Hofstede's Cultural Model

Saikat Howlader

doi:10.1177/0018726702551004

Outline

Hofstede's Cultural Model

Saikat Howlader

https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726702551004

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8 pages

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Abstract

Critically evaluate how Hofstede's Cultural Model has contributed to cultural awareness and the subsequent management of people in the global workplace. What advice would you give a manager going on an international assignment from the UK to China on how to engage successfully with the workforce? Justify your answer with reference to AT LEAST TWO dimensions from your chosen model.

Our 2006 Journal of International Business Studies article, "A Quarter Century of Culture's Consequences: A Review of the Empirical Research Incorporating Hofstede's Cultural Values Framework," provided a comprehensive review of 180 empirical journal articles and edited volume chapters published between 1980 and June 2002 that incorporated Hofstede's crosscultural values framework. We examined empirical research that positioned culture as either a main or moderating effect. The review attempted to make sense of the almost quarter century of research examining the impact of culture at the individual, group/organization, and country levels. In the present commentary, we provide: (a) a summary of the progress that has been made in the intervening decade, and most importantly, (b) a new set of recommendations for the next decade to guide those wishing to study the role of national culture in organizations. 3 In August 2002, we submitted our manuscript of the review of research inspired by Culture's Consequences to then Editor-in-Chief, Arie Lewin, with the hopes that he and his team might consider entering our manuscript into the review process at Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). We knew such a submission was a long shot, considering that JIBS was not publishing many qualitative reviews of research. Further, the framework featured by Hofstede in Culture's Consequences (1980), while certainly influential, had been the subject of a number of both theoretical and methodological critiques (e.g., McSweeney, 2002; Smith, 2002). So, why did we submit our manuscript to JIBS knowing full well that the chances of publication were slim at best? The only reasons we can think of now are that we (a) were much younger then and probably didn't know any better, and (b) felt that it was where the manuscript belonged. In re-reading our initial submission letter to Professor Lewin, we did point out that of the 175 (increased to 180 before the manuscript was published) articles that we included in our review, 37 had appeared in JIBS, almost twice the number that appeared in the next two mostcited journals, Academy of Management Journal (22 articles) and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (19 articles), so perhaps that worked in our favor. We certainly had no way of knowing that our manuscript would ultimately be accepted after undergoing two very extensive revisions, and that 10 years later our article would be recognized with the JIBS Decade Award for 2016! We are obviously very delighted that our work has had this type of impact, and we want to credit the late Kwok Leung, our Action Editor, and the three anonymous reviewers who stuck it out through multiple major revisions, and who provided so much constructive and developmental feedback, that ultimately shaped the final result. The road to publishing our review, which originally began in 1997, was a long one and involved a great number of physical library visits and photocopying (because on-line journal 4 article access was still in its infancy). In fact, it took so long to publish our article that during the time it was under revision at JIBS, we had to change the beginning of our title from "Twenty Years of Culture's Consequences" to "A Quarter Century of Culture's Consequences" and add more articles to the review! In this retrospective, we do not attempt to undertake another comprehensive review of the last decade of Hofstede-inspired cultural research, as that is typically not the objective of a JIBS retrospective. What we have set out to do in this update is twofold and includes: (a) reflecting upon the impact that our article has had over the last 10 years by assessing our original directions for future research against the advancements made since publication (requiring at least a more limited review); and (b) providing a new set of future research directions in light of the progress that has been made, new developments, and the many avenues yet explored. The Impact of Our Review Hofstede (1980, p. 25) defined culture as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another." Even though this definition has often appeared in the many articles referencing Hofstede's (and others') work, the exact wording contained within it is somewhat vague in terms of specifying what the actual components of culture are, raising questions about the culture construct itself and its measurement. Many researchers have discussed the complexity of defining and measuring culture (see Caprar, Devinney, Kirkman, & Caligiuri, 2015, for a recent example). Definitions more specific than Hofstede's have ranged from the beliefs, behaviors, values, and cognitive patterns that people in a society or culture share (i.e., the psychological view of culture, in which culture resides within individuals; Bond, 2004) to a "hypothetical, latent, normative value system that underlies and justifies the functioning of societal institutions" (i.e., the contextual view of culture, in which

