Geert Hofstede on Culture

Kate if people read about you they might get confused as to what discipline you are in what kind of a bird are you I have called my self-indulgence coddled professor which is kind of professor at large without necessarily attributing myself to any particular discipline right so you yourself don't make a big thing of the discipline that you're in no I think that maybe the well one of my particular identities is not having one you don't have an identity but your contribution to science does have one what is culture as you define it well my definition

is of course a particular definition which is that the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one group or category of people from another but that is one particular way of defining and there are other definitions as well so what is a peculiarity and what makes your concept of culture so usable may be that I focus on the way culture is a quiet it is I use the term programming of the mind which of course is a metaphor because the mind is programmed like a computer is but we all have computers so we all know

what's meant by programming but what I focus on is how do people acquire their programming and I picture actually the human being as somebody who comes in this world let's say with an operating system but still needing a lot of programming in order to function and that is one thing which people don't understand in my definition you read the word active it's a collective program which means it is those things which are shared but people who grew up in the same forest you have told us that culture is the collective programming of the mind which

is a bit of a difficult notion because it's both collective and it resides in individuals in their minds so how can you measure culture always on the basis of collective phenomena so you can look at people how they behave for example in a particular environment but you can also collect data from individuals but then take a central tendency in those central tendency which may mean take the average or take the percentage that people that gives a certain answer researchers often try to add to the body of knowledge about culture by doing a survey in a

particular country would that be a feasible option well in my case what my work is about is comparison it's actually measuring is always comparing and I'm trying to measure culture by comparing similar cultures so one place from another and I have compared Nations and I've also compared organizations what is the difference between comparing nations and comparing organizations I can assume there's both a method methodology logical difference and a difference in the kind of results that you might get yes yes well the method of methodological difference is of course that they're more almost perpendicular to each

other if you compare Nations you compare similar people similar organization similar situations in different countries and if you study organization cultures you're studying different organizations within the same country all right so they're two different things and then the results are quite different which actually is related to the question of how cultures are acquired because when do we acquire the culture of all nations well from the moment onwards we are born in that nation and the learning the we acquire in the first part of our life which is before a puberty which is say before the

certainly in the first ten years of our lives that learning is a mostly unconscious so national culture is composed of many unconscious elements now when do we acquire organizational conscious that that is from the moment we join that organization and that is for most people after they have completed their education when they are younger or not so young adults which means that then we there we acquire things that are completely conscious the unconscious element are in the national culture the conscious element are in the organization culture which also means that we get completely different problems

you can basically say you're in different disciplines because national cultures are actually a topic for anthropology and organization cultures are a topic for organization sociology alright would you consider yourself an anthropologist then no although I sometimes have called myself an organizational anthropologist which is a safe term because it's never been officially defined now you said that if you want to investigate national culture you need to look at the actions or questionnaire responses of similar people across countries many surveys are based on a specific category of people such as managers or teachers or students have you

got something to say about the kind of sample that you need to investigate culture across nations well of course the more diverse the sample the better because you get a broader picture of a particular society but you must find similarly diverse samples in other societies so an organ survey activity that does this is the world value survey which uses representative samples of the population according to market research principles whether that's always safe as whether it's always carried out in such a way that the samples are really matched well it can be disputed but anyway it's

probably the best we have other samples are what you could call narrow samples like in my case sampling people in the same kind of jobs in different subsidiaries of the IBM corporation it could be students and preferably students of particular discipline for example psychologists students of various countries it could be like Professor Schwartz has done is comparing elementary school teachers which is probably very interesting group also because they transfer their IDs also to children can you say something about what is the dimension of culture and how come the number of dimensions in your model has

changed well the dimension of culture is a way of unpackaging the concept of culture a culture of course is just an imaginary thing it is product of our imagination which is supposed to be useful to understand the world and to be able to predict certain things in society but as long as sculpture is let's say a holistic concept it is rather difficult to make any predictions because it it involves so much so what the dimensions are our ways of unpackaging this holistic concept of culture in two particular parts which have meant much clearer relationship to

phenomena and society and originally I found for the fact that we find more and poor is not surprising because more and more people are collecting data and they are reaching areas from which in beginning we had no information all right so what is actually would you say the function of culture to go back to the the total concept of culture why do human beings need culture it is the glue that keeps societies together right you can also say it's automatic the moment you have a society you get a culture because that are particular relationships between

the people who make up that society and they have to play their game according to certain rules so it's the unwritten rules of the social game unwritten rules of the social game yes all right so you need culture in order to play that the game of everyday social relationships in a couple societies right and also in an organization in an organization also because in that except that in that case the rules are at a different level they are much more pragmatic and much less profound I would say they're more explicit also and they are also

changeable maybe it's a good time now to start to have a look at these dimensions in your work could you tell us something first about how did you first discover the the importance of culture in the data that you collected at IBM because if I am correct this was just personnel research and not necessarily aimed at discovering cultural differences no it's true well it was input from several sides and one input was my own experience because I had an international job I worked in the international staff and I visited many different countries especially European countries

