
comparative study has been a set of national cultural means and country rankings along
dimensions of cultural values (Taras et al. 2009). Thus, to settle the cultureversus-country
debate, we rely on the approach to culture that is at the foundation of most of the empirical
literature on the topic.
Interpreting culture as inherently inseparable from country has become popular enough
that the two terms often are used synonymously. For example, the word ‘‘culture’’ has been
routinely included in titles of publications that provided crosscountry (but not culture)
comparisons, as in ‘‘The Perception of Distributive Justice in Two Cultures’’ (Marin 1982),
‘‘Rules for Social Relationships in Four Cultures’’ (Argyle 1986), ‘‘The Effect of Culture on the
Curvilinear Relationship between Performance and Turnover’’ (Sturman et al. 2012), ‘‘A Cross-
Cultural Examination of Self-Leadership’’ (Houghton et al. 2014), and many others (e.g.,
Bagozzi et al. 2003; Cialdini et al. 1999; Goodwin and Plaza 2000). Similarly, there are
numerous examples when nationality or country of residence are used as proxies for cultural
values, as illustrated by such quotes as ‘‘cultural background was measured by the current
citizenship (passport status) of each of the managers’’ (Offermann and Hellmann 1997, p. 346),
‘‘Individualism-collectivism was operationalized by the respondent’s native culture (country of
origin)’’ (Trubisky et al. 1991, p. 73), or ‘‘participants were divided into high and low Power
Distance groups by county-oforigin’’ (Eylon and Au 1999, p. 378), and ‘‘across two cultures (the
U.S. and Korea)’’ (Lee et al. 2014, p. 692).
This is not to say that the interest of cross-cultural management and psychology
researchers in values is misplaced. Indeed, it is primarily the core values and beliefs, not the
external cultural artifacts, that affect organizational behaviors and attitudes, and the effect of
cultural values on work-related outcomes appears to be significantly stronger than that of other
commonly used predictors, such as demographics or personality (for meta-analytic reviews see
Fischer and Smith 2003; Stahl et al. 2010; Taras et al. 2010). Measuring tacit values and beliefs,
however, is no easy task. Self-response questionnaire has been the method of choice, but the
efficacy of this approach has inherent limitations (Riordan and Vandenberg 1994; Taras et al.
2009; Taras and Steel 2009). As a result, it would be very convenient and advantageous if one’s
country of origin was actually a good proxy of cultural values. But, the question remains: Is it?
This question has an extended history. The problem of equating country and culture has
been recognized and sharply criticized for at least three decades, though attempts to address the
problem have been predominantly theoretical, and much of the criticism has gone unheeded in
subsequent research. As for empirical investigations, the evidence has typically targeted
assessing within-country variation in cultural values, demonstrating that nations are imperfect
indicators of its individual citizen’s values (e.g., Coon and Kemmelmeier 2001; Kaasa et al.
2014; Lenartowicz et al. 2003). The present study moves beyond confirming whether country is
a good proxy for culture. By directly comparing within- and between-country variance in cultural
values in a large global sample, we provide a new level of precision by assessing the exact extent
to which national borders are suitable as boundaries for cultures. In addition to potentially
pointing out that, yet again, cultures do not neatly compartmentalize between countries, we
theorize what could be better ways to think about cultural clusters and empirically test the
comparative worth of a number of alternatives, providing a foundation for moving forward on
this long debated issue.
2. Theoretical Background
2.1 A Brief Review of the Culture vs. Country Discussion
Thinking about cultures and countries as overlapping concepts appears to date as far back as the
construct of country itself. Consistent with the fundamental cognitive bias of group stereotypes,
here based on country of origin (Verlegh and Steenkamp 1999), we have an innate readiness to
equate country with culture and have done so for centuries (e.g., Darton 1790). Given this
inclination to conflate, Hofstede’s work providing country-averages for cultural values only
made it more convenient to equate the two. His readily-available sets of national cultural indices
provided a practical, low-cost and consequently attractive option for empirical research on
culture.
As Hofstede’s national cultural indices gained in popularity, the debate around the
assumption that cultures are contained within countries was becoming increasingly pervasive.
