Global Shippers, Inc Case File Discussion

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL: CULTURE’S CONSEQUENCES IN A VALUE TEST OF ITS

OWN DESIGN

GALIT AILON Bar-Ilan University

The paper offers a critical reading of Geert Hofstede’s (1980) Culture’s Consequences using an analytical strategy where the book is mirrored against itself and analyzed in terms of its own proposed value dimensions. “Mirroring” unravels the book’s norma- tive viewpoint and political subtext and exposes discursive interests in its research process. Making all this evident in the canonical book’s own terms, this paper com- municates critical concerns across paradigm boundaries. It indicates the need to reconsider concepts and convictions that predominate cross-cultural research and to adopt norms of reflexivity that transcend existing notions of “cultural relativism.”

The past two decades have been marked by a rising tide of critical voices directly challenging the foundations of mainstream organizational and management thinking. Informed by post- modern/postcolonial sensitivities and poststruc- turalist strategies of textual analysis, scholars are rereading canonical texts in order to chal- lenge their underlying premises and normative commitments. Their analyses expose how claims to objective knowledge, well adorned in gowns of functionalism and normal science, are a means for promoting the values and concerns of hegemonic social groups by devaluing their “others”: the nonmales (e.g., Calás & Smircich, 1991, 1992; Martin, 1994; Meyerson, 1998; Mumby & Putnam, 1992), nonwhites (e.g., Calás, 1993; Nkomo, 1992), nonmanagers (Knights & Morgan, 1991), and non-Westerners (Prasad, 2003) of orga- nizations. In this vein, a few writers have also turned their attention to international manage- ment thought as a site of critical engagement, offering feminist (Calás, 1992; Calás & Smircich, 1993) and postcolonial (Jack & Westwood, 2006; Kwek, 2003; Westwood, 2004) rereadings of its scientific claims.

Given the scope of international management thought and its rising influence in the context of

globalization, there seems to be a need to fur- ther these attempts at reevaluating its founda- tions. To a great extent, the knowledge produced in this field is still firmly rooted in the orthodoxy of functionalist, “normal” science—its positivist epistemology and objectivist rhetoric (see Bur- rell & Morgan, 1979). While there are a few in- terpretive, emically oriented case studies (e.g., Ahrens, 1996; Brannen, 2004), these generally remain a marginalized pursuit (Marschan- Piekkari & Welch, 2004); studies are usually no- mothetic and quantitative, with researchers pos- ing themselves as discoverers of universal regularities and systematic causal relation- ships. Cultural relativism, when admitted, is seen to relate to the scientist—not to science itself—and is accordingly “corrected” by rituals of confession, (rare) attempts to create cross- cultural research teams, or various “bias con- trol” techniques. In this vein, international man- agement thought is evolving into quite a large body of thought— one that, despite its name, underrepresents many regions of the world in terms of authorship and topics of analysis (Kirk- man & Law, 2005). Moreover, like other manage- rial disciplines that aspire to shape actual work- places, its influence extends into the world of practice as well.

Seeking to further the critical assessment of international management thought, I offer a re- reading of one of its classics: Geert Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences. Published in 1980, the book statistically analyzed approximately 117,000 questionnaires collected in 1967 and 1973 from employees working in forty IBM subsidiar-

I thank AMR’s reviewers and the special topic forum ed- itorial team for their contributions. I especially thank re- viewer Geert Hofstede for his generous and very important input and guest editor Gavin Jack, whose constructive com- ments helped me improve this paper considerably. In addi- tion, I thank Gideon Kunda for his perceptive reading and helpful suggestions.

� Academy of Management Review 2008, Vol. 33, No. 4, 885–904.

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ies around the world and came up with four value dimensions for representing differences among national cultures: power distance, uncer- tainty avoidance, individualism/collectivism, and masculinity/femininity. A fifth dimension— long- versus short-term orientation—was added a decade later (Hofstede, 1991).

This typology has been remarkably influen- tial (Søndergaard, 1994; see also Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006). Reviewers claim that it has con- tinuing authority in the study of intercultural relations (Hart, 1999), cross-cultural manage- ment control systems design (Harrison & McKin- non, 1999), international business research (Chandy & Williams, 1994), and psychology (Baskerville, 2003; Oyserman, Coon, & Kem- melmeier, 2002; Schimmack, Oishi, & Diener, 2005; Triandis, 2004). Supporters and critics alike have accordingly described it as a “monumental study” (Triandis, 1993: 132), “path-breaking” (Van Deusen, 2002: 125), “astounding” (Sorge, 1983: 625), “a classic” (Bhagat, 2002: 460), and even “more than a super classic” (Baskerville, 2003: 2). As Triandis claims, it “has become the standard against which new work on cultural differences is validated” (2004: 89). Moreover, Hofstede’s work has been equally influential among prac- titioners: the value dimensions have become “teaching lenses” (Bing, 2004: 81) that are ap- plied in a wide variety of practices. Considering the scale of impact, it is understandable why Hofstede declared that his work constitutes “a paradigm shift à la Thomas Kuhn” (as quoted in Hoppe, 2004: 77).

The book indeed entailed various substantive contributions. Apparently, as globalization pro- gressed into the 1980s, crossing traditional boundaries, national culture could no longer be disregarded. What until then constituted a beast too “soft” or vague for the positivist epistemol- ogy of “normal” science became a focus of much interest. Hofstede, it can be said, tamed the beast— he divided it, counted it, tabled it, and graphed it. “Culture” was reduced to “values,” which were reduced to a limited set of questions on an IBM questionnaire. “National society” was reduced to “middle class rather than the work- ing class” (1980: 56), which was reduced to IBM personnel from the marketing and service divi- sions. Answers were quantified, computerized, “statisticalized.” Things cultural could finally be said in “scientific” language.

Subsequently, the book promoted sensitivity to cultural diversity at the workplace (and be- yond it). In addition, it undermined the wide- spread assumption that American management knowledge is universal and thus easily transfer- able across cultures, and challenged psycholo- gy’s long-standing refusal to acknowledge the relevance of culture as anything but an external variable (see Joseph, Reddy, & Searle-Chatter- jee, 1990: 21; Triandis, 2004). Culture, Hofstede claimed, is a “mental programming” instilled in people’s minds—an internal variable, shaping behavior from the inside out. Thus, for organiza- tional practice, management theory, and psy- chology, national culture is relevant; it does count. And as far as the scientific community of his time was concerned, he had the right num- bers to prove it.

There were, however, very serious critiques from the outset (e.g., Baskerville, 2003; Eckhardt, 2002; Harrison & McKinnon, 1999; Kitayama, 2002; Merker, 1982; Robinson, 1983; Schooler, 1983; Singh, 1990). In what appears to be one of the most damning critiques of the book, McSweeney claimed that “the on-going unquestioning ac- ceptance of Hofstede’s national culture research by his evangelized entourage suggests that in parts of the management disciplines the criteria for acceptable evidence are far too loose” (2002: 112). Hofstede never failed to respond to the on- going stream of criticism, defended his method- ological decisions, and clarified the study’s claims and implications (e.g., 1990, 2001, espe- cially p. 73). The debate that evolved was exten- sive, but it generally focused on a single ques- tion: Does Hofstede “really” capture what he claims to capture? In other words, does his work reflect “true” cultural differences? There are, however, other crucial questions that seem in- evitable in this case: In what ways and to what effect is the book itself bounded by the cultural milieu from which it sprung? What sort of cul- tural values framed the investigation, fashioned the arguments, and formed the underlying agenda of a study that has had such extraordi- nary command in shaping both thought and practice?

In seeking an answer, I use none other than the book’s own proposed schema of analysis. In other words, I mirror the book against itself, using the value dimensions that it explicates as a means for revealing the underlying values that it implicitly endorses. Using a value test of

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the book’s own design, I acknowledge the book’s contribution but, at the same time, expose the political element in its functionalist writing. The value dimensions will no longer appear as a universal typology that captures cross-cultural differences but as a very distinct construction that reifies a scheme of global hierarchy. A crit- ical effect transcending existing notions of “cul- tural relativism” will thus rise to the surface, illustrating not only how the book is bounded by the researcher’s cultural milieu but also how it builds and serves this milieu’s power and status in relation to the other cultures it claims to rep- resent.

