CCM CHAPTER 3

COMPARING CULTURES: SYSTEMATICALLY DESCRIBING CULTURAL DIFFERNCES

 Culture is expressed in the complex interactions of values, attitudes, and

behavioural assumptions of a society, which are reflected in its institutions
and well understood by its members.
 Much of our understanding of cultural variation has been achieved by
focusing on values. Analysing a society’s values provides a way to understand
many coherent patterns in how a society chooses to deal with basic social
problems.
 By examining the choices that social groups make, we can infer their basic
preferences as their relationship to their environment and to each other. This
provides the ability to categorize a social group according to these shared
assumptions about the way things ought to be or the way one should
behave.
 Culture shapes individuals by influencing the content and structure of the
basic mental representation that members of particular groups share.

Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck Framework

 Societies place different emphases on three alternative ways of handling
each of these problems:
o Relationships to nature  people have a need-duty to control or
master nature (domination), to submit to nature (subjugation), or to
work together with nature to maintain harmony and balance
(harmony)
o Beliefs about human nature  people are inherently good, evil, or a
mixture of good and evil
o Relationships among people  the greatest concern and
responsibility is for one’s self and immediate family (individualist), for
one’s own group that is defined in different ways (collateral), or for
one’s groups that are arranged in a rigid hierarchy (hierarchical)
o Nature of human activity  people should concentrate on living for
the moment (being), striving for goals (achieving), or reflecting
(thinking)
o Conception of space  the physical space we use is private, public or
a mixture of private and public
o Orientation to time  people should make decisions with respect to
traditions or events in the past, events in the present, or events in the
future.
 In this conceptualization of cultural variation, the six value orientations are
not bipolar dimensions. A high preference for one assumption does not
mean low preference for the other two assumption in the same value
orientation. All preferences can be presented in a society, but with a rank
order of the preferred alternatives.
Hofstede’s Study
 Hofstede developed 4 dimensions to classify countries. These dimensions
were named individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty
avoidance, and masculinity-femininity.
 He named and interpreted these dimensions based on a way of
understanding societal problems that was developed from an extensive
review of anthropological and psychological studies of national culture during
the first half of the 20th century.
 Individualism-collectivism  self-identity of a society’s members depends
on individual characteristics or characteristics of the groups to which the
individual belongs on a permanent basis and the extent to which individual or
group interest dominate. Collectivist societies distinguish between in-groups
and out-groups more sharply and more permanently than do individualist
societies.
 Power distance  the extent that power differences are accepted and
sanctioned (pelanggaran) in a society.
 Uncertainty avoidance  the extent to which societies focus on ways to
reduce uncertainty and create stability. Accepting uncertainty means being
accustomed (usual) to acting without basing choices on known probability.
 Masculinity-femininity  the extent to which traditional male orientations
of ambition, acquisition, and achievement are emphasized over traditional
female orientations of nurturance (pengasuhan) and interpersonal harmony.

Long Term Orientation

 The omission (kelalaian) of a culture dimension having to do with the way in
which a society dealt with the problem of time as the limitation of Hofstede.
 Subsequently, Hofstede found a way to represent time orientation in a study
done in collaboration with a scholar who was studying Confucian cultural
traditions.
 Includes supporting the values of relationships based on status, thrift,
persistence, and a sense of shame and rejection of the values of steadiness
and stability, face, tradition and reciprocating gifts.
 They found that this long-term orientation measure is both highly correlated
with the Chinese Culture Connection measure and like that measure, with
economic growth.

Indulgence vs Restraint
 Addition of culture dimension of the Hofstede tradition is indulgence vs
restraint
 Indulgence  large proportion of citizens who say that they are very happy,
believe that they are in control of their lives, and place a very high important
on leisure. They have higher birth-rates, less cardio-vaskular disease, higher
importance of friends, more support of casual sex, and more obesity in
developed nations.
 This dimension has marketing implications.
 Additional dimension for Hofstede may occur.
 Intra-national consensus = Level of agreement between individuals in society
about the importance of a particular value dimension.

Note: Hofstede's scores were the average score for all participants in each
country. Therefore, not every particular individual will be a representative of the
mean score. The mistake of applying the national level to individuals is
called ecological fallacy

In an effort to investigate the possibility that Hofstede's study could contain

cultural bias because it was developed in the West, researchers conducted a
similar study based on Chinese values. This study indicated four dimensions:

 Integration: incl. Tolerance, harmony, solidarity, etc.

 Human-heartedness: incl. Kindness, solitaire, etc.
 Confucian work dynamism incl. Order, persistence, sense of shame, etc.
 Moral discipline: being disinterested, having few desires, etc.

