Geert Hofstede on Culture

Kate, if people read about you, they might get confused as to what discipline you're in, what kind of bird you are. I have called my self-indulgence a spoiled professor, which is a kind of professor in general without necessarily attributing myself to any particular discipline, so you yourself don't give much importance to the discipline you are in, I don't think maybe one of my particular identities is not having one, you don't have an identity, but your contribution to science does have one.

culture

, as you define it well, my definition is, of course, a particular definition, which is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one group or category of people from another, but that is a particular way of defining and there are others as well definitions, so what?

It's a quirk and what makes your concept of

culture

so useful may be that I focus on the way culture is silent. I use the term mind programming, which of course is a metaphor because the mind is programmed like a computer is. We all have computers, so we all know what programming means, but what I focus on is how people acquire their programming and I actually imagine the human being as someone who comes into this world, let's say with an operating system, but that still needs a lot of programming to work and that is something that people do not understand in my definition, you read the word active, it is a collective program, which means that they are those things that are shared, but the people who grew up in the same forest you told us. that culture is the collective programming of the mind, which is a bit of a difficult notion because it is collective and resides in the minds of individuals, so how can culture always be measured on the basis of collective phenomena in order to observe What are people like? behave, for example, in a particular environment, but you can also collect data from individuals, but then take a central tendency on that central tendency, which can mean taking the average or taking the percentage that people who give a certain answer researchers they often try to add to the body. of knowledge about the culture when doing a survey in a particular country, would that be a feasible option?

Well, in my case, what my job is about is comparing, in reality, measuring is always comparing and I am trying to measure culture by comparing similar cultures so that one place from another and I have compared nations and I have also compared organizations. What is the difference between comparing nations and comparing organizations? I can assume that there is a logical difference in the methodology of the method and a difference in the type of results that can be obtained. Yes, good. The methodological difference is, of course, that they are almost perpendicular to each other. If you compare nations, you compare similar people, similar organizations, similar situations in different countries, and if you study organizational cultures, you are studying different organizations within the same country.

So they are two different things and then the results are quite different, which is actually related to the question of how cultures are acquired, because when do we acquire well the culture of all nations from the moment we are born in that nation and The learning? what we acquire in the first part of our life, which is before puberty, that is, before certainly, in the first ten years of our lives, that learning is mostly unconscious, so national culture is made up of many unconscious elements. Now, when do we acquire organization? aware 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 we then acquire things that are completely conscious, the unconscious element is in the national culture, the conscious element is in the organizational culture, which also means that we have completely different problems.

You can basically say you're in different disciplines because national cultures are actually a topic for anthropology and organizational cultures are a topic for organizational sociology. If you consider yourself an anthropologist, then no, although I have sometimes called myself an organizational anthropologist, which is a safe term because it has never been officially defined. Now you said that if you want to investigate national culture you need to observe the actions or responses to questionnaires of similar people. people from all countries Many surveys are based on a specific category of people, such as managers, teachers or students, do you have anything to say about the type of sample you need to investigate the culture in all countries?

Well, of course, the more diverse the sample the better because you get a broader picture of a particular society, but equally diverse samples must be found in other societies, so a body survey activity that does this is the world value survey, which uses representative samples of the population according to the principles of market research, whether that is always certain or whether it is always carried out in such a way that the samples match really well, can be argue, but anyway it's probably for the best, we have other samples that could be called narrow samples, like in my case, taking samples of people in the same type of jobs in different subsidiaries of the IBM corporation could be students and preferably students of a particular discipline, for example, psychologists, students from various countries, it could be like what Professor Schwartz did when comparing primary school teachers, which is probably a very interesting group, also because they transfer their identifications to children as well.