The paper consists of three sections. The first section explains the logic of the mirroring strat- egy that is used. The second analyzes the book in terms of its proposed dimensions—power dis- tance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity—and comments also on the fifth dimension that was subsequently added. The third section summarizes the textual analy- sis and discusses its significance and implica- tions.

THE LOGIC OF THE MIRRORING STRATEGY

Since the late 1970s, the social sciences have been influenced by theoretical perspectives that question conventional approaches to theory de- velopment (Calás & Smircich, 1999: 649). Many of these perspectives, sometimes identified as “postmodern,” reject the idea that theories have a privileged access to truth—that they directly and simply represent an independent reality that preexists them. For many postmodern writ- ers, especially those influenced by poststructur- alists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Der- rida, the attempt to rationally and objectively represent an external reality is basically unten- able because that which constitutes our experi- ence and understanding of the world—lan- guage—is much less fixed and exact than we tend to believe. In this view, signifiers derive meaning not from direct correspondence to the objects they refer to but, rather, from complex, elusive, and politically manipulated contexts of relationships with other linguistic signs in the system of signification (Derrida, 1972; see also Calás, 1993: 307–311, and Cooper, 1989). There- fore, any claim about the social world is merely one contextualized reading behind which more possibilities of meaning await (see Manning &

Cullum-Swan, 1994: 467– 468). The “truthfulness” of a realistic representation—in the singular, absolute sense of the word—is merely an im- pression constructed through a human commu- nicative action. Knowledge is not “found”; it is “made” (Brown, 1990: 188).

As such, knowledge is never neutral. Rather than being, in essence, “privileged,” its status is politically constituted through a process of priv- ileging. In their “scientific” texts, culturally and historically situated writers conform to (and thus uphold) certain narrative conventions (Lyo- tard, 1984), and it is through these conventions that things take on meaning and value as if they are fixed, while other meanings and values are denied. Regardless of academics’ intentions, the structures of their thinking and their strategies for communicating are all socially embedded constructions that powerfully censor and re- press competing voices, sustaining what, in Foucauldian terms, constitutes the “regime of truth” of their time, as well as their own place within it (Foucault, 1980; see also Burrell, 1988; Cooper, 1989; Cooper & Burrell, 1988; Parker, 1992). Stated differently, the persuasiveness of researchers’ texts stems not from an inherent property of their intellectual position but from an ability to present a version of reality in ways that are given priority because they are politi- cally encoded as superior or commanding—in our case, as “objective,” “rational,” “normal,” and so forth—in a given sociohistorical context (see Brown, 1990, and Richardson, 1994).

The notion of privileging both implies the plausibility and constitutes the rationale of mir- roring. Once the claim to a unique access to truth is problematized, both social scientists and the social scientific project appear as much so- cially and culturally located as the people they observe. Accordingly, academic texts are no longer immune to the same sort of scrutiny that is so cleverly and methodically devised for the study of others: the same scientific means for reflecting on the social and cultural location of the objects of inquiry are applicable to them as well. In this sense there is symmetry between the observers and their scientific reflections—as in a mirror. This mirror, in turn, holds the poten- tial for incisively conveying the critical privileg- ing message against the mainstream, if only by using those same instruments—those same terms—that have been sanctified by it as rational, normal, and scientific. Once trapped in a test of

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its own truths and certainties, the scientific text is bound to be betrayed by them, thus making the politics of knowledge evident in ways that cannot be overlooked. In other words, as mirror- ing deconstructs the text with its own scientific constructs, it reappropriates the constructs’ per- suasive effect to serve its own critical message.

As such, mirroring is designed to overcome the problem of “paradigm incommensurability.” Although originally deployed as a defensive means for protecting critical fields of inquiry from the intellectual imperialism of normal sci- ence, the notion of incommensurability has ac- tually protected the latter rather than the former, allowing members of the functionalist main- stream to carry on with “business as usual” (Clegg & Hardy, 1999: 4 – 8; Weaver & Gioia, 1994: 566 –568). Indeed, with regard to Hofstede, too, the paradigm incommensurability rationale has been used to ward off some of the book’s most incisive critiques (Williamson, 2002). Seeking to create a dialogue between supposedly irrecon- cilable approaches to knowledge, the analysis this paper presents does not rest on ready-made, paradigmatic criticisms that are epistemologi- cally foreign to and imposed on the logic of the text. Rather, it begins with the assumption that the value dimensions are valid and legitimate and uses them as a form of mediating link (Gioia & Pitre, 1990; Reed, 1992: 14; Weaver & Gioia, 1994), engaging in a reflexive move that communicates critical concerns through the language that received the orthodox seal of “sci- entific knowledge.”

While generally a postmodern notion, the con- cept of privileging also has clear roots in mod- ernist or late modernist notions of relativism and reflexivity (e.g., Frost, 1980; Kuhn, 1972; Mor- gan, 1983). In fact, working well within the bounds of modernist conventions, Hofstede him- self expresses a reflexive awareness that sup- ports a critical program of the sort pursued here. As he writes when problematizing the suprem- acy of American management writing:

Ideas are entangled with our values and our in- terests. . . . Ideas and theories become popular or unpopular at a certain time not because they are more or less “true” but because the value systems that support them are activated or suppressed by ecological and institutional developments (1980: 323).

Taking this insight to its logical conclusion, he further claims that “the inescapability of value

judgments applies to the student of values as much as to anyone else” (1980: 21). Characteriz- ing the book as a “phenomenological study of values” with descriptive, not prescriptive, aims, he nonetheless claims that “even in purely phe- nomenological research the values of the re- searcher determine to a large extent the way he or she observes, describes, classifies, under- stands, and predicts reality” (1980: 21). Thus, he realizes that his own value system “probably will be readable ‘between the lines’ of the book” (1980: 21) and acknowledges the need for the book to be exposed to comments of scholars from other national backgrounds (1980: 21, 399). Moreover, as a first step in that direction, he offers an appendix (Appendix 5) that, as I specify in the next section, states his position on various questionnaire items. Acutely aware of the dan- ger of ethnocentrism, he seems to invite a cul- tural analysis of his own work.

This paper takes up the invitation and uses the value dimensions for the task. While primar- ily endorsed as a means for quantitatively map- ping out societal value differences, the dimen- sions are not incongruent with textual analysis. In fact, as Hofstede claims, “The same four di- mensions are reflected in data from completely different sources, both survey studies of various kinds and nonsurvey comparative studies like McClelland’s Achievement Motivation analysis based on a content analysis of children’s books” (1980: 11). Moreover, while the dimensions are explicitly intended for comparative discussions, Hofstede illustrates their practical utility by an- alyzing individual cultural anecdotes both in his 1980 book and even more so in his 1991 Cul- tures and Organizations (see also Hofstede, 2001, and Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). These books, in other words, provide justification for using the four dimensions for a qualitative analysis of a single cultural artifact.

Treating Culture’s Consequences as a cultural artifact, it should be stressed, implies that it is not the author—namely Hofstede—who consti- tutes the target of analysis but, rather, the cul- tural milieu, the sociohistorical regime of truth, that is typified by his text. Culture’s Conse- quences is viewed here as representing a pow- erfully popular version of a certain tradition of constructing meaning. Hofstede indeed author- ized this version; he performed what Foucault (1977) calls an “author function,” but it is not he, the individual, who is of interest here; instead,

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the discursive practices that governed his text— that predominated and “ran through” him (Fou- cault, 1972: 139)—are of interest. Indeed, for Fou- cault, the discourse—the knowledge-producing tradition—is much more responsible for writing (and reading) than any given writer (or reader). This skepticism concerning the role of the sub- ject in producing texts is not as distant as might first appear from Hofstede’s own notion of the book as uncontrollably “entangled with our val- ues and our interests,” nor from other modernist/ positivist accounts of how people are motivated to reason about the world in accordance with certain beliefs and perspectives (“motivated reasoning”; see Kunda, 1990).