Even though the problem was identified early on, the discussion revolved around pointing out
that cultures are not homogeneous within countries, and thus national averages may not
adequately represent the distribution of the values in the population. Still, the solutions continued
to adopt geography as the sorting mechanism, generating distinct sets of indices for different
geographic regions within countries, such as assessing Switzerland’s German, Italian and French
regions or the Anglophone versus Francophone provinces in Canada (e.g., House et al. 2004;
Punnett 1991). Ironically, despite trying to rectify the issue of excessive within-group
heterogeneity, these more granular reports do not often include within-region variance statistics,
effectively treating these geographic regions themselves as culturally homogenous. Thus, even
though reporting regional averages is a refinement from the practice of relying on political
borders, dividing countries into regions implicitly assumes geography as the appropriate
clustering dimension and does not necessarily solve the underlying problem.
Hofstede responded to this criticism by stressing that his model is only suitable for the
nation level of analysis and highlighting the importance of matched sampling to make the
comparison of national averages meaningful (Hofstede 2002a, b, 2006). As a result, the
discussion focused on the issue of ecological fallacy (i.e., acting as if the average represents the
instance), which might have had the unintended consequence of doing more harm than good for
the development of the field of cross-cultural research. Specifically, instead of trying to find
more suitable dimensions for clustering cultures, researchers were preoccupied with the question
of whether or not Hofstede’s indices can be generalized to the individual level of analysis
(Spector et al. 2001), developed instruments for measuring individual cultural values (Maznevski
et al. 2002), and researched cultural regions within countries (Huo and Randall 1991). Country
as a proxy for culture may have been discredited, but in the absence of a better alternative, the
old framework held its ground. Even the more recent large-scale studies on cultural regions
remained stuck in the ‘‘country’s culture’’ paradigm (e.g., GLOBE country indices, House et al.
2004).
Clearly recognizing the problem without offering a viable alternative resulted in a curious
phenomenon. In the past decade or so, researchers would still use Hofstede’s (or GLOBE’s)
country indices, but add a paragraph on the limitations of this approach, thereby showing their
understanding of the problem and attempting to rebuff potential criticism. It also became
common to add the word ‘‘national’’ (as in ‘‘national culture’’, see Fig. 2) to signal the
understanding of the controversy surrounding the use of national averages proxies for cultures
and warn that the findings apply only at the national level, thereby making criticism redundant
(e.g., Han et al. 2010; Kanagaretnam et al. 2011). Unfortunately, acknowledging limitations does
not resolve them.
Fig. 2 The frequency of use of the term “National Culture”, Google Ngram
As a partial solution, many researchers moved on to directly measuring values in their
samples by the means of surveys similar to Hofstede’s value survey module (Kirkman et al.
2009; Yoo and Donthu 2002). Even though this approach mitigates the problem of ecological
fallacy, it does not address the issue of cultural boundaries. Culture is an inherently group level
phenomenon, and values must be shared in a group to form a culture. Otherwise, we are likely
dealing with personality, or the study of individual differences, even if we aggregate these
personality profiles to the level of groups, such as nations (Hofstede and McCrae 2004). Unless
we know the boundaries of the population in which those values are shared, direct measurement
of participant values does not solve the problem of generalizability. If cultures do not cluster
within countries, then just as national averages should not be taken to accurately represent
individuals, so value effects found in a sample cannot be appropriately generalized to a country.
If we do not know the boundaries of the population in which the given values are shared, we
haphazardly generalize findings from the sample to that population.
Even though numerous Editorial Letters have called for banning the ‘‘passport’’
approach in cross-cultural research (e.g., Caprar 2015; Jackson and Aycan 2006; Lenartowicz et
al. 2003; Lonner and van de Vijver 2004; Pudelko et al. 2006; Tung and Verbeke 2010; Zander
2004), there has been limited response to these recommendations in empirical studies. Studies
that use country of residence as a proxy for culture remain commonplace, even in leading
journals (Han et al. 2010; Kanagaretnam et al. 2011; Ng et al. 2009). Remarkably, the effect of
the countryequals-culture paradigm is so strong that cross-cultural comparative studies do not
often report standard deviations or other variance statistics for the national average (e.g.,
Hofstede 1980; House et al. 2004); nor are the standard deviations reported (or taken into
account) when calculating national averages in meta-analytic reviews of the literature on the
topic, given that most of the studies never provided these statistics (e.g., Oyserman et al. 2002;
Steel and Taras 2010; Taras et al. 2012).
2.2 Arguments for Using Country as a Proxy for Culture