Can you say something about what the culture dimension is and why the number of dimensions in your model has changed? The dimension of culture is a way of unraveling the concept of culture. A culture, of course, is only something imaginary of which it is a product. our imagination, which is supposed to be useful in understanding the world and being able to predict certain things in society, but as long as sculpture is, let's say, a holistic concept, it's quite difficult to make predictions because it involves so much of what the dimensions are our shapes. of decomposing this holistic concept of culture into two particular parts that have meant a much clearer relationship with the phenomena and society and originally I discovered that the fact that we find more poor is not surprising because more and more people are collecting data and are reaching to areas that we had no information about at the beginning, what really is the function of culture to get back to the whole concept of culture?

Why do human beings need culture? It is the glue that holds societies together. You can also say that it is automatic the moment you have a society, you get a culture because there are particular relationships between the people who make up that society and they have to play their game according to certain rules, so they are the unwritten rules. of the social game. rules of the social game yes, okay, then you need culture to be able to play well the game of everyday social relations in a couple of societies and also in an organization in an organization also because in that case, except that in that case, the rules They are at a different level, they are much more pragmatic and much less profound.

I would say that they are also more explicit and also modifiable. Maybe it's a good time to start looking at these dimensions in your work. Could you tell us a little bit first about how you first discovered the importance of culture in the data that you collected at IBM? If I'm right, this was just a personnel investigation and wasn't necessarily aimed at uncovering cultural differences. It isn't true. It was contributed from various sides and one contribution 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 and I was from time to time in the United States, so it was an American company, so that there I also saw differences, so you experienced these differences and then we also connected, we started collecting data by asking the same questions about their work to employees in different parts of the world, that was something that came very logical in the philosophy of the founders of IBM because that always said that the company has a responsibility towards its employees, so the millions of millions of employees are very important, so we had an entry there, although we still have to convince the local managers to allow us to do those surveys and that their own people do them in their own language, but the objective of those services, those surveys was not to discover differences in the culture that was taught, it did not work, in reality we saw it after having done it well at some point and it was a fairly large operation, we noticed that there were two things where, on the one hand, what we could call values, on the other, what we could call satisfactions, and they were not necessarily related and that, especially in this area of ​​​​values, it was seen A country might be satisfied with another group that is dissatisfied, but if you asked, for example, this dimension of power distance if people noticed whether they thought that It was a problem that employees were afraid to disagree with their managers, I would note that you got a ranking order of countries in this regard and you got that ranking order regardless of who you asked, regardless of whether you asked the research scientists. or if you ask the secretaries or if you ask the rank and file workers, okay, so you started to see that all the people in a certain country tend to answer the same thing to these questions about, for example, the fear of expressing an opinion, yes, at least what did you do in Poland, there was a good Eddie doll there.

Answer the same thing, but you could say that if you compare country A to country B. There would always be more people in country A who would get the particular Padilla than in country B. Okay, so what was your next step when you discovered that when trying to interpret it you should also realize that time in history played a role in the first survey? was celebrated around 1968 1968 was a year in which there was a lot of unrest, especially in Europe, about power, yes, about power and self-determination. Respond, so the questionnaires we had at that time were made by people who were children of their times, of course.

They contained quite a few questions about power and when we looked into that we found out that the real differences in the alters on our part this was actually the first time Angelov came out, can you tell us something about how you discovered, established and named that first dimension that there was a time in which there was a popular book by Dutch social psychologist Bob Miller and it also appeared in English. It's from Psalter's daily power play and he coined the word power distance as the relationship, the emotional relationship between the person at the top and the person. under she or he in a moment I would say yes and can you define that to mention it more formally and maybe give an example of how you could recognize power distance in daily life?

Yeah, well, the definition is that you say you see the emotional distance between the two. person on a higher step on a lower step as if he feels like a child, yes, and the father will initiate relationships if you find him in the relationship between the child and the father in the relationship between a teacher and a student in the relationship between the The boss and the subordinates in the relationship between the government and the citizen in all those places where you have, for example, obedience between parents and children would transfer the mutual relationships to those other parts of society.