This article examines a scholar's discourses related to edu-business in the context of Sino-Finnish edu-business. Based on a critical approach to interculturality, and the decade-long critiques of culturalism, a case study serves as an illustration of the use of the concept of culture by a scholar from Finland to retail Finnish education in China. The results show a reliance on an old and highly criticized conception of culture and a tendency to exoticize and aggrandize Finland, the Finns and Finnish education. Yet a hint at similarities between "Asians" and Finns represents an interesting move from typical differentialist discourses. The article ends with a call for taking interdisciplinarity and ethics into account in edu-business activities in academia. Keywords edu-business, Finland, culturalism, interculturality, education export Transnational Edu-Business in China 37 books about Finnish education published in China for a general rather than narrowly specialist readership. They note myths about Finnish education found in the books such as no homework, happiness of all children, no social class. They draw the conclusion that these tell about how the authors of the books view Chinese education but also current societal discussions about it-rather than the complex realities of Finnish education. Despite the fact that the discourses and practices found in the propaganda about Finnish education it is seemingly as popular today as it ever has been (Liu & Dervin, 2017). Some of the key factors behind the discourses point to Finnish education being aggressively positioned as an export led strategy by the Ministry of Education and Culture (2010) in Finland, whereby Finnish education is seen as "part of the global service economy" (p. 3). The Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland focuses on competition and a good reputation in "developing Finland as an education-based economy" (p. 3). As Kapferer (2012) argues "whether they like it or not, (countries) act de facto as a brand-a summary of unique values and benefits" (p. 2). The role of "Finnish nation branding" and Finnish education as an economic export has been discussed by Dervin (2015) whereby Finnish education can be viewed through the context of an economically orientated export strategy (Kantola & Kettunen, 2012). In addition, the role of Finnish higher education export strategies (Schatz, 2015) have contributed to constructing an image of the country as an educational hyper-brand (Varjo, Simola, & Rinne, 2013; Dervin, 2015). Aronczyk (2013) shows that one of the four phases of creating a national brand identity is through education and training. Thus, nation branding and education are seemingly intertwined, not only in terms of the implementation and dissemination of an idea/concept (for example, Finnish education as a nation branding product/service) but also in the processes of formulating and problematizing how the idea/concept comes-into-being. Here, through functioning as ideology nation brands can affect economic, political, social realms through the projection of a perceived national identity whilst at the same time communicating national interests through potentially chauvinistic and antagonistic forms of nationalism (Volcic & Andrejevic, 2011). Schatz (2015) and Schatz, Popovic, and Dervin (2015) show how education export discourses, in the example of Finnish education, can be used to create representations of national identity whilst marketing Finnish edu-business. It is 38 Fred DERVIN, Ashley SIMPSON important to note that nation branding can engender ideologies about nationhood (Kaneva & Popescu, 2011; Kaneva, 2011) and be used to hierarchically position one nation vis-à-vis another nation as well as contributing to the definition of the limits of how nations can be conceived (Volcic, 2008). It is therefore important to pay attention to the ideological and semiotic manifestations of how nation branding comes-into-being in terms of how nation branding is discursively negotiated, constituted, and performed, in relation to edu-business (Manning, 2010; Nakassis, 2012). Market-Making: The Commodification of Cultural Knowledge in Edu-Business? According to Aspers (2011, p. 23), market-making in education consists in a "broader set of processes, which are as much economic as they are cultural, social and political." Li & Dervin (2018) note how much Finnish edu-business abroad tends to rely on differentialist and culturalist perspectives to retail Finnish education. They explain (p. 14) that Finland is often constructed as "as a different place that has very little in common with other countries-especially in terms of education (Sahlberg, 2014)". The insistence on dissimilarities makes the Nordic country both an "exotic" and "better" place. The use of culture and especially cultural difference has been under scrutiny by anthropologists, postcolonial scholars and intercultural specialists over the past 20 years (e.g., Wikan, 2002; Appadurai, 2004; Holliday, 2013). The anthropologist Dahlen (1997), in his ethnography of professional interculturalists selling culture in the business context, notes that the latter recycle an

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