This sounds similar to the basic thesis of the popular book “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam — which I haven’t read. (There is a synopsis of the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/ .) His thesis is “Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values–these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.” Sounds like a Layer 3 problem!

Very interesting discussion, Jason, and a very important one. A few years ago, at a SIETAR cofrerence, I learned about a study comparing self-esteem of Chinese and Japanese students. The radical difference between the two demonstrated that the collectivism of the Chinese was totally unlike that of the Japanese. This highlights a problem which I find with all the Hofstedian dimensions: they are simple contrasts that inevitably contain a fatal lack of precision, in spite of the variable scores obtained on a sliding scale. But worse, they divide the world into two camps and discourage the quest for nuance. In some ways, this itself is a Western way of doing things. We like to classify things in such a way that we fail subsequently to see the yin in the yang.

As for Western individualism, the same can be said. US, French, German or Italian individualism are all very different. US invidiualism derives from its own multiple traditions that include the notion of the individual’s right to the “pursuit of happiness”, which we simply don’t find in most (if not all) of the European traditions, where implicit class standards are still very much present, conditioning the definition of happiness or social equilibrium. The bowling alone phenomenom seems to me directly linked to the post WWII consumer society revolution, against which the hippie movement attempted to re-establish a form of collectivist thinking and sentiment, but failed, partly because the collectivist idealism was in direct contradiction with the hippe version of the pursuit of happiness: “tune in, turn on, drop out”. In that sense the message was a retreat from 3 into Hsu’s (if not Freud’s) unconscious.

Jason,
I do of course see much of value in Hofstede’s dimensions and find myself frequently using some of them – especially individualist/collectivist – because they do correspond to some real observable distinctions in the behavior of certain people and institutions, though I still feel they remain severely lacking in nuance and even in coherence in the case of masculine/feminine… for reasons I think Freud would easily understand.

My beef is with their acquired status as the unique and unquestioned orthodoxy of intercultural science, a science that’s far too young to have any orthodoxy at all. I feel that the intercultural training community has adopted and used Hofstede in a way similar to that in which scientists and doctors from antiquity through to the 17th century used the theory of the humors. There actually is something to the theory of humors, i.e. something metaphorical, pedagogical and psychological at the same time, but it ain’t what you would call serious science. (Point of information: my original background was literary and focused on the 16th and 17th century as a post-graduate student at Oxford; I still find the theory of the humors delightfully interesting and worthwhile knowing about).

In other words, Hofstede’s dimensions have – abusively to my mind – been elevated to the status of being the Newtonian physics of intercultural science, whereas for me his system is at best pre-Newtonian and, a fortiori, pre-Einsteinian and pre-quantum. He has created something that’s relatively easy to teach, but which tends to close more doors than it opens. My byword: Don’t banish it, just put it in perspective.

You could say Hall did the same thing as Hofstede with high/low context, monochronic/polychronic etc. but his categories were more about perception than interpersonal behavior and identity. You’re right about the caveats. The main caveat I would give is to see anything that is presented in the form of a dichotomy to categorize human behavior as a pedagogical game rather than a scientific description (and that includes Freud’s conscious/unconscious, though it’s more a pair of interdependent entities than a dichotomous contrast). And producing dimensions does seem to have become a game, as experts – think of Trompenaars – vie with each other to produce new dimensions as a means of attaining the prestige of intercultural “thought leaders”. (And if it isn’t a game think of it as a pheromone!).

In any case, Jason, I’m particularly pleased with discovering your blog, which is delightfully rich, attractive and seriously informative.

Just one further thought on the hippie thing and its link with Hofstede’s dimensions. I tend to believe that all cultures are both collectivist and individualist, masculine and feminine and even high and low power-distance, etc. rather than one or the other. But they place each of the ends of the dichotomies in specific areas of cultural expression, including fiction. The hippies definitely represented a reaction in favor of vanishing collectivistic traditions (the revolutionary spirit, the conquest of the west – not as individualistic as fiction makes it out to be – unionism, 1930s style socialism, the war effort, etc.) against the extreme individualistic idealism of the post WWII consumer society. But the hippies didn’t reject individualism. At the same time as they embraced collectivism (communes, Haight Ashbury, etc.) they exacerbated the individualistic strain in consumer culture. You consume drugs to alter your state of awareness. And of course the drug culture – aiming not at casual euphoria but a transformed state of the individual – is still with us.

Final autobiographical note: I was a Californian in my teens through most of the 60s, and a musician to boot!