Yes, yes, that would be nice, an example, let me try to give an example. from my own experience because that, as always, yes, it is always the best, the most impressive, your thoughts, it is not something simply taken from a standard story, it is my own experience, a few years ago I was invited to give a lecture at the University. in the northeast of France, near the German border, and this university not only had its own staff and students, but also some staff and students from a nearby German university and after giving my lecture we had a discussion session and it was noticed that among the The Germans it was the students who asked the questions among the French it was only the teachers who asked the questions Now, in my measurement, the power distance for France is considerably larger than the power distance for Germany, but what What I did notice was that when we later had a drink in a nearby cafe and the teachers were not present that some of the students came to me and asked me their questions art from abroad the presence of their teachers 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 passing on to the French attendees to your students and your friend forhave me so nice to his students, he was a French teacher and well, I didn't.

I don't feel like he was particularly nice being myself, but I came to the conclusion that my behavior as a Dutch teacher seems nice compared to the behavior of the average French teacher. Can those students tell us something about the cultural dimension of individualism versus collectivism? Again, it's a personal experience and yes, there is a difference in individualistic collectivism between the Netherlands, my own country, we are supposed to be quite individualistic, and the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, which is usually a combination of several collectivist societies . Now I became very aware of it. this when one of the Jones brothers married a Dutch Chinese Indonesian wife and by marrying into that family, we suddenly planned that we also became members of that family because in the collectivist background of this family that originally came from Indonesia has preserved the The concept of family is much broader, so now we belong to that family, which is very nice and I also remember that.

The day we were invited to the party, my daughter-in-law's mother turned 75 and she made a party in a restaurant and there were like 80 guests and at that time I was planning a party of my own and now I asked her if you have to be 80 guests how many invitations do you have to send and I was expecting her to say about a hundred he said well about sixty and so Of course they bring their friends if you belong to that situation you bring your friends who also belong to the third party. The dimension that you defined also has a lot to do with relationships between people, doesn't it?

It will be on masculinity versus femininity, yes, yes, okay, it is actually related to the fact that genders in different societies say that they acquire different mental programs and if what I What we call masculine society is a society rather it is a kind of division of values ​​where men are supposed to be tough, practical and tough and women are supposed to be gentle and concerned about the quality of life. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. men are from Mars and women are from Venus and it is not true, so well, to a certain extent, you can find this element in all societies, but much more in some societies than in others, 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 fall apart and do you have experiences in your personal life with masculinity and femininity? Well, let me give you an example: masculinity, femininity is one of the dimensions. where is the difference between my country, the Netherlands and the United States are the strongest. The US is a markedly masculine culture and, by my measurements, the Netherlands is one of the most feminine countries in the world, they are exactly the only Denmark, oh no, sorry, only Sweden and Norway. I scored lower on masculinity lower, higher on femininity, so one of the examples I can mention is that when my wife and I were traveling around the US and we were in Miami, Florida, we took a trip in boat down the river and the guide told us We found out about every beautiful house that was there how much it had cost and that surprised us because if you sailed, for example, down the river in the Netherlands and sailed along those beautiful houses, no one I would tell you what that costs, we couldn't.

It doesn't matter, this is not what we are interested in, if we see something, maybe you would mention the architect, so here is a family that built it, but I have a similar example, another country that is much more masculine than Dutch Germany, this It is probably one of the most striking differences between German culture and Dodge culture and we live near the German border and my wife Mica is a member of a gardening club and they go and visit gardens in various places to get inspired and because we are close to bottle, they also crossed the ball to see a German garden and at the end of the visit of the Dutch garden club, the owner of the garden said this is interesting, well, I have German guests here who always want to know how much everything costs. and you never asked me this question, let's continue and now we have talked about three dimensions about human relationships.

