UNDERSTANDING THE CULTURAL COMPLEXITIES OF OUR WORLD
NetExpat Team • July 11, 2019
Prof. Geert Hofstede is interviewed by Alain Verstandig, President, NetExpat Group
Alain Verstandig: Professor Hofstede, about 30 years ago, you dedicated yourself, as no one else had, to understanding the cultural complexities of our world. If you had to conduct the same extensive study today, what would your dimensions and scores be?
Prof. Geert Hofstede:
Our world and its population has indeed changed since the late 80’s. My Dutch colleague, Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, compared data from the World Values Survey related to the six dimensions in our 2010 book, across two generations, 30 years apart, and his findings are very interesting. Take the dimension “Power Distance”, which measures how societies handle inequalities among people: people in societies scoring high in “Power Distance” accept a hierarchical order in which everyone has a place. In societies with low “Power Distance” scores, people constantly challenge inequalities of power. When you compare scores across 30 years, all cultures have gone down: our whole world is less hierarchical and requests more justification when facing inequalities. But the difference between countries has remained the same. All of the data I collected 30 years ago is still relevant and highlights relative positions of one country to the other, which has not changed much. What we have found is that all countries have evolved together.
The same applies to “Individualism”: all cultures today have become more individualist compared to 30 years ago. People from all cultures are expected to take care of themselves and their immediate families. Today, people’s self-image is more defined in terms of “I” than “we”. But here as well, differences between countries have remained the same.
The third dimension for which this is the case is our latest addition “indulgence versus restraint”: a measure of subjective feelings of happiness. “Indulgence” stands for a relatively free gratification of basic and human desires related to enjoying life and having fun. Its opposite, “restraint”, stands for a conviction that such gratification needs to be curbed and regulated by strict social norms. The younger generation in all countries has moved to the “indulgence” pole, while the ranking of countries was not affected. The remaining three dimensions did not systematically move, and the rankings of countries, on which our scores are based, showed to be rather stable.
So, all my scores have been proven to be quite stable over time. The forces that cause cultures to shift tend to be global or continent wide. This means that they affect many countries at the same time, so if their cultures shift, they shift together, and their relative positions remain the same.
AV: The word “culture” is often used to represent completely different concepts: what differences do you see between national cultures and corporate cultures?
GH: My research, along with the research of others, shows that national cultures tend to be acquired during the first 10 years of our lives. National cultures are built on fundamental values: what we perceive as right and wrong. They are not in our mind, they’re in our guts.
On the other hand, corporate cultures or job cultures are acquired much later in our working environment: they are more a set of practices and are meant for everyone in an organization to work harmoniously and efficiently together.
Even if the same word “culture” is used in these two concepts, our core “national values” are of a completely different nature than “corporate cultures”. You find far less conflict between organization and national cultures than among different national cultures.
AV:
How critical are intercultural competencies in our modern world?
GH:
Well Alain, it is encouraging to see that a growing majority of young graduates are exposed, through their studies, to cultural differences. Programs like Erasmus and all the study abroad initiatives push our future workforce to discover what a worldwide citizenship could mean.
But there is a difference between being a global student and becoming an active global employee. I see an unfortunate tendency for adults who
are successful in their specialized career to think that they are superior and do not need any cultural sensitivities. But to be a true world citizen, one of the most important things is that you are genuinely interested in other people. Our world is indeed more global, but the recipe for success in any international endeavor is still the same: if you are only interested in yourself, if you just listen to yourself, if you have no time
to listen and discover others, then 30 years ago you would have failed, and you will fail today. Humility is still central to the notion of being a world citizen.
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