第一代写网提供英国伦敦大学留学生硕士论文代写，本文是一个关于人类关系研究。Dimensions do not exist: A reply toBrendan McSweeney
Geert Hofstede
In January 2001 Human Relations invited me to write a response to an articleby Brendan McSweeney which was a critical examination of my 1980 bookCulture’s consequences, to coincide with the forthcoming publication of thebook’s second edition. I reacted enthusiastically, but my enthusiasm quicklyfaded away when I saw McSweeney’s diatribe. I pointed out that the appearanceof a re-written and updated edition of my 1980 book would make manyof McSweeney’s comments obsolete. Also, I reacted to his style, which I foundunnecessarily abrasive. Human Relations decided to publish McSweeney’sarticle anyway, in a somewhat mollified version. My response to hiscomments follows below:
The second edition of Culture’s consequences contains a section:‘Support and Criticisms of the Approach Followed’ which reads as follows
(endnotes omitted):
The first edition of this book’s disrespect for academic borderlines paidoff in a multidisciplinary readership. It also caused very mixed reviews:Some enthusiastic (e.g. Eysenck, 1981; Triandis, 1982; Sorge, 1983),some irritated, condescending, or ridiculing (e.g. Cooper, 1982;
Roberts & Boyacigiller, 1984). I had made a paradigm shift in crossculturalstudies, and as Kuhn (1970) has shown, paradigm shifts in anyscience meet with strong initial resistance.
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Human Relations
[0018-7267(200211)55:11]
Volume 55(11): 1355–1361: 028921
Copyright © 2002
The Tavistock Institute ®
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
Editors’ Note
This exchange has been prompted by interest in and response to the original
McSweeney article in Vol. 55, No. 1 (January 2002) of the journal. The
Editors regard this exchange as now closed.Five standard criticisms of my approach were:
1. Surveys are not a suitable way of measuring cultural differences (my
answer: They should not be the only way).
2. Nations are not the best units for studying cultures (my answer:
True, but they are usually the only kind of units available for comparisonand better than nothing).
3. A study of the subsidiaries of one company cannot provide informationabout entire national cultures (my answer: What wasmeasured were differences between national cultures. Any set offunctionally equivalent samples from n/ational populations cansupply information about such differences. The IBM set consistedof unusually well matched samples for an unusually large numberof countries. The extensive validation in the following chapters willshow that the country scores obtained correlated highly with allkinds of other data, including results obtained from representativesamples of entire national populations).
4. The IBM data are old and therefore obsolete (my answer: Thedimensions found are assumed to have centuries-old roots; onlydata which remained stable across two subsequent surveys weremaintained; and they have since been validated against all kinds ofexternal measurements; recent replications show no loss of validity).
5. Four or five dimensions are not enough (my answer: Additionaldimensions should be both conceptually and statistically independentfrom the five dimensions already defined and they should bevalidated by significant correlations with conceptually relatedexternal measures; candidates are welcome to apply).Since the later 1980s the idea of dimensions of national cultures hasbecome part of what Kuhn called ‘normal science’. The message of thefirst edition of this book has been integrated into the state of the art invarious disciplines dealing with culture. The fouror five dimensions Iintroduced have become part of intercultural training programs and oftextbooks and readers in cross-cultural psychology, organizational psychologyand sociology, management and communications. They have
also been used in a number of other areas and disciplines; these willemerge in the following chapters, and Chapter 10 will summarize someof the more surprising applications.
In fact, this extensive use has its disadvantages. Some people havetried to imitate my approach cheaply for commercial purposes. Some
1 3 5 6 Human Relations 55(11)carry the concepts further than I consider wise. At times my supportersworry me more than my critics. But fortunately the messagehas also reached serious academics and practitioners who carry onwith research and experimentation in intercultural cooperation, tomeet the crying need for integration of human efforts in a shrinkingworld.