also some Middle Eastern countries also I was from time to time in the United States so it was an American company so there also you saw differences so you experienced these differences and then also we connected we started to collect data asking the same questions about their work to employees in different parts of the world that was something which came very logically in the philosophy of the founders of IBM because that always said that the company has a responsibility towards its employees so the M billion of the employees is very important so we had we

had an entry there although we still have to convince local managers to allow us to do those surveys and to have it done by their own people in their own language but the aim of those service those surveys was not to discover differences in culture that was taught it was not it came out actually we saw after having done well sometime and it was a quite a large operation we noticed that there were two things there where on the one hand what we could call values on the other hand what we could call satisfactions and

they were not necessarily related and that especially on this area of values you saw a pattern between countries satisfactions could vary one group in the country could be satisfied another group who do not be satisfied but if you asked for example this dimension of power distance whether the people noticed whether thought it was a problem that employees were afraid to disagree with their managers you notice that you got an rank order of countries in this respect and you got that rank order regardless of whom you asked regardless whether you ask research scientists or whether you

ask secretaries or whether you ask rank-and-file workers okay so you started to see that all people from a certain country would tend to respond the same to these questions about for instance fear of expressing an opinion yeah at least what did you do that Poland in there there was a good Eddie doll answer the same but you could say that if you compared country a to country B there would always be more people in country a who get the particular Padilla than in country B all right so what was your next step when you found

that trying to interpret it that that you should also realize that the time in history played a role the first survey was held around 1968 1968 was a year that there was a lot of upheaval especially in Europe about power yes about power and self-determination answer so the questionnaires we had at the time contained were made by people who were children of their times of course so they contained quite a few questions about power and when we analyze that we discover that the real differences in alters of our part this in fact was the first

time angelov came out can you tell us something about how you discovered established and named that first dimension that was at a time there was a popular book by a Dutch social psychologist Bob Miller and it also appeared in English is of Psalter daily power game and he coined the word power distance as the relationship the emotional relationship between the person at the top and the person below her or him in at a time I would say yeah and can you define that to mention more formally and maybe give an example of how you could

recognize power distance in the daily life yeah well the definition is that you say see emotional distance between the person on a higher step at a lower step like like feeling like a child yeah and parent is going to start relations if you find it in the relationship between the child and the parent in the relationship between a teacher and a pupil in the relationship between the boss and the subordinates in the relationship between the government citizen in all those places you have for instance obedience between parents and children would carry over mutually relationships to

those other parts of society yes right yes it would okay an example let me try to give an example from my own experience because that as always yeah it is always the most well the most impressive its thoughts it's not something just taken from a standard story it is my own experience it's a few years ago that I was invited to give a lecture at the University in northeastern France near the German border and this university had not only in their own staff and students but also some staff and students from a nearby German University

and after I'd given my lecture we had a discussion session and it was noticeable that among the Germans it was the students who asked the questions among the French it was only the professors who asked the questions now in my measurement the power distance for France is considerably larger than the power distances for Germany but what I did notice is that when afterwards we had a drink at a nearby cafe and the professors were not present that some of the students came to me and asked me their questions art of the outside the presence of

their professors now on that same trip the next day I still had a talk with the colleague who invited me and the colleague said you where we thank you for having been so kind to our students and I was conveying the French attendings to his students and his friend to having me so kind to his students he was a French professor and well I didn't feel I had been particularly kind at just being myself but I concluded that my behavior as a Dutch professor comes across as kind in comparison to the behavior of the average

french professor those students can you say something about the culture dimension of individualism versus collectivism again a personal experience and yes there is a difference in individualist collectivism between the Netherlands my own country we are supposed to be quite individualist and the former Dutch colony of Indonesia which is typically a combination of various collectivist societies now then I became very much aware of this when one of a Jones brothers married a Chinese Indonesian dutch wife and by him marrying into that family we plot suddenly we're also had also become members of that family because in

the collectivist background which this family which came originally from Indonesia has retained the concept of family is much larger so now we belong to that family which is very nice and I also remember that one day we were invited at the party my daughter-in-laws mother turned 75 and she had a party in a restaurant and there were about 80 guests and at that time I was just planning for a party of her own and I asked her now if you have to be 80 guests how many invitations do you have to send and I expected

she would say about a hundred he said well about sixty and of course they bring their friends if you belong to that situation you bring your friends who also belongs the third dimension that you defined is also very much about relationships between people isn't it you'll be in masculinity versus femininity yes yes okay well it is related actually to the facts that genders in different societies are say acquiring different mental programs and if what I call a masculine society is a society rather is a kind of division of values where men are supposed to be

tough and practical and hard and women are supposed to be gen tender and concerned with the quality of life men are from Mars and women are from Venus men are from Mars and women are from Venus and a isn't that true then well to some extent you could find this element in all societies but much more in some societies than another basically what I call a family in society is a society where both men and women are from Venus societies where both come from Mars are not stable I think they would they would fall apart

and do you have experiences in your personal life with masculinity and femininity well let me give you one example masculinity femininity is one of the dimensions where there's the difference between my country the Netherlands and the United States is strongest USA is a pronounced ly masculine culture and in my measurements the Netherlands is one of the most feminine countries in the world they exactly the only Denmark oh no sorry only Sweden and Norway score lower soil in lower masculinity higher in femininity so one of the examples I can mention is that when my wife and