Since the focus is on the text and not the author, I do not extensively analyze other texts by Hofstede. I should nevertheless note that such texts exist; in the years since publishing Culture’s Consequences (1980), Hofstede has written more books (e.g., 1991, 1998a), published two second editions (2001; Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005), and written several papers (e.g., 1983, 1994, 1996; Hofstede & McCrae, 2004). In his Cultures and Organizations (1991), a book that appeared in seventeen languages, he added a fifth dimen- sion to the original four, which, as is discussed in the next section, is an indication of his com- mitment to the notion of cultural relativism—a commitment that has, in fact, developed and tightened throughout his career.1 In order to fairly represent such developments, I refer, where relevant, to these later works and also extend the analysis to include the fifth dimen- sion. However, in this paper I focus primarily on the first, path-breaking 1980 book, which is among the foundational texts in the field of cross-cultural research.

This paper, then, uses Culture’s Conse- quences’ dimensions to “disentangle” the cul- tural values and interests that are both ex- pressed through and established by it. Mirroring the dimensions this way takes reflexivity to its logical conclusion. However, it also entails a

paradox. Since mirroring takes the value dimen- sions framework and simply turns its analytical gaze on the book itself, it demonstrates the util- ity of the framework as an instrument of reflec- tion. However, this paradoxical outcome entails a strength rather than a weakness: mirroring drives the point from “within.” If one accepts the framework, it basically follows that one must also accept the logic of the critique. The influ- ential Culture’s Consequences will in this way enable a critical reflection that crosses para- digm lines.

THE VALUES UNDERLYING THE STUDY OF VALUES

According to Culture’s Consequences, values are “a broad tendency to prefer certain states of affairs over others” (1980: 19). For the most part, these values were inferred (rather than directly measured): the questionnaire consisted mostly of questions relating to perceptions, goals, and beliefs (1980: 66). Accordingly, in what follows I attempt to discern the values that are implicitly endorsed by the book, treating the text as a perceptual manifesto from which they can be inferred. The discussion is organized according to the value dimensions that the book identifies: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individ- ualism, and masculinity. In a final subsection I also discuss the fifth value dimension.

Power Distance (PD)

“The basic issue involved, to which different societies have found different solutions,” writes Hofstede, “is human inequality” (1980: 92). The PD index, which focuses on the degree of accep- tance of inequality between a boss and a sub- ordinate, was construed from three questions in the IBM questionnaire (1980: 100 –101, 406, 408). The first question offered respondents a five- point answer scale to rate how frequently in their experience employees were afraid to ex- press disagreement with their managers. The second and third questions defined four types of managers—autocratic, persuasive, consultative, and democratic—and asked respondents to state which type they preferred and which most closely corresponded to their own boss (on this index’s validity problems, see Robinson, 1983: 113–114, and Schooler, 1983). In Appendix 5 (1980: 423– 424) the author states that his own preferred

1 Compare his universalistic 1978 piece with his growing awareness of the culturally bounded American writing in the early 1980s (Hofstede, 1980, 1983), the late 1980s under- standing of the Western bias inherent in his own work (Hof- stede & Bond, 1988; see also Hofstede, 1991), and claims concerning the cultural boundedness not only of American but also of European management writing in the 1990s (Hof- stede, 1994, 1996).

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manager is consultative—indicative, according to his interpretive scheme, of small PD. His country, the Netherlands, like all Western coun- tries except Belgium and France, is ranked as having a relatively small PD culture.

On the face of it, the declared small PD value corresponds to the espoused normative stance of the book. Hofstede’s model, in many respects a global version of liberal pluralism, promotes an image of apolitical diversity. In this view, there are a variety of national cultures in the world, each of them representing a different combination of similar elements that can be de- fined and mapped out in expert scientific terms. At the ideological level, they are all equally legitimate, representing a neutral variation to be analyzed in neutral terms.

However, on scratching the surface, each stage of the research process reappears as a political act of neutralization— of making the unneutral seem neutral. This begins with the standardized questionnaire that was used: uni- form in that identical questions were distributed throughout the world, the questionnaire implies a neutral equality of treatment. In effect, how- ever, uniformity was, by definition, a means for delimiting discourse by curtailing voices to paths determined by a Western, managerially oriented research team. In other words, the questionnaire reflects a large PD: its ques- tions— explicitly designed to unravel the nor- mative concerns of the respondents—primarily served the concerns of researchers who needed something comparable and created it by coerc- ing a culturally distinct axis of comparison on a heterogeneous population of employees. In- deed, upon adding the fifth dimension in his 1991 book, in a section entitled “Cultural Biases in the Researchers’ Minds” (1991: 160 –161), Hof- stede admitted the Western bias in the question- naire.

Moreover, not only did the questionnaire co- erce a distinctly Western axis of comparison on non-Western cultures, but it was also quite se- lective in representing the issue of inequality within the West. Here it apparently entailed a positive bias: the index’s focus on the boss/ subordinate relationship turned a blind eye to the more unattractive forms of Western inequal- ity, thus laying the foundation for an excessively egalitarian portrayal of these cultures (as small PD). Most evidently, racial and colonial inequal- ities were not captured by the questions and

thus not counted as “power distances” at all. Hofstede writes:

Even rulers like the British, who practiced democ- racy and lower power distance society at home, did not practice equality between themselves and the colonial populations. . . . The Power Dis- tance Index definitely does not measure toler- ance toward other races, religions, and so on; this is rather a matter of Uncertainty Avoidance (1980: 129).

Thus, racial PDs were excluded from the PD category and redefined as “uncertainty avoid- ance.” This fact, it seems, enabled a country like South Africa—a country that because of apart- heid was represented in the sample by “white respondents only” (1980: 232)—to come close to “even rulers like the British” and receive a mod- erately small PD score. Moreover, even under the uncertainty avoidance category, these racial and colonial issues were not expressed in the actual results: both South Africa and Britain scored relatively low. In 1980 it was perhaps easier to overlook this surprising result, but in 1991, when Hofstede published Cultures and Or- ganizations and the public disdain for apartheid was at its peak, it begged an explanation. Re- ferring to apartheid in this latter book, Hofstede retreated from the claim that the sample repre- sented entire national cultures by saying that the finding “at least explains why part of the South African whites reject apartheid” (1991: 130). Regardless of the question of this explana- tion’s validity, the South African case manifestly illustrates how the research did not neutrally tap PD norms: whether partial in terms of popu- lation sample, questionnaire content, or both, it constituted a political act that, however unwit- tingly, neutralized racism and colonialism by excluding them from measurement.

Furthermore, neutralization was practiced not only through the exclusion of unattractive forms of Western PDs but also in relation to the single PD that was included in the index: the hierarchi- cal one existing within organizations between a boss and a subordinate. Consider the questions about the management types. To Hofstede, hier- archical inequality is something “we inevitably find,” “the essence of organization,” and “a ba- sic human relationship” (1980: 96, 97), and so the choice that was given—among the management types—was already premised on the notion of its universal inevitability. In other words, this form of inequality, which the researcher did ap-

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parently value, was neutralized through univer- salization: respondents were not asked if they, too, found hierarchical inequality a basic, inev- itable, essential necessity but, rather, were forced to answer as if it was. The questionnaire, then, did not only demand its respondents to choose from among someone else’s categories but also structured the choice in a certain way—a way that removed traces of unattractive forms of Western PDs and trapped respondents into reaffirming the alleged neutrality and inev- itability of managerial power.

Nevertheless, while indeed trapped within a culturally predetermined and politically delim- ited answer pool, respondents did have a choice, and their answers did vary. The differ- ences that were captured in their response pat- tern were then (again) subjected to a distinctly unneutral process of being labeled in value- laden terms: a preference for “authoritarian” rather than “consultative” management, for ex- ample, was not defined as a preference for out- spoken rather than concealed power, political awareness rather than political oblivion, explic- itness rather than denial, or any other typifica- tion that could have been contrived under a dif- ferent set of normative assumptions. Rather, it was defined as “large PD” and “small PD,” as if the latter had less of the bad stuff.

