Understanding Culture with Hofstede

One of the things that I spent a great deal of time studying in grad school was Cross-cultural communications. I knew I would be working in an international environment and I thought it would be important for me to study this. It is knowledge that has served me well. I can't remember if I have discussed this before of not. So forgive me if I have posted on this at some point in the past. A little repetition never hurts.

Cross Cultural communications is one of those fringe interdisciplinary topics that you can find in business studies as well as the social sciences. I never encountered it as a topic until I studied international business. It was present to a degree in anthropology and to some degree in sociology but it is not widely considered in the political sciences and RBR will probably agree that most hard core political scientist would laugh at the mere mention of it. And they would be right because there isn't a whole lot to know; it isn't terribly hard to understand once it is explained, and it makes you seem smart and entertaining at cocktail parties and Rotary Club meetings, which is sort of irritating. But I am not hard core, and I am entertaining at cocktail parties in general (that dancing on the table thing I do goes over big- just kidding.), so I don't mind bringing it up in response to some of Dr.S's questions in the posting about Iraq.

The "father" of this topic (It isn't really a field and shouldn't be considered as one) was a Dutchman named Geert Hofsteade. He proposed that there are core cultural values that effect social organization and interaction. The five values are: power distance (i.e. the level of acceptance in a society of inequality), Individualism vs. Collectivism, Masculinity vs. Femininity (the distribution of roles within a society and to what extent "male" values such as competition dominate over "female" values such as cooperation), Uncertainty Avoidance (i.e. and its ramification on decision making), Time Orientation (long term vs. short term planning.)

He then tested his theory by studying IBM employees throughout the world. At the time, the late 1970's early 1980's, IBM was the largest transnational around with a presence in some 64 countries. What he found was that these core values are not only prevalent, but consistent over time. Now, the Hofstede Model should not be taken too literally. It was applied to societies not individuals and I do not believe the statistical models have been updated. As RBR points out, culture changes over time. But then, so does everything else including political economy and government. And generalizations must always be questioned.

If you map out the cultural dimensions (as the link above does) you will see some very interesting patterns emerge. For instance, the countries with the least power distance tend to be the wealthiest. Low power distance correlates with high individualism and that usually correlates with high masculinity. And you start to get a picture of the U.S. Because highly masculine cultures value competition and aggressiveness, they tend to have a short-term orientation and more tolerant of ambiguity.

On the other end of spectrum, you get collective cultures, which tend to be present in developing nations. They tend to have more power distance, high femininity, which corresponds with a long-term orientation.

Now that doesn't mean that the U.S. only values competition and aggressiveness. We do value team work and cooperation. But when you index it statistically, you see that those characteristics associated with men are more significant than the others. every society values everything to a certain extent. Nothing is mutually exclusive.

In addition to this, there is a difference between high context and low context cultures. In a high context culture, behavior and communication is largely dictated by the context and a shared understanding of the situation. In other words, a great deal of things are left unsaid, but presumed. Germany is a high context culture as is Japan and most other Asian nations. The U.S. and the U.K. are low context cultures. We don't have a huge difference in behavior or communication dependent much less on a shared understanding of the situation. We explain everything.

All of this had a much larger influence on my thinking than even I realize at times. When you mention Iraq to me, I immediately begin the sorting process. "High context, big power distance, great tolerance for Ambiguity, collective, medium on the masculinity index". And RBR is correct that if I were to stop there, then I would be lazy and possibly prone to stereotypes. But I am neither of those things. So if I use Hofestede as a starting point, I can begin making sense of things such as, "Why didn't they overthrow Saddam on their own?" Then I start thinking about their history. And then it all makes more sense to me. From there, I consider their geopolitical situation, and I cross reference that with what Iraqis have told me, and perhaps I read a few things written by knowledgeable people, and on and on it goes. A picture starts to emerge. For me, I want to understand why they are where they are so that I can figure out where they are headed. Not everyone thinks this way, nor should they. But it is my starting point and I figured it would be a good opportunity to explain it.