Hofstede's Model of National Cultur

Hofstede's Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A triumph of faith - A failure of analysis" (abridged)
by Dr. Brendan McSweeney

Geert Hofstede’s depiction of enduring and powerful national cultures or national cultural differences is legendary. If his findings are correct they have immense implications for management within and across countries, and for the future of nation states - including the prospects for greater European integration. However, closer examination of his research reveals that it relies, in my view, on fundamentally flawed assumptions. This article examines four crucial assumptions upon which his measurements are based. These assumptions are ‘crucial’ in the sense that each is necessary for the plausibility of his identification claims. It is argued that they are all flawed and that therefore his national cultural descriptions are invalid and misleading.

Assumption 1
Every micro-location is typical of the national

Hofstede generalises about the entire national population in each country solely on the basis of analysis of a few questionnaire responses. The respondents were simply certain categories of employees in the subsidiaries of a single company: IBM. What evidence does he have that they were nationally representative? None. He just assumes it. Sometimes he supposes that every individual in a nation shares a common national culture. At other times he claims to have found in the IBM data a "national norm" or "central tendency", or "average [national] tendency." Both claims are problematic.

A statement that every English person is violent, because on occasions some English football fans are violent, would be regarded by any rational person as absurd. Generalising about an entire national population on the basis of miniscule number of questionnaire responses - in some countries fewer than 100 - is equally absurd. If a national culture were common to all national individuals - and survey responses could identify those cultures - there would not have been significant intracountry differences in individuals’ questionnaire responses. But the IBM surveys within each country revealed radical differences in the answers to the same questions.

If somehow the "average tendency" of IBM employees in each country - constructed by statistical averaging of highly varied responses - is assumed to be nationally representative, and this is Hofstede’s assumption - then with equal plausibility, or rather equal implausibility, it must also be assumed that each Hofstedian average tendency was, and continues to be, the same as the average tendency in every other part of a country, in every company, tennis club, knitting club, political party, and massage parlour. The "average [national culture] tendency" in the New York City Young Marxist Club, for example, is (if Hofstede’s Assumption 1, above is believed) the same as in the Keep America White Cheer-Leaders Club in Smoky Hill, Kansas, USA, and amongst any other group, in any other part, of the USA. Is Hofstede’s assumption credible?

There are no evidence-based reasons for assuming that the average IBM responses reflected ‘the’ national average. Hofstede’s assumption is a mere leap of faith. It is not grounded in evidence. Furthermore, IBM subsidiaries demonstrably had many nationally atypical characteristics. These included: the company’s selective recruitment only from the ‘middle classes’; the frequent international training of employees; the technologically advanced and unusual characteristics of its products during the survey periods - which were before the development of the ‘personal computer’; the ‘frequent personal contacts’ between subsidiary and international headquarters staff; its tight, internationally centralised control; US ownership during a period in which foreign direct investment was new and controversial; and the comparatively young age of its managers. Furthermore, IBM employees diverged from the general population more in some nations than in others. For instance, during the time the survey(s) were undertaken, working for a non-family owned firm would have been much more unusual in Taiwan than in Britain. Hofstede does not demonstrate the national representativeness of what he claims to have found in each IBM subsidiary is nationally representative. He asserts it. What is said to have been identified is actually presupposed. Hofstede’s reasoning is circular - he begs the question.

Suppose that by sheer chance he did find national averages - what use would they be? As managers, employees, investors, tourists, citizens, or whatever we do not engage with statistical averages but with real local specifics - as the statistician who drowned in the river whose average depth was five centimetres unfortunately discovered.

Assumption 2
Respondents were already permanently ‘mentally programmed’ with three non-interacting cultures

How does Hofstede claim to have identified national culture in IBM subsidiaries? As well as supposing the existence of such cultures, and the typicality of what he could identify in that company, he had to make a number of other and equally implausible assumptions in order to be able to assert that he could describe, indeed measure, these cultures.

