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

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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.

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.

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.

From earlier reviews it is clear that Hofstede's research claims are controversial. The reviews have been extraordinarly laudatory or have very sharply questioned the verasity of Hofstede's research. So, I decided to read the book and the journal article cited in one of the reviews. The conclusions of that article are clear from its title: B.McSweeney "Hofstede's model of national cultural research: A triumph of faith - a failure of analysis", Human Relations, 2002 Vol.55,(January) pp.89-117. Human Relations is, I know, a very highly rated scholarly journal. All articles published in it are independently refereed, so there must be some merit in McSweeney's critique! I found his article to be very clearly and carefully written and to be very convincing. Whilst looking for a copy of the article, I discovered that Hofstede had replied and McSweeney had responed. Both reply and response were published in Human Relations in November last year (Vol.55, No.11). In my view it's "game, set, and match" to McSweeney. His demonstrations in his response of the flaws in Hofstede's "validations" are I think devastating. So, my recommendation is, if you plan to read Hofstede's book make sure you also read the three articles in Human Relations: McSweeney's critique; Hofstede's reply; McSweeney's response.

In reference to the previous reviews, there is considerable critique of Hofstede's work throughout the academic community and Amazon.com is not the ideal place to get a feel for the value of this book. Also, the survey was not given in English around the world; it was translated into the appropriate languages and retranslated back into English just to ensure that the translation from English was accurate. However, this does not mean that other problems with the survey do not exist.

If you are seeking an understanding of what is currently known about culture and how to compare cultures, this book is essential. I don't mean that I think it is good. I mean that no reputable research on cultural values will fail to include Hofstede's work because it has been so influential, even for those who despise it. Those who agree use this to reinforce their perspectives. Those who disagree use this to frame counter-argument. It is essential.

It should be understood that this is academic literature. Only those committed to understanding the deep and complex issues associated with differences among cultures should even attempt to read thus. It is more like a reference book. I have only read probably half of it, myself. However, I learned more in that half than I have in many whole books.

For experienced readers and thinkers only.

Hofstede's book is essential reading for anyone interested in cross-cultural studies. The reviewer, Nemesis (Washington D.C.), demonstrates a rather appalling lack of knowledge of the current state of cross-cultural research. The original studies of Geert Hofstede were in fact carried out in English within the IBM Corporation, as Hofstede was an IBM employee at the time. However, since then a considerable number of studies have been completed, with the survey administered in English and in local languages, demonstrating the usefulness and consistency of Hofstede's cultural value constructs. Most responsible cross-cultural research today that uses surveys is carried out with data collection in local languages. The reader is referred, for example, to the extensive body of work on values across cultures based upon the Shalom Schwartz value survey. You can look it up.

In the social sciences, of which business is one, a theory is a model or framework for understanding phenomena. The term generally is taken to mean a framework derived from a set of basic principles capable of producing experimental predictions for a given category in a system. Humans construct theories in order to explain, predict and master phenomena (e.g. inanimate things, events, or the behaviour of animals). In many instances, it is seen to be a model of reality. A theory makes generalizations about observations and consists of an interrelated, coherent set of ideas. A theory has to be something that is in some way testable; for example, one can theorize that businesses progress from local to international markets by always implementing a certain set of processes in a fixed order. Then the process of internationalization of businesses is studied, and the theory is confirmed or revised in a continuous feedback system.

According to Stephen Hawking, a physicist, in A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, "a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations." He goes on to state..."Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory." This also applies to business theories, including Hofstede's, from which one can make definite predictions that have been verified. Theories are not facts, but tools.

Professor Hofstede is the Michael Jordan of Culture and, with this book, he will only add to the luster of his work. Widely read and respected, sometimes controversial and feisty but never ignored, he has led the way for all those interested in the study of culture. The first edition of "Culture's Consequences," published in 1980, has become one of the most widely referenced books in history. This greatly expanded second edition, published in 2001, builds on his original work and extends the bridge to cultural understanding he and his academic colleagues have produced over the past 20 years. His gifts include a creative mind, empirical soundness, and a highly readable writing style which sets him apart from many other serious writers and researchers. He also is the first to suggest his teachings and his Five Dimension Theory should be used as guidelines (vs. absolutes) in recognizing the practical aspects of culture and its influences in the public and private sectors. The Netherlands has provided the world many treasures and, among these, is Professor Hofstede and his work. Anyone who takes the time to even casually look through this book will find numerous cultural gems and other nuggets which make one's professional life more understandable and appreciated...both globally and within his/her own national, organizational, and/or occupational culture.

I am currently an expatriate in France, and have also lived in the United States, Mexico, Spain. Hofstede's book is a good guide to better understand culture. As with a map, we recognize that it is not (nor is it intended to be reality) rather a tool to help guide us. The information on cultures in this book is our "first best guess" to understanding business norms in that culture, and then once we get to know the individuals we are working with, we can adapt. We recognize that these "norms" may change depending on the industry, the region, sub-culture, or other various factors. This book is extremely helpful in creating our "first best guess."

On the surface Hofstede's claim to have identified enduring, systematically causal, 'national cultures' may seem plausible and indeed to have been scientifically proven. However, too much mangement literature is long on assertion and pseudo-science and very short on genuine testing of ideas. Hofstede's work is no exception - it's an extreme example of an author 'proving' what he already 'knows.

His data base is very old and biased viz non-independent questionnaires from just one company: IBM completed in the early 1970s. Yet on the basis of that single company data he claims to be able to generalise about entire countries. To make that analyitical leap requires a number of crucial but fundamentally flawed assumptions. There have been many critiques of his work. The best and most extensive was publised this year. It identifies and strongly criticises each of Hofstede's fundamentally flawed assumptions: B. McSweeney,'Hofstede's model of national cultural diffrences and their consequences: A triumph of faith - a failure of analysis' in the journal Human Relations (ISSN 0018 -7267) Vol. 55, No. 1, January 2002.

If you really want to understand different cultures you must read. But only if you "really want": it is a giant book with minuscule font. So if you are unsure, try 'software of the mind' of the same autor.

But... if you are still reading I think it worth to explain why you should read:

- Mr. Hofstede developed a great way to try to understand AND MEASURE the values of each culture of each country.
- It's based in 2 giant global researches at IBM and over 1,000 academic works (!).
- We are not talking about black & white, cultures are gray, with different shadows. And Mr. Hofstede knows that. he also coments several academic works made based on the first edition of this book (Uau ! That is really really cool) in a very honest way.
- Explain his methodology and the limitations. Also comments his errors. Very honest.
- He studied also great filosofers and inventors (that's the best part) to understand how and where these ideas came from and where more aceptable. Let's take the clasic example: Mr. Karl Marx, how german culture influenced his work and why his ideas were acepted or rejected by different cultures. Same ideas, different response and one of the reasons of the failure of it model: there is one kind of socialism, but there is several kinds of capitalism. In fact each capitalist country developed its own type. There are others: Jung, Maslow, you will have a lot of fun.

Btw, this book also helps to explain why are you here reading books instead of watching television.