There's another dimension that has more to do with fear and anxiety than relationships, which you also found in the first IBM study: uncertainty avoidance is the name. What did you give to that dimension? Yes, and does it have to do with risk avoidance or with anxiety? What is the nature of this dimension? Does it have to do? I think that with managing ambiguity, managing situations that you don't know what they are about and you want to. they know what the situation is about and therefore societies that avoid uncertainty tend to have many rules, it does not mean that they always respect the rules, but they have the feeling that there should be many rules, but I remember that you also wrote about speed at speed on highways. be related to this dimension yes, how come it is a rule?

I say it well, since this speed is 108 or 120 or 100 in each case it is a rule, it is almost not so much to govern, but avoiding uncertainty is a complex dimension, it is basically related to stress, it is for Stress, anxiety and societies with stress tend to want to drive faster, so the speeds and also the speeds tolerated because there is a pressure in a society with stress to tolerate higher speeds, which you see happening in our country right now , okay, apparently there is a relationship in This is a dimension between the two phenomena of stress and ambiguity, stress and ambiguity, and if people cannot tolerate ambiguity, they are the ones that stress society the most.

Then in a different study, you found a fifth dimension and you discovered that in China, yes I'm right. Can we say something about why you found it there and why you found it later and what the dimension means? Yes, the activity arose from research done by a colleague of mine, Michael Bond, and the story is that when I found my first four dimensions. Michael Bond had done a multi-country study in East Asia and had analyzed his data in a different way, but when he used my way of analysis he found the same four dimensions in his data.

This was, of course, very exciting, so we wrote an article together about this, but we were also philosophizing about it and said, well, let's apply this thinking to ourselves. Could it have something to do with the fact that we are both from Western countries? Bond is Canadian and that may be because we have Western culture. minds, that's why we get those four dimensions and if people had had a different type of mind, say in the eastern mind, they would have found the same dimensions. To what extent is what you find an advantage of what you have in mind as a researcher?

Well, it probably depends on exactly what questions you ask in the survey, no, but what questions you ask, and since Bond was a teacher in Hong Kong and he had a lot of Chinese colleagues, he asked his Chinese colleagues to do his questionnaire, so We got questions that were traditional in Chinese thought and we used that questionnaire together. I used it and I collaborated, but he used it in 23 countries around the world and we looked at dimensions and we found a dimension that we hadn't found before facing another that wasn't there. . Because it was Western, we thought it was to avoid uncertainty, but we found a two-dimensional pain that I called long-term for a short-term orientation and it was a dimension that East Asia, which was long-term, was opposed to. most Western countries that were short term. and it was also an explanation of the economic miracle of East Asia because long-term cultures evolved more rapidly.

Later research by our friend Michael Minkoff showed me that this short-term side was actually related to something he called monumentalism, which is DI. that people should be like you, they would have principles and share, they should have traditions and they should be proud and they should not deviate from that, so in the short term there would be pride and tradition and in the long term there would be a capacity for depth and vision of future and that turned out to be a very significant dimension Professor Hofstadter these are good times for students of culture there is a lot of data available on the web, such as your own data or the data from the World Values ​​Survey there are many universities in many it is where the young people study culture, would you have any advice for these people?

I would be very happy to see. I'm always very happy that you are viewing applications. You are seeing people who have related phenomena in them. real world to those dimensions and that is what I would recommend. I would recommend your practical research where you show the extent to which differences in culture explain differences in phenomena in the real world. What do you think will be the future of the pattern of cultures everywhere? the world, what is happening with the world wide web and with globalization are we going to see a greater disappearance of cultural differences? Well, here you must make a difference between practices and values.

I think there will be a harmonization of practices simply because we all use this around the world. We need some practices to use it, but what you feel when doing it and what you value when doing it will be different and this amount of information is so large that within that system there is room for all kinds of failures, so there is no single world culture. . now, in the near future, there will not be a single culture and if you doubt it, try to tell me what that single word worth being guilty should look like, whether it looks like Russian culture, whether it looks like Chinese culture, whether It looks like Brazilian culture, if it looks like American culture.

It seems like, of course, it should resemble Dutch culture. Yes it's all right, thank you very much.