Three discrete cultures: Out of the potentially huge number of cultural and non-cultural influences on the questionnaire answers, Hofstede assumed that only three: organisational (OrC); occupational (OcC) and national cultures (NC), were significant. Each respondent was conceived of as exclusively carrying - as being permanently "mentally programmed" by - these three non-interacting cultures (or values). This extraordinarily reductive conception of IBM employees conveniently allowed him to argue that as there was only one IBM culture, and as he occupationally matched the respondents, the questionnaire response differences showed "national culture with unusual clarity."

Hofstede’s anorexic and mechanistic assumption can be seen from its expression below as an equation:
(OrC + OcC + NC1) - (OrC + OcC +NC2)
= NC1 - NC2
in which,
OrC = Organisational culture (IBM’s);
OcC = Occupational Cultures;
NC = National Culture;
and therefore NC1 - NC2 = Difference(s)
between two national cultures.

Convenient for processing questionnaire answers, but unrelated to reality. Was there really just one monopolistic organisational culture in IBM world-wide? Does every occupation have a single global culture?

Organisational culture: The principal problem for Hofstede’s analysis is not that he supposed that there was a single worldwide IBM organisational culture - albeit that is contestable, and not self-evident as he suggested - but he treats that culture as the only organisational culture in IBM. He ignored extensive literatures which argue for recognition of multiple, dissenting, emergent, organic, counter, plural, resisting, incomplete, contradictory, fluid, cultures in an organisation. If the assumption of a single and monopolistic IBM culture is rejected and the possibility of a host of diverse cultural and/or noncultural influences on the questionnaire responses is acknowledged, Hofstede’s underlying equation collapses.

About ten years after the initial publication of his analysis of the IBM survey data, Hofstede had begun to acknowledge that there is cultural variety within and between units of the same organisation. An acceptance that organisations have multiple cultures and not a single culture would seem to undermine a crucial, and much trumpeted, part of his analysis: that all respondents were from the same company and therefore had the same organisational culture. However, Hofstede never admits error or weaknesses in his analysis. In parallel with his acknowledgement of cultural heterogeneity in organisations, Hofstede redefined ‘organisational culture’. He stated that "national cultures and organisational cultures are phenomena of a different order." Thus he concludes that the cultural heterogeneity within IBM did not affect his cross-IBM-subsidiary comparison of values, as organisational culture does not contain/reflect values. His definitional change is problematic for many reasons (see McSweeney, 2002).

By expediently taking organisational cultures out of his definition, Hofstede’s methodology becomes even more reductive and unreal as can be seen in the revised equation which excludes organisational culture:

(OcC + NC1) - (OcC + NC2) = NC1 - NC2

Like the earlier version, this reasoning relies on the unwarranted presumption that occupational cultures are universally the same.

Occupational culture: Hofstede’s notion of uniform world-wide occupational cultures supposes early and permanently-imprinted socialisation. Occupational cultures, which he also calls "values" (and indeed national culture/values also), are, he claims, enduringly "programmed into" carriers in pre-adulthood. "Values", he states: "Are acquired in one’s early youth, mainly in the family and in the neighbourhood, and later at school. By the time a child is ten years old, most of its basic values have been programmed into its mind... for occupational values the place of socialization is the school or university, and the time is in between childhood and adulthood."

The notion that national and occupational cultures are unchanging and finalised consequences of early ‘socialization’ has few supporters. Even Talcott Parsons, the high priest of socialisation, was less rigid. And yet the continuity assumption is crucial for Hofstede’s analysis. Without it, the mere matching of respondents on an occupational basis could not plausibly be deemed to isolate national cultural values.

Hofstede’s deterministic notion of permanent programming of "occupational cultures" conveniently, but ridiculously, supposes that throughout the world members of the same occupation (plumbers, electricians, clerks, pimps, accountants, or whatever) r