Dimensions do not exist: A reply to Brendan McSweeney
Geert Hofstede
In January 2001 Human Relations invited me to write a response to an article
by Brendan McSweeney which was a critical examination of my 1980 book
Culture’s consequences, to coincide with the forthcoming publication of the
books’ second edition. I reacted enthusiastically, but my enthusiasm quickly
faded away when I saw McSweeney’s diatribe. I pointed out that the appear
ance of a re-written and updated edition of my 1980 book would make many
of McSweeney’s comments obsolete. Also, I reacted to his style, which I found
unnecessarily abrasive.
Human Relations decided to publish McSweeney’s article anyway, in a somewhat mollified version. My response to his comments follow below.
The second edition of Culture’s consequences contains a section:
‘Support and Criticisms of the Approach Followed’ which reads as follows (endnotes omitted):
The first edition of this book’s disrespect for academic borderlines paid off in a multidisciplinary readership. It also caused very mixed reviews: Some enthusiastic (e.g. Eysenck, 1981; Triandis, 1982; Sorge, 1983), some irritated, condescending, or ridiculing (e.g. Cooper, 1982; Roberts & Boyacigiller, 1984). I had made a paradigm shift in crosscultural studies, and as Kuhn (1970) has shown, paradigm shifts in any science meet with strong initial resistance.
Editor’s Note
This exchange has been prompted by interest in and response to the original McSweeney article in Vol. 55, No. 1 (January 2002) of the journal. The Editors regard this exchange as now closed.
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component to practices, are far-reaching. Values (as we measured them) are hardly changeable (they change but not according to anybody’s intentions), whereas practices can be modified - given sufficient management attention. This explains why a multinational like IBM could function at all, in spite of the considerable differences in values, which my research revealed. What holds a successful multinational together are shared practices, not, as the ‘corporate culture’ hype of the early 1980s wanted it, shared values.
McSweeney’s criticism of my interpretation of survey data (his pages 100-6), if correct, applies to all survey and test-based cross-cultural studies, including those of Schwartz, Triandis, market researchers, sociologists and political scientists around the world. All of these draw conclusions from central tendencies calculated from individual survey answers. There is no creative accounting in the way I treated my data, I followed common practice and moreover in the 1980 and 2001 books provided all the data by which others can verify my findings. What we social scientists all do is called statistical inference, but McSweeney is obviously unfamiliar with it.
To conclude, let me cite from a review of my work on culture by Malcolm Chapman, British like McSweeney, but an anthropologist, not an accountant:
... Hofstede’s work became a dominant influence and set a fruitful
agenda. There is perhaps no other contemporary framework in the
general field of “culture and business” that is so general, so broad, so
alluring, and so inviting to argument and fruitful disagreement. . .
Second, although Hofstede’s work invites criticism on many levels, one
often finds that Hofstede, in self-criticism, has been there first. Third,
although Hofstede’s work is based on a questionnaire drawn from
social psychology that was not expressly designed for the purpose to
which it was later put, Hofstede brings to his discussion such a wealth
of expertise and erudition from outside the questionnaire that many
criticisms of “narrowness” are withered on the tongue.
Hofstede’s work is used and admired at a very high level of general
ization. Those who take country scores in the various dimensions as
given realities, informing or confirming other research, do not typically
inquire into the detail of the procedures through which specific empiri
cal data were transmuted into generalization. Hofstede, of course,
provides all the background one could wish for about these procedures,
and that is another reason for admiring his work.
(Chapman, 1997: 18-19)