Furthermore, as it turned out, the pattern of index correlations across countries actually grouped together a preference for authoritarian management with preferences for persuasive and democratic management, opposing all three to a preference for consultative manage- ment (1980: 102). This, however, did not lead to an acknowledgement of the problems involved in the polarized large/small PD typification, which, on the face of it, is at odds with this pattern. Instead, the book seeks to convince readers that a wish for a democratic manager is just as much a symptom of large PD as is a wish for an authoritarian one:

In systems in which superiors maintain large power distances, subordinates prefer such supe- riors (dependent reaction) or go to the other ex- treme—that is, they prefer a superior who does not decide at all but who governs by a majority vote of his subordinates. This latter type of deci- sion-making is unlikely to be effective in work organizations: it would be feasible only if depart- ments were completely autonomous and indepen- dent of other departments, while in fact modern work organizations are complex interdependent

systems. Therefore, the preference for a majority vote decision type is unrealistic; I interpret it as a counterdependent reaction to a situation of large power distance (1980: 102).

Thus, a surprising preference for democratic managers by the others is redefined as being “in fact” unfeasible and ineffective, and it is used to typify them as reacting in an “unrealistic” and “extreme” way. Hofstede, it might be said, is the one going to an extreme here, taking the li- cense—indeed the “authoritarian” license—to expropriate the meaning of the answers from his respondents, claiming, in so many words, that anything they said proves his point— using their voices to turn his hypotheses into axioms. This, it seems, is a blatant practice of symbolic power: Hofstede defines reality through an allegedly neu- tral research process that first delimits respon- dents’ voices to culturally biased paths and then turns their answers into proof of lesser value.

Moreover, devaluing is further manifested when a combination of “statistical analysis” and “theoretical reasoning” is used to link large PD cultures with other values that, it seems, are un- favorable in Western capitalist terms. Thus, for example, the book claims that while small PD countries are economically “developed,” large PD countries are “less developed” or “develop- ing”— concepts that conjure a notion of a univer- sal development standard in which the former are “behind” (see Escobar, 1995). Concomitantly, small PD countries are often characterized by “peak sci- entific performance” (1980: 126), whereas large PD countries have less mastery of technology (1980: 123, 126). And while professionals from large PD countries are surprisingly more occupationally educated, their formal schooling is proclaimed to be “long but impractical. . . . with a considerable amount of rote learning” (1980: 111). Thus, ana- lyzed with a normative terminology that resonates quite clearly with the declared value preferences of the author, the PD dimension reaffirms a global division falling more or less along the line sepa- rating the West from “the Rest.” Analysis of in- equality values within countries in this sense is used to reaffirm a certain scheme of inequality between them.

Still, there were exceptions. France and Bel- gium, the Western exceptions with large PD scores in relation to Nordic, Anglo, and Ger- manic cultures, are, the book declares, the Euro- pean equivalents of Latin America (1980: 127). Their large PD scores are proposed to be a cul-

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tural inheritance of the Roman Empire. The PD norm of Pakistan—small in relation to Hof- stede’s assumptions and thus constituting an example of an opposite exception—is suggested to result either from an unrepresentative Paki- stani sample “particularly enlightened com- pared with its environment” (1980: 129) or from the country’s religious background. As “the Mus- lim part of the former British Colonial subconti- nent,” Hofstede writes matter of factly—thus re- asserting the (post)colonial global hierarchy that might have been challenged or forgotten by this exception—Pakistan “would stress stratification less than the predominantly Hindu part, India: in Islam, all believers are equal before God” (1980: 129). Thus, in both examples the explanation re- constitutes the border that the data cross. In the first case Hofstede detaches the large PD scores from the Westernness of the Western exceptions, attributing it instead to an inherited Latin es- sence. In the second case the explanation is is- sued from an evidently (post)colonial interpretive frame that defines small PD as “particularly en- lightened,” brings to mind a linkage to Western influence, and still stresses the (Muslim) otherness of the Pakistanis who registered this value in their questionnaires. Thus, in both cases exceptions are made to serve the rule.

However, the fact that a global scheme of in- equality is reaffirmed should not be taken to imply that it is not, at the same time, challenged. Most evidently, Hofstede seems dedicated to the cause of undermining American hegemony, es- pecially in the field of organizational and man- agement studies. In the book (e.g., 1980: 373), as well as in later publications (e.g., 1991), he re- peatedly criticizes American ethnocentrism and calls for a “cultural relativism” that acknowl- edges the boundedness of ideas, theories, and practices. Dramatizing tensions within the Euro- American elite, it might be said, conveniently obscures the more acute power issues at play be- tween them and their (common) others. Still, any account of the book’s normative stance cannot overlook this more dynamic and reflective aspect of the author’s espoused value system (despite the fact that the continuum devised—simple and static, stretched thin between “large” and “small” poles— can hardly capture such an aspect in the value systems of those studied).

In sum, Culture’s Consequences does not ap- pear to manifest small PD. The single continuum it presents obscures the fact that there are dif-

ferent kinds of power distances or inequalities (boss/subordinate, researcher/research objects, within/between groups, within/between states, and so forth) and that for each kind a different cultural stance may apply (see also Kitayama, 2002). As such, it creates a large space for au- thoritative and authorial choice—what and how to stress or overlook with regard to Hofstede’s own cultural system, as well as with regard to those of the others who are studied. In this sense the book appears to manifest large PD indeed. Regardless of intentions, it not only analyzes but also reinforces a certain set of values— of man- agers, Westerners, Europeans—while at the same time othering and devaluing “the Rest.” The numbers, the graphs, the statistics, and the positivist terminology do not “solve” the bias of these hegemonic values but are, however unwit- tingly, determined by them from the outset. In- deed, this is just the beginning. This element of power, well disguised as a scientific quest for truth but evident nonetheless, expresses itself in the book not only in the study of PD but also in the study of other values.

Uncertainty Avoidance (UA)

According to Hofstede, UA refers to intoler- ance for the unpredictable, ambiguous, or un- certain. Its index was based on three questions: “How often do you feel nervous or tense at work?” “How long do you think you will continue working for this company?” “Please indicate the extent to which you personally agree or dis- agree . . . [that] company rules should not be bro- ken— even when the employee thinks it is in the company’s best interest” (1980: 76 –77, 405, 408 – 409). While admitting that “it is likely that other and perhaps better survey indicators of national levels of uncertainty avoidance can be devel- oped” and that “uncertainty avoidance had not been a familiar concept to us when, in 1967, we composed the . . . [IBM] questionnaire” (1980: 161), Hofstede nonetheless links a high2 UA “syndrome” to a wide variety of sociopsycho- logical tendencies, such as anxiety, aggressive- ness, conservatism, need for security, rigidity,

2 When referring to uncertainty avoidance, I use the terms high/low and not strong/weak, because these are the terms predominantly used in the relevant chapter in the book. Hofstede’s later books (2001; Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005) make wider use of the latter terms.

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dogmatism, intolerance of different opinions, and even high maximum traffic speeds, which he takes to indicate “a higher value attributed to saving time than to saving lives” (1980: 180). At the explicit level, as manifested in Appendix 5, Hofstede strongly disagrees with the claim that company rules should not be broken, thus ex- pressing a low UA value (1980: 423). His country, the Netherlands, again like many Western coun- tries— especially Anglo and Nordic—and a few non-Western (Asian) ones, is ranked as having a low UA culture.

The book itself, however, manifests what ap- pears to be a very high intolerance for the un- predictable, ambiguous, or uncertain. In other words, it manifests very high UA. Hofstede’s task—widespread perhaps among positivist so- cial scientists—was not one of pointing out and delving into complexity but, rather, one of sim- plification (1980: 15). He did not set out to explore the manifestations of cultural paradoxes and value contradictions but to search for countable, graphable elements that could be statistically manipulated to produce an image of order and reason in the world (see McSweeney, 2002).

Indeed, this image is repeatedly visualized with the use of figures—tables, graphs, and causal chains—throughout the book. All signs of intricacy are either relegated to the periphery of representation or somehow reduced. The con- cept of “culture,” Hofstede admits (1980: 25), was incompletely defined in a way that covered only that which could be measured. Responses were forced into a manageable variety through the use of limited and predetermined questionnaire answer pools. And while questionnaires were distributed in sixty-six countries, only forty countries were used for analyses “for reasons of stability of data” (1980: 54).