Schwartz Value Survey

 Schwartz conducted a series of studies about the content and structure of
human values.
 Values  criteria that people use to evaluate events and select courses of
action.
 Structure  the organization of these values based on their similarity and
their differences.
 Schwartz and his colleagues identifies 3 universal human requirements:
o Nature of relationship between individual and the group.
o Preservation of the society itself
o The relationship of people to the natural world.
 They used this set of requirements to organize and add to a set of values that
had been identified by Rokeach (1973)
 This analysis yielded seven value orientations that were labelled as follows:
o Egalitarianism  recognition of people as moral equals
o Harmony  fitting in harmoniously with the environment
o Embeddedness  people as embedded in the collective
o Hierarchy  unequal distribution of power is legitimate
o Mastery  exploitation of the natural or social environment
o Affective autonomy  pursuit of positive experiences
o Intellectual autonomy  independent pursuit of own ideas
 This procedure generates a two dimensional graphic representation

Trompenaar’s Dimensions
 5 dimensions concerned relationship among people:
o Universalism-particularism:
Universalism  belief that what is true and good can be discovered
and applied universally.
Particularism  belief that unique circumstances determine what is
right or good
 o individualism – collectivism  this dimension concerns the extent to
which people plan their actions with reference to individual beliefs vs
those of the group.
o neutral – affective
neutral  emotion should be held in check, and maintaining an
appearance of self-control is important
affective  it is natural to express emotions
o specific – diffuse: this dimension refers to the extent to which
individuals are willing to allow access to their inner selves to others.
Specific  people separate the private part of their lives from the
public
Diffuse  these aspects of the individual overlap
o achievement – ascription: this dimension is about how status and
power are determined in the society.
Ascription  status based on who a person is
Achievement  status is based on what a person does

 2 orientations towards time and the environment.

o Time : Past vs. future. The extent to which time is viewed as linear
vs. holistic.
o Environment: The extent to which people feel that they are the
primary influence on their lives. Alternatively, the environment is
seen as more powerful, and people should strive to achieve harmony
with it.

 5 concepts about relationships among people reflected two main dimensions

of cultural variation:
o loyal involvement – utilitarian involvement  representing varying
orientations toward group members
o conservatism – egalitarian commitment  representing orientations
toward obligation of social relationships.

The GLOBE Study

 The GLOBE Study = Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour
Effectiveness is the most recent study of cultural differences.
 One of the outcomes of the GLOBE research was the construction of nine
dimensions of cultural variation. The first four dimensions are described as
direct extensions of Hofstede’s (1980) work with the exception that GLOBE
proposes two dimensions of collectivism, with in group collectivism being
the most highly correlated with the Hofstede individualism – collectivism
dimension. Also, even GLOBE uses the label uncertainty avoidance for one
dimension, the GLOBE measure focuses more specifically on the use of
explicit procedures to handle uncertainty than does it counterpart in the
Hofstede scheme. (The extent to norms, rules etc that they use to avoid
uncertainty)
 These first four GLOBE dimensions are:
 o Institutional collectivism  the degree to which organizational and
societal institutional practices encourage and reward collective
distribution of resources and collective action
o In group collectivism  the degree to which individuals express
pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organizations or families
o Power distance  the degree to which members of a collective
expect power to be distributed equally
o Uncertainty avoidance  the extent to which a society, organization,
or group relies on social norms, rules, and procedures to alleviate
unpredictability of future events.
 The next two dimensions can be seen as re-conceptualization of Hofstede’s
masculinity – femininity dimension:
o Gender egalitarianism  the degree to which a collective minimize
gender inequality
o Assertiveness  the degree to which individuals are assertive (tegas),
confrontational, and aggressive in their relationships with others.
 The next two dimensions have their origins in the work of Kluckhohn and
Strodtbeck (1961) on the nature of people and time orientation:
o Humane orientation  the degree to which a collective encourages
and rewards individuals for being fair, altruistic, generous, caring, and
kind to others
o Future orientation  the extent to which individuals engage in future
oriented behaviours, such as delayed gratification, planning, and
investing in the future.
 The final dimension is described by the GLOBE authors (House et al., 2004) as
derived from McClelland’s (1961) work on achievement motivation.
However, linkages to Hofstede’s (2001) masculinity construct can also be
found (Peterson, 2004). This dimension is
o Performance orientation  the degree to which a collective
encourages and reward group members for performance
improvement and excellence.
 The cultural dimensions in GLOBE data were treated as practices (the way
things are) and values (the way things should be).
 As discussed, the result of major studies of national variation in value
orientations have some similarity, despite being conducted at different
times, with different samples, and using different methods. They are also
closely connected to a broad range of social and economic indicators.
 In addition, however, because they appear in some form in all the
frameworks, individualism-collectivism and power distance are perhaps
especially important to understanding cultural variations. Because the first
has to do with boundaries between individuals and groups; and the second
with the preservation of order in society.

