Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations [Paperback]

Geert Hofstede (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0803973241 | ISBN-13: 978-0803973244 | Publication Date: April 20, 2001 | Edition: 2nd

Geert Hofstede has completely rewritten, revised and updated Culture's Consequences for the twenty-first century, he has broadened the book's cross-disciplinary appeal, expanded the coverage of countries examined from 40 to more than 50, reformulated his arguments and a large amount of new literature has been included. The book is structured around five major dimensions: power distance; uncertainty avoidance; individualism versus collectivism; masculinity versus femininity; and long term versus short-term orientation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An important, sophisticated and complex monograph. . . . Both the theoretical analysis and the empirical findings constitute major contributions to cross-cultural value analysis and the cross-cultural study of work motivations and organizational dynamics. This book is also a valuable resource for anyone interested in a historical or anthropological approach to cross-cultural comparisons." 

(PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY )

Product Details

• Paperback: 616 pages
• Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc; 2nd edition (April 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803973241
• ISBN-13: 978-0803973244
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #262,544 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very valueable, if taken as Hofstede has meant it, May 11, 2005

By 

M. Beise-Zee "Rian" (Bangkok) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations (Paperback)

Although many comments have already been accumulated let me add something, since some of the reviews tend to get out of focus. Hofstede never claimed to have studied cultures in general, he studied effects of culture on work-related values. For this topic his work is still the standard. The starting point is like this: a large company like IBM tries to establish a strong corporate identity shared among all of its worldwide employees ("We are IBM" kind of thing). However, if you ask them a couple of questions about their work-related values, they answer differently. Turns out, the differences can be explained to some degree by the employee's country-of-origin, that is his or her culture. Hofstede then goes on and tries to find dimensions in order to describe the differences between cultures, - and it has to be said again and again - dimensions for "work-related values" and not for culture in general! This observation was and is tremendously important for multinational companies. It means that we are still influenced even when we work at a multinational firm by our cultural traditions and that this cannot easily be exchanged by the company's culture. Of course if you are more interested in other aspects of culture, than Hofstede's books might not the prime choice for you to study.
Hofstede's work is scientifically sound. The choice of IBM as a case is reasonable given his prime motivation. Sample sizes are impressive for all who have tried similar studies (besides, representativity is not a function of sample size but given by the radomness of the sample draw. Sample size has an effect on standard error but this can be taken into account with a test of significance). Quackery is how other people have used Hofstede's data in contexts other than work-related.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An essential reference. . . ., June 19, 2002

By 

Vieuxblue (Ewing, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Culture's Consequences : Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (Hardcover)

The publication of the original edition of Hofstede's Culture's Consequences was, within the field of cross-cultural research, comparable to the work of Darwin in evolutionary theory. Now, with a second edition, practitioners and theorists alike have a rich quarry to mine for many years to come.

The second addition notably adds references to a number of corroborating studies that have been collected over the more or less twenty years since the first edition. As an example, Appendix 6 contains references to well over 50 statistically linked research papers from other authors. The result is the collection in a single volume of a growing body of literature in the field, work that continues to define a kind of mental geography of culture.

When I first come upon Hofstede's research in the 1980's I was immediately taken with the extraordinary relationship between his mental geographies (charted by developing ratios between his four, now five, dimensions) and the physical proximity of real countries. In other words, the countries in his dimensions tended to cluster in similar ways to how countries cluster geographically. Of course there are counter-intuitive examples (e.g., Germany), but in many of those cases, the data helps break cultural stereotypes widely held about those countries.

Hofstede's original research focused on over 115,000 questionnaires provided to the worldwide employees of IBM. The premise behind using one company worldwide is that because the company is held constant, the data that can be examined for differences that can be attributed to country cultures. If IBM employees had been compared to, for example, government workers in different countries, organizational culture would have been implicated.

More recent studies (for example Michael Hoppe's dissertation work) tend to revalidate the country positions on the dimensions, showing only slow shifts in the data over time.

Over the years that I have used Hofstede's research in my practice, I have found it to be a touchstone by which people of all backgrounds can understand how culture influences business and other fields. I know that many, many other practitioners rely on his research approach as well.

The book is a compendium of much of the substantive cross-cultural research of the past half-century; it is an essential reference for students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners alike.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Culture traits in broad strokes, November 25, 2008

By 

James Moore "PlayFair" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations (Paperback)

I grew up speaking a minority language of a rural culture in the Netherlands. In my teenage years I became part of the hippie counterculture. Later I met my Malaysian wife (with an Iban-Tamil-Chinese cultural mix) in England, where we lived for a while. We lived or spent considerable time in a number of other countries, including the US and (mostly) Canada. In Canada we worked with First Nations people and lived for a while in a small fly-in community in the subarctic north. We studied the culture and wrote papers on aspects of the culture (qualitative research). (Perfect it was not, but it was immensely helpful.) We speak or studied a combined total of 15 languages. This is all to say, I do not have a simplistic view of culture -- I am fully aware how quickly cultural norms can change (as it did in the sixties and seventies in the West).
At every level--whether at clan level within a small Native group such as the one we worked with in Canada, whether it is at a village level in the rural setting I grew up, whether it is at urban level, whether it is at regional or provincial level, whether it is at ethnic or subcultural level, or whether it is at national or other macro-geographic regional level--we can generalize certain culture traits. This is not an exact science, but helpful nevertheless. Hofstede's research infers such generalities through the aggregate of responses from individuals (quantitative research) who all work in the same multinational company. It is just a way to analyze a glimpse of reality. (Perfect it is not, but it is immensely helpful.)
I read Hofstede's material after I had read Brendan McSweeney's full rejection of Hofstede's research, methodology and conclusion. McSweeney's article, which appeared in Human Relations Vol. 55(1), goes well beyond constructive academic critique, but I bought into his reasoning and consequently was thoroughly prejudiced against Hofstede's approach... until I actually started to read his material and discovered that McSweeney, though scoring some points, made Hofstede into a caricature. It is easy to shoot heavy artillery at hugely inflated monsters -- monsters McSweeney unjustifiably pumped up out of Hofstede's material. Did he hit the target? Absolutely. How can one miss inflated distortions? As for me, I find Hofstede's approach helpful as giving another view of the hugely complex reality of people and their behavior.
Does Hofstede's approach give a complete picture? No, nor does it claim to be--it gives culture traits in broad strokes, and that within a context of work. The massive project of House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta (2004) with the involvement of numerous peers builds and improves on Hofstede in Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies. At the very least one can say that Hofstede's research has been broadly accepted and validated by peers. True, this does not make a theory and methodology infallible, but at the very least one has to give it considerable more respect than Nemesis can muster.