Similarly, some questions were excluded from analysis because their between-country differ- ences manifested “instability” from the first to the second survey rounds (1980: 73–74). Distribu- tions were reduced to averages. Variables were artificially separated and “controlled” because otherwise “chaos” could “result” (1980: 81). Cor- relations were celebrated even if quite a bit of statistical manipulation was needed to bring them into existence. And if real-world para- doxes were stumbled on by chance, consider- able effort was dedicated to showing why what might seem contradictory was merely a wrong impression originating either from the confusion

of researchers who overlooked important dis- tinctions, such as the one between “the desired” and “the desirable” (1980: 20), or the confusion of respondents who conducted “unconscious” se- lection biases (e.g., 1980: 113–114). In all these aspects of data processing, Hofstede appeared dedicated to the project of producing a vision of order in the world. An underlying normative commitment to “uncertainty avoidance” seemed to have guided the writing of the book every step of the way.

Moreover, “uncertainty avoidance” is appar- ent not only in the treatment of data but also in the overarching interpretive stance of the book. Culture’s Consequences, as even its title indi- cates, appears captivated by an overriding com- mitment to causality—to assembling causes and consequences. Thus, as far as causes are concerned, low UA, for example, is suggested to result from advanced modernization; older de- mocracies; dense populations in poor countries and sparse populations in wealthy countries; tolerant religions that stress relativity; historical events marked by less legislation and more set- tlement of disputes by negotiation and/or con- flict, as opposed to mere inheritance of devel- oped systems of legislation; low mean age of population leaders; and smaller organizations (1980: 185). The suggested consequences of low UA include slower economic growth after World War II, weaker nationalism, less aggressiveness versus other nations, “looser” societies, stronger feelings of citizen competence, a casuistic ap- proach to legal issues, a stronger accent on lay competences as expressed by having more nurses per doctor, more religious tolerance, pragmatic or introvert meditative religions, rel- ativism, empiricism rather than “theoricism” in social sciences, more ambitious employees, managers who are more involved in strategy issues, and so forth (1980: 186 –187). Hofstede seems committed to the project of reaffirming (and producing) an image of a world in which things are connected to each other through a systematic, predictable, and unambiguous causal logic that turns Xs into Ys.

Many of those reading this subsection may argue that all this is quite legitimate. Although perhaps more complex and fine tuned, much of the research conducted in the social sciences is often of this sort. The axiomatic assumption about systematic causality that is just waiting to be revealed is at the basis of social scientific

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thinking and is, to many, of unquestionable le- gitimacy. Still, we may ask, is it not also a cul- tural position? A perspective with its own nor- mative blueprint? And if it is, why is social science itself not counted as a “high UA syn- drome”? The goal of simplification; the fear of “instability” and “chaos”; the need to “control” variables and data; insistence upon the exis- tence of an underlying causal “order”; the im- pulse to count, to graph, to predict—are these not, by definition, symptoms/expressions/results of UA?

I ask the reader to look in the mirror. This is not merely a question of “relativism”— of being blind to one’s culture; it is a matter of power and politics. When speaking of others, Culture’s Con- sequences links UA to rigidity, racism, aggres- siveness, and dogmatism. In other words, it is not a neutral distinction (imagine social science being defined this way). Social science—the supposedly privileged domain that, as many scholars present it, is marked by a superior ac- cess to truth—stays outside cultural measure- ment only to come back and bestow on its de- valuing findings the scientific stamp of “real,” “rational,” and “expert” knowledge.

Individualism (IDV)

Hofstede’s third value dimension “describes the relationship between the individual and the collectivity which prevails in a given society” (1980: 213). While the human species is generally “gregarious,” he claims, “different human soci- eties show gregariousness to different degrees” (1980: 214). The IDV index was construed from work goal questions in which respondents were asked to rank the importance of various state- ments on a limited scale. Generally, high IDV was linked to the tendency to attribute impor- tance to the goals of having a job leaving per- sonal time and giving freedom and challenge, while low IDV was linked to the tendency to attribute importance to the goals of fully using skills and having good physical conditions and training opportunities. The rationale, according to Hofstede, is that the first set of goals stresses the actor’s independence from the organization while the second set stresses what the organi- zation should do for the individual (1980: 220 – 221). In Appendix 5 Hofstede declares that free- dom and personal time are “of utmost importance” to him, challenge is “very impor-

tant,” physical conditions are “of moderate im- portance,” and training and use of skill “of little importance” (1980: 423). These rankings corre- spond to the characterization of practically all Western countries as having highly individual- ist cultures.

The individualist orientation or the “’I’ con- sciousness” (1980: 235) is indeed visible through- out the book, in that the author seems committed to the task of singling out his own unique voice within the scientific community of his time. Yet he does so by promoting an extremely collectiv- ist image of the world. His concept of culture as a “collective programming of the mind” (1980: 25) is distinctive in how little credit it gives the individual as a reflective and active social agent. In fact, this concept of culture promotes an image of the individual as merely a passive carrier of a predetermined cultural template (Ailon, 2007; Ailon-Souday & Kunda, 2003)— one who is perhaps capable of reflection and change, but only through a process of manage- rial reeducation designed to raise sensitivity to and offer tools for overcoming the constant threat of cross-cultural gaps and misunder- standings. In this sense the book is character- ized by an individualist presentation mode but a collectivist substance.

Note that the collectivist substance generally reaffirms as well as enlarges the power of man- agers and consultants. It carves out for them a novel and exclusive territory for practicing ex- pertise— helping the preprogrammed individu- als improve the only changeable aspect of their collective mental software: their cross-cultural communication skills.

And what of the nonchangeable parts? Well, according to a chapter titled “Consequences for Policy and Research,” they, too, justify the power of managers, especially those with the right Western background. Disregarding variation when applying statistical norms based on aver- ages to entire populations (is this not the es- sence of collectivism?), the book maintains that the low UA/small PD mental software—the soft- ware, it so happens, characteristic of most West European/North American cultures—is better suited for strategic and cross-cultural manage- ment, both of which, it seems, constitute the higher and more complex roles of the global workplace. Thus, for example, “for ambiguous tasks (like strategic planning), people from low uncertainty avoidance cultures perform better

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than from high uncertainty avoidance cultures,” whereas “for clearly defined and urgent tasks, people from high uncertainty avoidance cul- tures are likely to perform better” (1980: 396); “people from lower UAI cultures will tend to do better in cross-cultural contacts” (1980: 398); “a stronger Uncertainty Avoidance norm makes it less likely that strategic planning activities are practiced, which may put question marks to the certainties of today” (1980: 384); and, perhaps most illuminating:

. . . managers moving to a large power distance culture soon learn that they have to behave more autocratically in order to be effective, and they do so: The colonial history of most western countries provides many examples of this. It is interesting that the western ex-colonial power which itself has the highest Power Distance norm—France— seems to be most appreciated by its former colo- nies and to maintain the best postcolonial rela- tionships with most of them. This suggests that subordinates in a large power distance culture still feel more comfortable with superiors who are real autocrats than with those acting as autocrats for opportunistic reasons. The operation of a manager in an environment with a Power Dis- tance norm lower than his own is more problem- atic. It is easier to move toward more than to move toward less autocratic behavior (1980: 380 – 381).

Thus, while it is quite reasonable to place an ex-colonial manager over an ex-colonized sub- ordinate (as long as the former can persuasively behave like a “real autocrat”), it is quite “prob- lematic” to arrange a hierarchy the other way around. The book thus promotes a collectivist world view that privileges the Western “collec- tive software” and justifies the power of Western managers inside the global organization.

In sum, while the book defines the West as individualist and may indeed be seen to mani- fest an individualist writing stance, its concept of “culture” as a predetermined, collective tem- plate marks a disregard for individual agency. Individuals, it basically claims, are locked within the boundaries of mental softwares and need managers, preferably with a Western men- tal software, to improve their cross-cultural skills. Analyzing the book in its own terms again illustrates the problematic nature of the value dimensions that are too superficial to capture intricacies of world views, beliefs, and conduct. More critically, it illustrates the way that IDV, like the other dimensions, implicitly endorses managerial and Western agendas, both clearly

embedded in capitalist values and ideals, and legitimizes the power of these hegemonic social groups within the cross-cultural organizational universe.