I were traveling in the USA and we we're in Miami Florida and we make a boat trip along the river and the guide told us from every beautiful house that was standing there how much it had cost and that struck us because if you would sail for example the fact River in the Netherlands and you would sail along those beautiful houses nobody would ever tell you what that costs we couldn't care less this is not what we are interested in if we see something maybe you would mention the architect so here's a family who built

it but I have a similar example another country that is much more masculine than hollandaise Germany this is more probably one of the most striking differences between German culture and dodge culture and we live close to the German border and my wife mica is a member of a gardeners Club and they go and visit gardens in various places and to get inspiration and because we're close to the bottle they also went across the ball to see a German garden and at the end of the visit of the Dutch gardener's Club the owner of the garden

lady said that this is interesting well I have German guests here they always want to know what it all costs and you never asked me this question let's go on and we've now talked about three dimensions about human relationships there is another dimension that is more about fear and anxiety rather than relationships that you found also in the first IBM study uncertainty avoidance is the name that you gave to that dimension yes and does it have to do with risk avoidance or with anxiety what is the nature of this dimension it has to do I

think with handling ambiguity handling situations you don't know what they are about and you want to know what the situation is about and therefore uncertainty avoiding societies tend to have many rules it doesn't mean that they always respect the rules but they have a feeling there should be many rules but I remember that you also wrote about speed at speed on motorways being related to this dimension yes how is that a rule I mean well as this speed is 108 or 120 or 100 in each case it's a rule it's almost not so much to

rule but uncertainty avoidance is a complex dimension it's basically related to stress it's to stress anxiety and stress societies tend to want to drive faster so speeds and also the tolerated speeds because there is a pressure in a stress Society to tolerate higher speeds which you see happening in our country at the present time okay so there is a relationship apparently in this one dimension between the two phenomena of stress and ambiguity stress and ambiguity and if people cannot tolerate ambiguity they are most the society is more stressed then later in a different study you

found a fifth dimension and you found that in China if I'm correct can we say something about the why you found it there and why you found it later and what the dimension means yeah activity it came out of a research by a colleague of mine Michael bond and the story is that when I had found my first four dimensions Michael bond had done a study in East Asia of a number of countries and he had analyzed his data in a different way but when he used my way of analyzing he found the same four

dimensions in his data now this was of course very exciting so we wrote an article about it together but we were also philosophizing on it and said well let's apply this thinking to ourselves could it have something to do with the fact that we both are from Western countries bond is a Canadian and that may be because we have Western minds this is why we get those four dimensions and if people had had a different kind of mind let's say in Eastern mind would they have found the same dimensions to what extent is what you

find a pro of what you have in your mind as a researcher well it probably depends on the questions that you ask in the survey exactly no but the questions you asked so and because bond was a professor in Hong Kong and he had many Chinese colleagues he asked his Chinese colleagues to make his questionnaire so we got questions which were traditional in Chinese thinking and we use that questionnaire in bond used it and I collaborated but he used it in 23 countries around the world and we looked at dimensions and we found one dimension

we hadn't found before we affront another one not in there because it was Western we were thinking which was uncertainty avoidance but you found two dimension pain which I called long term for such short term orientation and it was dimension on which the East Asia which was long term opposed most of the Western countries which were shorter term and it was an explanation also of the East Asian economic miracle because longer term cultures through faster a later on research by our friend Michael Minkoff me show showed that this short-term side was actually related to something

which he called monumental ism which is the ID that people should be as you'd have principles and share should have traditions and they should be proud and they should not deviate from that so there would be on the short term there will be pride and tradition and on the long term there would be a depth ability and the eye on the future and that turned out to be a very meaningful dimension professor Hofstadter these are good times for students of culture there are many data available on the web such as your own data or the

data of the World Values Survey there are many universities in many is where young people are studying culture would you have any piece of advice to these people I would be very happy seeing I'm always very happy you're seeing applications you're seeing people who have related phenomena in the real world to those dimensions and so that is what I would recommend I would recommend your practical research where you show to what extent differences in culture explain differences in phenomena in the real world what do you think will be the future of the pattern of cultures

across the world what with the world wide web and with globalization are we going to see a further fading away of cultural differences well you must make a difference here between practices and values I think there will be a harmonization of practices simply because we all use this worldwide we happen to need some practices to use it but what you feel doing it and what you value doing it will differ and there is this amount of information is so huge that within that system there is room for all kinds of failures so no single worldwide

culture now in the near future no single culture and if you doubt that try to tell me how that single word worth guilty should look should it look like Russian culture should it look like Chinese culture should it look like Brazilian culture should it look like Americans culture should look like of course it should look like Dutch culture yeah okay thank you very much