A few weeks ago I posted a series of pieces on Geert Hofstede’s five “dimensions” of culture. In my last three posts, the notions of universalism and particularism have come up. Today we’ll take a look at these two concepts in the context of the work of Dutchman Fons Trompenaars and his British colleague, Charles [...]

Yesterday and the day before we took a look at Chinese and American responses to scenarios about a fallen tree and a hypothetical rich person. Besides the lessons about the differences between abstract American moralism versus concrete Chinese practicality, there is, once again, also a lesson for us about oversimplifying.

First, yesterday I came across this article — a thoughtful discussion of some Chinese reactions to the Tonghua tragedy discussed last week in this blog. There is much worth commenting on, but I’m shirking the temptation in order to probe a little more deeply into a topic we began looking at yesterday: American moralism and [...]

Today we round out our discussion of Hofstede’s dimensions of culture. The fifth and final dimension — time orientation — was not discovered in Hofstede’s original surveys. Sensing that something was missing — something important about Asian cultures — Michael Harris Bond, a professor in Hong Kong, designed and carried out a separate set of [...]

The fourth Hofstede dimension goes by two different names. The current preferred name is “achievement orientation” (versus “quality of life”); in Hofstede’s original work it was called “masculinity” (versus “femininity”). While some stick to the old nomenclature, most interculturalists have found the connection to gender to be so loaded that people can’t think clearly: for [...]

How well do you tolerate ambiguity? Do you need a clear roadmap of what’s ahead, or do you prefer more flexibility? Or is “flexibility” tantamount to “chaos”? Each person has a unique set of tendencies around this. Even so, just as with the two Hofstede dimensions we’ve discussed in earlier posts, with “uncertainty avoidance” there [...]

One thing we need to watch carefully as we move through Hofstede’s research: cultural dimensions aretendencies and only tendencies. Hofstede himself is emphatic about this. Any individual in any culture could show up anywhere on any dimension. Think of the dimensions as statistical generalizations: road maps with enough detail to get you where you need [...]

Scientists like to measure things. Social scientists especially like to measure things that are hard to measure. In the late 1960s a Dutch scholar by the name of Geert Hofstede took on measuring cultural difference. He ended up having over 100,000 managers at IBM worldwide fill out surveys to test how cultures differ. The result [...]