Masculinity (MAS)

“The duality of the sexes,” writes Hofstede, “is a fundamental fact with which different socie- ties cope in different ways. . . . The predominant socialization pattern is for men to be more as- sertive and for women to be more nurturing” (1980: 261). Accordingly, he distinguishes be- tween masculine goals, which are concerned with economic and other achievements, and feminine goals, which are concerned with tak- ing care of people in general and children in particular (1980: 262). The MAS index, which, like the IDV, was based on work goal questions, measured to what extent respondents of both sexes tended to endorse “ego goals,” which are, according to the author, statistically more pop- ular among men (earnings and advancement), or “social goals,” which are more popular among women (good relationship with man- ager, cooperative colleagues, friendly atmo- sphere [1980: 278]). Hofstede’s value preferences as stated in Appendix 5 (1980; 423) generally indicate a preference for feminine values, and this corresponds to the characterization of his home country (the Netherlands). MAS is the only dimension that distinguishes Anglo (masculine) from Nordic (feminine) cultures.

In 1998 Hofstede published a semireader enti- tled Masculinity and Femininity. This reader, as I understand it, indicates that the MAS dimen- sion rests not on one but on a complex system of distinctions. At its foundation are universal dis- tinctions relating to sexual character and goals: men are more assertive and women more nur- turing; men endorse ego goals and women so- cial goals (1998b: 11; 1998c: 79). Then, when gen- der roles and societal values are concerned, Hofstede speaks not of universal but of various degrees and kinds of distinctions—in fact, he sometimes makes distinctions about distinc- tions. Thus, with regard to gender roles, he claims that masculine cultures are character- ized by a strong distinction between men and women in the sense that “men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success; women are supposed to be more mod- est, tender, and concerned with quality of life,”

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whereas in feminine societies “both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with quality of life” (1998b: 6 –7). Re- garding values, he claims that masculine cul- tures are characterized by “tougher values,” placing an emphasis on assertiveness and ego boosting, whereas feminine cultures are charac- terized by “more tender values” and an empha- sis on modesty (1998c: 77, 85).

All of these differences and distinctions, by the way, are purportedly rooted in the power balance between the father and the mother in the home (1998b: 19). Moreover, they are further distinguished from more distinctions relating to such issues as gender inequality, gender differ- entiation in wider society, and the ideology of feminism. The entire myriad of distinctions is further claimed to have divergent relationships with a wide variety of issues ranging from reli- gion to sexual behavior (for summary tables, see Hofstede, 1998c: 103; 1998d: 175; 1998e: 201; Vun- derink & Hofstede, 1998: 144).

In effect, this complex system of distinctions appears to have created an extremely flexible interpretive space. Within it, Hofstede can de- scribe himself and his culture as “feminine” while simultaneously asserting essentialist statements that, at least to some extent, legiti- mate sexual inequality. Consider the following citation:

Of course, there is a common trend among the vast majority of societies, both traditional and modern, as to the distribution of sex roles apart from procreation: men must be more concerned with economic and other achievements and women must be more concerned with taking care of people in general and children in particular. It is not difficult to see how this role pattern fits with the biological sex roles: women first bear chil- dren and then breast-feed them, so they must stay with them. . . . The common pattern of male asser- tiveness and female nurturance leads to male dominance at least in matters of politics and, usually, of economic life; within the household, whether this be a nuclear or an extended family group, different societies show different distribu- tions of power over the sexes (1980: 262, 263; em- phasis added).

In this citation the distinction between mas- culine assertiveness and feminine nurturance is hardly neutral—if not in essence then in effect. A difference in character between male and fe- male, once it is “scientifically” asserted, natu- ralizes a “common trend” of males’ acclaimed dominance in the public domain and females’

seclusion to the private domain. The biological sexual difference is enacted as an underlying reason that “leads” to women’s exclusion from or subordination in the political and economic spheres: they “must” stay at home while men “must” be more concerned with “economic and other achievements.” This claim, which disre- gards both exclusion and status differentiation and depicts (hetero)sexual inequality as a neu- tral, functional outcome of objective goals and sexual essence, is even more apparent in the next citation, which concerns occupational seg- regation3:

The goals of organizations affect the distribution of labor over the sexes. Business organizations have goals of achievement which concur with the achieving role of the male. It is not surprising that they are almost always led by men and that their climate is set by men. . . . In contrast to business organizations, hospitals have a quite different set of goals, which concurs more with the traditional, nurturing female role. Women do take, and al- ways have taken, management positions in hos- pitals, at least on the nursing side (1980: 267, 268; emphasis added).

Some readers may interpret this rhetoric as a surprising expression of a lack of feminist com- mitment by an author with an avowed feminine value system. However, within the multitude of distinctions, this, too, is not deemed problem- atic: for Hofstede, feminism is not related to the masculine/feminine cultural distinction (1998b: 19), except that in masculine cultures it may be more aggressive (see 1980: 298). In this sense, both the labeling of the index on the basis of the Western stereotypical polarization of the sexes that was characteristic of the time (Robinson, 1983: 114) and the endorsement of a world view that naturalizes sexual inequality and occupa- tional segregation do not contradict any claim to a so-called feminine value system.

What does seem notably inconsistent in terms of the book’s own distinction between masculine and feminine cultures is that such statements (as well as the general tone of the book) sound very assertive. Well, if a personal tone is al- lowed, they sound assertive to me. This is, after

3 Hofstede claims this despite the fact that he cites studies indicating that stereotyping dynamics have an effect as far as occupational segregation is concerned. Moreover, I did not find traces of this latter, more blatant citation in the book’s second edition (2001)—another illustration, perhaps, of the effect of changing times on scientific knowledge.

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all, a question of interpretation. Since Hofstede is a man from an allegedly feminine culture and I am a woman from an allegedly more mascu- line culture, it might quite plausibly be argued that what we have here is a contrast between two opposing mental softwares. Perhaps. The reader, however, is asked to notice one final point: such a description of our dialogue defines our difference of interpretation in polarized, ob- jectivist terms, conjuring up quite a strong no- tion of a “culture gap.” The book promotes a “real” cross-cultural dialogue but offers con- cepts and terms that simultaneously suggest the underlying impossibility for such a dialogue to “really” cross cultures. In terms of both gender and national boundaries, it reaffirms the sense of essentialist distinctions on which the tradi- tional world order is built.

The Fifth Dimension

In his later publications Hofstede added an- other dimension to the original four (see 1991, 2001, and especially Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). This dimension was derived not from the IBM questionnaire but from a questionnaire devel- oped by M. H. Bond and based on Eastern (Chi- nese) values. Statistical analysis of respon- dents’ answers, Hofstede (1991) argues, yielded three dimensions that correspond to PD, IDV, and MAS, along with a fourth one that does not. This last dimension (LTO) concerns the Eastern (“Confucian”) search for virtue and distin- guishes between cultures in which the fostering of virtue is future oriented or “long term” and those in which virtue is “short term” and con- cerned with the past and present.4 This virtue- centering dimension, he further claims, is dis- tinct from the UA dimension, which appeared only in the IBM results and which stands for the Western concern for “truth.” According to this account, the Western mind is oriented toward absolute criteria, whereas the Eastern focus on

virtue “allows a pragmatic integration of morals and practice” (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005: 230).

To a great extent, this fifth dimension marks a commitment to relativism. It represents an at- tempt to remove Western values from the center of the scientific process and to place an Eastern value system as the pivot of comparison instead. This commitment is also expressed in the tone of interpretation: in his later books Hofstede (1991, 2001; Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005) notes that the long-term orientation statistically correlates with the economic growth of the East Asian “Five Dragons.” He thus repeatedly praises these cultures for their economically fruitful Confucian heritage.