(Hofstede, 2001: Ch. 2, p. 73)McSweeney’s article reiterates some of the old comments, mostly from the
categories 1, 3, and 4. He focuses very much on details of the analysis of theIBM database, but does not write a word about the validation of the countrydifferences in the IBM study on other data. It all started at IMEDE, where Itaught on a leave of absence from IBM. IMEDE (now IMD) is an internationalbusiness school in Lausanne, Switzerland. The 1980 edition of Culture’s consequencescontains the following text (which McSweeney could have read):
I taught courses in organizational behavior at IMEDE from 1971 to1973. By that time it had become clear that certain questions in the
HERMES questionnaire which could be expected to express values
produced stable and predictable differences in answer patterns amongcountries. I included in my IMEDE courses the administration of a 17-
item ‘Questionnaire on Work Goals and Preferences’ which containedquestions . . . of the HERMES questionnaire; I used the results asteaching material in the course itself. Answers on this questionnairewere obtained from 362 managers from about 30 different countriesand from a variety of private and public organizations unrelated to the
HERMES Corporation. As will be shown in Chapters 3 and 5, themajor country differences found in HERMES are also visible in the
IMEDE sample. The latter is based on a different population, and allrespondents reacted to the English version of the questionnaire,whereas in HERMES every nationality received its own languageversion. The similarity between HERMES and IMEDE data thereforealso ruled out the hypothesis that the differences found among countriescould be due to the translation of the questionnaire.
(Hofstede, 1980: Ch. 2, p. 68)‘HERMES’ was the nickname for IBM used in the early versions of my work,when IBM had not yet agreed to make its identity public. The IMEDE experiencewas the first external validation of the country differences alreadyidentified in IBM. It provided statistical proof that a significant part of thedifferences in answers on the IBM questions were due to the nationalities ofHofstede Dimensions do not exist 1357the respondents. To me this was the starting point of an exploration of othercross-national differences that might be expected to relate to the IBM scores.Most of the 1980 book is devoted to these validations – how could anyone,including McSweeney, possibly claim to have read this book without noticingit? They consist of cross-national survey and test data from other studies,
including a number of representative samples of entire national populations,and of indicators measured at the country level, such as GNP per capita,income inequality and percentage of the national budget of wealthy countriesspent on development assistance to poorer countries. All validations aresummarized on pages 326–31 of the 1980 book, a total of some 90 significantand independent correlations.
Precisely these validations were the reason why so many academics indifferent disciplines felt stimulated by my work; these people added more
validations, and contributed to the overall picture. They did so because of itspossibilities to further their analysis, not because of some kind of faith, asMcSweeney suggests. Their work has been reviewed for the 2001 secondedition. More than half of the over 1500 sources in the 2001 reference listwere published after the first edition appeared. The count of significant andindependent correlations has grown to more than 400. The validations arenow in Appendix 6. Besides, there have been more straight replications ofthe IBM surveys, using the same questions on different populations (as wasdone at IMEDE). My 2001 book describes four large-scale replicationscovering between 15 and 32 countries, on country elites, employees of otherorganizations, airline pilots and consumers. After the completion of the 2001edition, new large-scale replications were published on civil servants(Mouritzen & Svara, 2002) and on employees of a multinational bank (vanNimwegen, 2002). Replications usually confirm most, but not all of thedimensions, but different replications confirm different dimensions.
This leads me to McSweeney’s allegations of my supposed rigidity, suchas holding ‘the notion of a mono-causal link between national cultures andactions within nations’ (McSweeney, 2002: 109). But this rigidity is in theeye of the beholder. In my 1980 book, where I introduced the term ‘mentalprograms’ to include both ‘values’ and ‘culture’, I wrote:
It is possible that our mental programs are physically determined bystates of our brain cells. Nevertheless, we cannot directly observemental programs. What we can observe is only behavior: Words ordeeds. When we observe behavior, we infer from it the presence ofstable mental software. This type of inference is not unique to the socialsciences; it exists, for example, in physics, where the intangible conceptof ‘forces’ is inferred from its manifestations in the movement of1 3 5 8 Human Relations 55(11)objects. Like ‘forces’ in physics, ‘mental programs’ are intangibles, andthe terms we use to describe them are constructs. A construct is aproduct of our imagination, supposed to help our understanding.Constructs do not ‘exist’ in an absolute sense: We define them intoexistence.
(Hofstede, 1980: Ch. 1, p. 14)
In the first session of a new student class, I used to write big: CULTURE
DOESN’T EXIST. In the same way values don’t exist, dimensions don’t exist.
They are constructs, which have to prove their usefulness by their ability toexplain and predict behavior. The moment they stop doing that we shouldbe prepared to drop them, or trade them for something better. I never claim
that culture is the only thing we should pay attention to. In many practicalcases it is redundant, and economic, political or institutional factors providebetter explanations. But sometimes they don’t, and then we need the constructof代写留学生论文culture.