Individualism and Collectivism

 Individualism and collectivism are perhaps the most useful and certainly the
most frequently studied dimensions of cultural variation in explaining a
diverse array of social behaviour.
  Individualism  the tendency to view each person as independent of others
and to be more concerned about the consequences of a person’s actions for
that person alone.
 Collectivism  the tendency of a society to view people as interdependent
with selected others who are part of stable groups, such as a kinship group.
Collectivist societies tend to be concerned about the consequences of
behaviour for each person’s reference group and expect people to be more
willing to sacrifice personal interest for the good of their group.
 However, individualism-collectivism should not be depicted as simply
dichotomy of self-interest and a generalized concern for everyone in the
world. Collectivism does not equate with socialism.

Tightness and Complexity

 An aspect of individualism-collectivism that is closely related to the kinds of
individual responses to nation culture.
 A society’s individualism is closely related to its looseness and complexity,
whereas collectivism implies tightness and simplicity.
 Tightness  the extent to which members of a culture agree about what is
correct behaviour, believe they must behave exactly according to cultural
norms, and believe they will receive or should give severe criticism for even
small deviations from cultural norms. Ex: Japan. Tightness is also associated
with homogenous culture that often have high population density.
 Loose culture often have conflicting norms about appropriate behaviour.
Although a culture might be characterized as tight or loose, both tightness
and looseness can occur in a society in different context.
 Cultural complexity  the amount of differentiation in the various domains
of individuals’ lives.

Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions

 Culture – specific characterisics that differentiate between different kinds of
individualism and collectivism. Significant among these are the vertical and
horizontal dimensions that relate to the way in which people view their
status relationship with others.
 The vertical dimension is somewhat similar to Hofstede’s (1980) power
distance dimensions and related to the SVS (Schwarts, 1992) value
orientations of hierarchy and harmony. In combination with individualism
and collectivism, these dimensions correspond to the four types of self-
independent and same or different.
 Distinction between vertical and horizontal individualism and collectivism
results in four cultural profiles or syndromes. However, the correlation
between power distance and collectivism suggest that vertical collectivism
and horizontal individualism might be the dominant cultural profiles
around the world.
  Triandis (1995) offers the following defining attributes of these cultural
syndromes. Vertically collective societies view their members as parts of an in
group, but members of the in group differ in terms of status, and different in-
groups are also likely to have varying status. Ex: India’s caste system
 In horizontal individualistic societies, the self is autonomous and people are
generally equal. These culture typically show patterns of social behaviour
that emphasize equity in resource sharing according to contribution and
distribution of resources equally among members. They have social systems
that emphasize both the values of equality and individual freedom. What
these two dominant syndromes suggest is that verticality served to reinforce
collectivism, and horizontalness reinforces individualism.

Social Axioms
 Provide a complementary way to understand societal cultures.
 Social axioms  basic truths or premises or generalized expectancies that
relate to a wide range of social behaviours across different context. The
formal definition by Leung and colleagues (2002)  Social axioms are
generalized beliefs about oneself, the social and physical environment, or the
spiritual world, and are in the form of an assertion (demand) about the
relationship between two entities or concepts.
 Unlike values, social axioms do not have an evaluative or “ought’ component
which is a value statement. Instead, a typical social axioms has the structure
and the relationship can be correlational or causal.
 Leung et al (2002) identified many thousands of social axioms. Based on their
fit with the four categories of psychological attributes, orientation toward
the social world, social interaction, and the environment the items were
reduces to 182 axioms.
 Bond and colleagues (2004) derived a cultural level structure of social
axioms. At the cultural level, one strong factor was labelled dynamic
externality, because it represented a cluster of beliefs that focuses around
religiosity and a belief that effort would ultimately lead to justice. A second
 factor labelled social cynicism was composed almost entirely of items that
reflected a cynical view of people – a negative view of human nature, a
biased view against some groups of people, a mistrust of social institutions,
and a disregard of ethical means of achieving an end.
 Dynamic externality was closely related to but not identical with cultural
collectivism. However, social cynicism appears to be a new cultural
dimension in that it correlates only moderately with dimension from previous
studies of cultural variation.

Culture as Sources of Guidance

 Another line of research seeks to understand cultural differences based on
characteristics of the role structures typical in organizations in a society. This
research considers the extent to which individuals in different nations rely on
others in different roles and on rules and norms to deal with their daily work
situations. Specifically, it analysed how societies differ in the extent to which
managers consider eight sources of guidance for handling the work
situations that they face. These sources are (1) org rules and procedures 2)
their superiors 3) their colleagues 4) their subordinates 5) staff experts 6)
their organization’s norms 7) their society’s norms and (8) their own
experience and training.

Cultural Distance

 This index represents the relative distance of nations from each other based
on a combination of these four cultural dimensions.
 Because of conceptual and measurement issues associated with cultural
distance, a refinement ide called cultural friction was introduced.
 Cultural friction  attempts to capture the relationship between two
different cultures as well as their distance.