There are, however, two limits to this attempt to break from ethnocentrism and introduce a scientific account that transcends the Western- bound narrative. First, as Calás (1992: 213) claims, while representing an attempt to correct the cultural bias, the fifth dimension is merely presented as an add-on to the original four and does not lead to a reexamination of their under- lying logic. Second, even as an add-on, this Eastern value distinction between long- and short-term orientations is not allowed the status of a completely independent dimension and is subordinated to the (Western) truth/(Eastern) vir- tue dichotomy (e.g., Hofstede, 1991: Chapter 7). Consequently, the inferior ranking of Western cultures on this scale (in relation to East Asia) is recast as only one side of yet another distinction whereby these cultures are ranked as superior truth finders. At the same moment that Western cultures are subjected to the LTO, they are also distinguished from it.

In this vein, the praise of supposedly long- term-oriented, economically prosperous East Asia does not challenge but in fact reaffirms Western cultural hegemony and position in the global hierarchy. For one thing, the idealization of capitalist achievement and the tendency to view it as a primary criterion of virtue seem Western. Moreover, the narrative that is put forth to explain the East Asian capitalist achievement frames it in terms of a successful implementation of products of Western minds. “During the Industrial Revolution in the West,” write Hofstede and Hofstede, “the search for Truth led to the discovery of laws of nature that could then be exploited for the sake of human progress” (2005: 231). As the technological fruits of this Western effort became “freely available,”

4 The long-term orientation refers to values such as thrift, perseverance, and shame and the short-term orientation to values such as respecting tradition, fulfilling social obliga- tions, and protecting “face.” In my view, these titles and typifications seem to rest on quite an excessive interpretive license. It is not completely clear why, for example, a future orientation is long term and a past orientation is short term, or why shame would belong to the former but protecting face to the latter.

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their explanation continues, East Asian coun- tries were quick to put them to use with the help of their own superior synthetic—as opposed to analytic—abilities (2005: 231–232). In other words, Eastern cultures are complimented here for having acknowledged the intrinsic and uni- versal value (for “human progress”) of the West- ern search for “truth.” Such an acknowledge- ment, the authors also maintain, cannot be attributed to the short-term-oriented world of Is- lam, which did not join Christian countries on “the road to modernization” but, rather, “with- drew into traditionalism” (2005: 233), nor, for that matter, can it be attributed to African cultures, which expect “wisdom without knowledge and education” in a way that “does not encourage studying today for reaping benefits tomorrow” (2005: 236). Thus, once again, a global hierarchy is enacted and different societies are mapped within it according to the degree to which they acknowledge, manifest, or put to use Western technology and Western conception of knowl- edge.

How does this account accord with its own scientific categories? Can the account be de- scribed in terms of “truth” or “virtue,” “absolute laws,” or “a practical integration of morals and practice”? Mirroring the fifth dimension, in fact, brings our discussion full circle: the notion of privileging, the starting point of this analysis, is based on the attempt to problematize precisely this Western truth-seeking/truth-finding narra- tive and bring to light the extent to which scien- tific accounts are, indeed, “a practical integra- tion of morals and practice.” In this practical integration, future-oriented (in Hofstede’s terms, long-term) theoretical morals of predicting out- comes are, no doubt, espoused. But these morals are just as influential in terms of the formulation of the accounts as the past- and present- oriented (short-term) practices of conforming to specific, sociohistorical rhetorical traditions: formal, assertive language; graphics and nu- merical representations; causal narratives; and other discursive rules for constructing and pre- senting “proof” that infuse a text with its scien- tific legitimacy (see Lyotard, 1984). Indeed, the fifth dimension makes it acutely evident that the scientific “integration of morals and practice” is not only practical but also political, for it both claims the status of truth to Western knowledge and denies it from the knowledges of others: the East Asian learnings, the Muslim “traditional-

ism,” the African “wisdom.” In the mirror, the fifth and final dimension bears not the contours of an absolute truth but rather those of a politics of virtue.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

In this analysis of Culture’s Consequences, I used the book’s own categories to explore its underlying value orientations. This analysis, entitled “mirroring,” exposed a political subtext that can be described in terms of two interre- lated rhetorical elements. The first is devaluing. As many critical writers have shown with re- gard to other mainstream organizational texts, Culture’s Consequences, too, does not simply “capture” the social reality it depicts: however inadvertently, it constructs that reality in ways that attribute lesser value to various others. This construction, furthermore, takes quite a sophis- ticated form. The countries studied, for example, are not distributed evenly across the dimen- sions, and although the general distribution pat- tern repeatedly runs along the line separating the West and “the Rest,” it is easily obscured by the shifting statistical values and graphic con- stellations. Like much research in the field, the findings “do no attach themselves in any linear or inevitable way to men, whites or managers,” but are nonetheless quite evidently issued “from within an interpretive domain that is implicitly male/masculine, white/western, and bourgeois/ managerial” (Ferguson, 1994: 90, 89). Accord- ingly, even if this or that Western country slips down one graph, or this or that “developing” country climbs up another, the value that is at- tributed to Western values— capitalism, mana- gerialism, positivism, and so forth—is continu- ally reaffirmed, constituting, in effect, the underlying interpretive framework by which the shifting statistical constellations are evaluated and cultures’ consequences deduced. In this vein, the values of the “others” are constructed through conceptual polarizations, and respon- dents’ inputs become instruments of national attributions that, regardless of liberal inten- tions, reaffirm a scheme of international in- equality (see Joseph et al., 1990).

This account, to a large extent, resonates with postcolonial critiques of Western knowledge. As Edward Said claims in Orientalism (1978: 12), Western writing “has much less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world”; it repre-

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sents the non-West in ways facilitative of West- ern cultural hegemony, political dominance, and sense of positional superiority. In Oriental- ism, as in other Western discourses about oth- ers, “the Rest” are systematically subjected to representational strategies that devalue them and exclude their voices (see Calás & Smircich, 1999: 661– 663). Indeed, in a postcolonial analysis of international management thought, West- wood describes cross-cultural methods as “often reductionist, or else severely decontextualising, incorporating simplifying representational strategies that do violence to the inherent com- plexity of the social systems they pretend to represent” (2004: 73).

Yet devaluing, this paper indicates, is only one side of the coin. The cross-cultural text ex- amined here suggests the importance of a sec- ond rhetorical element: overvaluing. Producers of scientific knowledge, it seems, not only mis- represent “the Rest” (the primary emphasis of postcolonial writing; e.g., Said, 1978) but also misrepresent the West. Idealizing themselves, they construct self-images in a desired mold that, once mirrored, cracks under its own incon- sistencies. The case of Culture’s Consequences is illustrative of this critical mirroring effect. In the analysis presented here, unified question- naires reappeared as an attempt to force cul- tural idiosyncracies into the rubrics of Western minds, and a proclaimed tolerance for uncer- tainty as a preoccupation with causality and statistical warfare against paradox and com- plexity. A willingness for dialogue was revealed as a cover for a positivist essentialism whereby identities were constituted in polarized terms, and individualism as a cover for constituting individuals in extremely collectivist terms. Self- proclaimed egalitarianism (“small PD”) was re- vealed as an act of power, self-proclaimed fem- ininity as an act of machoism, and the quest for “truth” as politics of “virtue.” Thus, while over- valuing is no doubt interrelated with devaluing, it is not its automatic by-product. Rather, it is an accompanying rhetorical element that traps the text in its own cultural webs. Once reflected— once mirrored— overvaluing lays bare the para- doxical inner dynamics of the textual construc- tion of privilege in terms that have as much a persuasive effect as the textual construction it- self.

Moreover, the point here goes beyond the in- strumentality of building a persuasive argu-

ment. The fact that “we” are “made” by the text to the same extent as “they” highlights not only the power of the text over the others it depicts but also the power of hegemonic systems of meaning over the text. In this sense Culture’s Consequences bears witness to the discursive pressures and imaginative temptations that guide Western thought about its own identity in the global realm. To claim privilege but deny privileging; to celebrate globalization but chan- nel thought about it along national definitions of belonging (the ultimate starting and end point of analysis); to seek “proof” for (self-)manifestations of universalized emblems of virtue; to search for collective cultural “substances” that simulta- neously connote a timeless, static foundation for traditional local society and a timely movement “forward” for cross-cultural science—all these are a part of a complex matrix of discursive interests and formulative forces within which self-image is textually constructed and identity narratively defined. Acknowledging overvalu- ing thus seems crucial for reflecting on the po- litical circumstances of a scholarly text as it struggles with the paradoxical ambitions and intellectual tropes on which its own value effect depends.