Also, the validations of my dimension scores do not imply assumptionsabout causality: validations can point to causes, effects, or association basedon circular causation or on hidden third factors. Circular causation applies
to the relationship between national culture and national institutions, illustrated
in the diagram on page 27 of the 1980 book.
McSweeney misses the point completely about our research on organizational
cultures. This was a separate large-scale project carried out in the
1980s across 20 organizational units in Denmark and the Netherlands. The
/ report was published in an article in Administrative Science Quarterly
(Hofstede et al., 1990), which McSweeney lists in his references but does not
refer to in the corresponding section of his text (pp. 96–7). (For unclear
reasons he lists, but does not use, a number of my other publications as well.)
I did not ‘begin to belatedly acknowledge that there is cultural variety within
and between units of the same organization’ (p. 96). We had planned this
research for years – it was the logical sequel to the cross-national study. And,
what if I had acknowledged it belatedly? On page 90, McSweeney reproaches
me with never having changed my mind.
The organizational culture study tried to identify the values component
that differentiated organizations within the same country rather than similar
organizations across nations. Contrary to our original hypothesis we found
only a weak values component, but strong differences in what we labeled as
‘/practices’. For a description of what we meant by that, McSweeney should
read the article. If he wants to define practices differently, fine, but then we
are talking about something else. The practical consequences of the fact that
the national culture component relates primarily to values, the organizational
Hofstede Dimensions do not exist 1359component to practices, are far-reaching. Values (as we measured them) are
hardly changeable (they change but not according to anybody’s intentions),
whereas practices can be modified – given sufficient management attention.
This explains why a multinational like IBM could function at all, in spite of
the considerable differences in values, which my research revealed. What
holds a successful multinational together are shared practices, not, as the
‘corporate culture’ hype of the early 1980s wanted it, shared values.
McSweeney’s criticism of my interpretation of survey data (his pages
100–6), if correct, applies to all survey and test-based cross-cultural studies,
including those of Schwartz, Triandis, market researchers, sociologists and
political scientists around the world. All of these draw conclusions from
central tendencies calculated from individual survey answers. There is no
creative accounting in the way I treated my data, I followed common practice
and moreover in the 1980 and 2001 books provided all the data by which
others can verify my findings. What we social scientists all do is called statistical
inference, but McSweeney is obviously unfamiliar with it.
To conclude, let me cite from a review of my work on culture by
Malcolm Chapman, British like McSweeney, but an anthropologist, not an
accountant:
. . . Hofstede’s work became a dominant influence and set a fruitful
agenda. There is perhaps no other contemporary framework in the
general field of ‘culture and business’ that is so general, so broad, so
alluring, and so inviting to argument and fruitful disagreement. . . .
Second, although Hofstede’s work invites criticism on many levels, one
often finds that Hofstede, in self-criticism, has been there first. Third,
although Hofstede’s work is based on a questionnaire drawn from
social psychology that was not expressly designed for the purpose to
which it was later put, Hofstede brings to his discussion such a wealth
of expertise and erudition from outside the questionnaire that many
criticisms of ‘narrowness’ are withered on the tongue.
Hofstede’s work is used and admired at a very high level of generalization.
Those who take country scores in the various dimensions as
given realities, informing or confirming other research, do not typically
inquire into the detail of the procedures through which specific empirical
data were transmuted into generalization. Hofstede, of course,
provides all the background one could wish for about these procedures,
and that is another reason for admiring his work.
(Chapman, 1997: 18–19)
1 3 6 0 Human Relations 55(11)References
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Studies of Management & Organization, 1997, 26(4), 3–29.
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代写留学生硕士论文Roberts, K.H. & Boyacigiller, N.A. Cross-national organizational research: The grasp of
the blind men. In B.L. Staw & L.L. Cummings (Eds), Research on organizational
behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984, pp. 423–75.
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Hofstede Dimensions do not exist 1361
Geert Hofstede is Emeritus Professor of Organizational Anthropology
and International Management of Maastricht University, and a Fellow of
the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation (IRIC) and of the
Center for Economic Research (CentER), both at Tilburg University, The
Netherlands. For more information see