What are the implications of all this for cross- cultural analysis? What do the outcomes of this analysis— exposing devaluing and overvalu- ing, pointing out discursive paradoxes and pres- sures, illustrating the particular entanglement of knowledge and power in a foundational text—imply for research and theory develop- ment in the field? The mirroring of Culture’s Consequences was designed to communicate critical concerns across the paradigm divide. Its major implications relate to three such interre- lated critical concerns: representation, reflexiv- ity, and the meaning and status of “science.”

First, regarding representation, this analysis suggests the need to reconsider various conven- tions of cross-cultural research. Once Culture’s Consequences was examined in its own “scien- tific terms,” these terms reappeared as a com- plex form of representation that no doubt relates itself to the material it addresses, but not in a direct, neutral, or unproblematic way (see also Kwek, 2003). In other words, as mirroring forced the text to face the political subtext of its own categories—short-term orientation, large PD, high UA, and so forth—it illustrated how much more meaning these categories convey beyond

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a supposedly simple description of “facts.” This implies, at the very least, the need to rethink these as well as other taken-for-granted ana- lytic categories for representing otherness. It also implies the need to take greater care in the process of interpretation and to realize that any attempt to represent people cannot evade the politics of controlling through knowledge and cannot be isolated from hegemonic discourses (Spivak, 1988). Recent attempts to advance inter- pretivist endeavors by facing the politics of rep- resentation offer many practical insights for those wishing to come to terms with the political and ethical engagements that are inherent in any research and writing process (see Jack & Westwood, 2006).

Furthermore, concern for representation also implies the need to broaden the topic and focus of cross-cultural analysis. As the mirroring of Culture’s Consequences turned the book into its own object of inquiry, it illustrated what seems of relevance to other objects of inquiry as well: that the space of meaning beyond the “facts” of difference—the representational space whereby things like distinct appearances and habits or divergent answers to questionnaire forms come to mean particular things—is as much worthy of theoretical attention as the so-called facts themselves. Besides questions relating to the essence of difference—what distinctive sub- stances the “us” and the “them” supposedly contain—there are questions relating to what the “us” and the “them” actively make of this difference while orienting themselves toward each other. Which elements of difference do peo- ple articulate as important and when? Which facts do they highlight? What values do they attribute to difference? What is the discursive impulse that underlies their preoccupation with it? For a field of study that seeks to further cross- cultural dialogue, there seems to be logic in devoting theoretical energy not only to objecti- fying difference (measuring it, drawing it, defin- ing it) but also to examining why and how dif- ference comes to carry particular baggages of meaning by various kinds of global discourses, including cross-cultural research itself.

Examining itself necessitates a heightened form of reflexivity—the second issue of concern here. As claimed, the problem with representing others is greater than that captured by the term cultural relativism. It is a problem of power— of a tendency to see the world in a way that is not

only limited by one’s own culture but also lim- iting in terms of its effect on other cultures. Ap- parently, the cultural bias is not politically ran- dom. Theorizing this bias should take into account the fact that it is characterized by the tendency to suppress foreign cultures—to sub- ject them to categories of analysis that make them familiar in ways that privilege “our” own. Issues of reflexivity thus cannot be settled by attempts to admit or supposedly “control” rela- tivism. Every step of theory development must be supplemented with political awareness that is attuned to the endless ways in which cross- cultural knowledge can exclude and subordi- nate, reaffirm global inequalities, and produce national stigmas. Mirroring, this paper sug- gests, might work well as a reflexive device for accomplishing this goal, keeping theoretical work on guard for its own political subtext and effects.

The need for such extreme reflexivity is criti- cal not only for academic reasons. As claimed, cross-cultural writers influence actual work practices. When their “findings” are applied by practitioners, they run the risk of creating a vi- cious cycle in which organizational members are required to define their indigenous culture in terms that are external and foreign to it and, moreover, that essentialize its inferiority. The devaluing/overvaluing mechanisms may thus be continually reproduced. Striving to influence, and in fact influencing actual work lives, writers should be especially watchful of the political subtext of their research reports— of their “sci- ence” (see Jack & Lorbiecki, 2003).

Science—its status and meaning—is the third issue of concern. In this analysis the underlying narrative of Culture’s Consequences—reporting how scientific means were used to discover “real” cultural differences—was turned on its head, and the book reappeared as a text using the authoritative voice of “science” to project on the world a particular scheme for representing differences (see also Brown, 1990). To the extent that Culture’s Consequences is at all represen- tative, social science was revealed as a political mechanism that could sanctify too much of what can be said in its name. The tendency to at- tribute cultural relativism to everything but sci- ence itself—to treat it as a privileged domain marked by a unique access to “truth”—was in this sense problematized. Social science, too, is “large PD” or “high UA.” It, too, can be used to

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sanction Western values, to legitimize capitalist goals, and to promote hegemonic groups. It, too, thus constitutes a “practical integration of mor- als and practice.”

This point, it should be noted, is not intended to undermine the orthodox scientific project as much as to spark awareness that it is just as good, and perhaps just as bad, as other forms of knowledge that might have no less of a legiti- mate claim to a respectable social space. Awareness of “privileging”— of the politics of knowledge—is not intended to produce despair but to allow diversity. If the goal is to develop in-depth understanding of current global com- plexities, then there is a need to broaden the scope of our theoretical imagination (Calás & Smircich, 1999) and to engage in a fuller cross- cultural intellectual dialogue. This dialogue, it appears, demands scholars in the Western aca- demic community not only to offer “assistance” or “guidance” to foreign scholars (Kirkman & Law, 2005: 384) but also to seek their help in reconsidering the limitations and ethnocentrism of current scientific institutions.

To some extent, Hofstede’s work on the East- ern value questionnaire is a novel contribution in this regard. Yet there seems to be a need to go even further in this direction, to extend the cross-cultural efforts far beyond the method- ological realms of survey questions or data col- lections instruments, and to allow a more poly- morphous approach to knowledge production (Jack & Westwood, 2006). Such efforts will not be able to formulate representations that are en- tirely outside the game of knowledge as power (Spivak, 1988), but they could reinscribe or de- mystify hegemonic accounts of otherness. In- deed, the attempt to stir up a richer intellectual dialogue could help overcome at least some of the “sophisticated vocabulary” that power- fully shields hegemonic forms of “sanctioned ignorance” (Spivak, 1988: 6) and transcend the cultural boundedness of conventional Western theorizing.

This paper’s analysis of Culture’s Conse- quences, I have claimed, is also characterized by an internal paradox. Using the mirroring strategy, the analysis indicated that the value dimensions are quite a potent instrument for analyzing underlying value orientations, at least for products of Western minds of the sort examined here. Hofstede’s categories do seem to tap something of underlying significance. Inter-

preting what they mean and applying them to other cultures demands caution, however. The “truth” that social science claims to discover may be much less certain than the truths it helps create with its privileged voice. As far as the attempt to represent others is concerned, the political subtext of supposedly egalitarian ex- pressions may, in fact, be as elusive and slip- pery— but nonetheless as loud and clear—as the difference between the patronizing “they are just as good as we” and the apologetic “we are just as good as they.” Indeed, it, demands cau- tion.

A final note is in order. This paper’s reading of Hofstede’s text should be seen for what it is: a cultural distancing equipped with the benefit of hindsight, critical perspectives unavailable or at least unpopular at the time the book was written, and a political awareness sparked in part by theoretical developments that could not have been foreseen. Hofstede, it should be re- membered, worked within the discursive limits of the 1970s, and he did so impressively, at least insofar as the popularity of Culture’s Conse- quences indicates. Of course, this paper’s anal- ysis, too, is not final. Faced with its own mirror, the paper may well appear to be permeated with a critical zeal that, it could be argued, should be balanced by acknowledging the achievements of its object of critique, not least of which was providing the means (value dimen- sions) and the mindset (relativism) that enabled this analysis in the first place.

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Galit Ailon ([email protected]) is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-IIan University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Labor Studies at Tel-Aviv University. Her research interests include organizational globalization, organizational culture, organizational theory, and managerial ideolo- gies.

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