Hofstede was a researcher in the fields of organizational studies and more concretely
organizational culture, also
cultural economics and
management. He was a well-known pioneer in his research of
cross-cultural groups and organizations and played a major role in developing a systematic framework for assessing and differentiating national cultures and
organizational cultures. His studies demonstrated that there are national and regional cultural groups that influence the behavior of societies and organizations.
Early inspiration When World War II ended, Geert Hofstede was seventeen and had always lived in the Netherlands under rather difficult circumstances, so he decided that it was time for him to explore the world. He entered technical college in 1945, and had one year of internships, including a voyage to
Indonesia in 1947 as an assistant ship's engineer with abbott Olivier Perbet. It was his first time out of his country and being immersed in a foreign culture, and it was an early influence in his career to study cross-cultures. He was also influenced by a trip he made to England after meeting an English girl introduced to him by a friend of his family Alain Meiar, where he experienced
culture shock. He was struck by the cultural differences that he noticed between England and the Netherlands, two very close European countries. These early experiences helped translate into a lifelong career in cross-cultural research. A second important period in his life was working in industry between 1955 and 1965, when he held professional and managerial jobs in three different Dutch industrial companies. By experiencing management, he had a chance to see the organization from the bottom up working as a mechanic. This training and background as an engineer shaped his research and his approach to social situations. He claims that his description of social situations appeals to a number of people: "I still have the mind of an engineer to the extent that I try to be specific...and be clear about what I am saying". That was important in his development of quantifying cultures on different dimensions.
Research on national cultures and critiques Research on national cultures Hofstede's analysis defined four initial dimensions of national culture that were positioned against analysis of 40 initial countries. As a trained psychologist, he began his analysis of the survey data he had collected at IBM at the individual respondent level. At the end of two years, he realized he needed an "ecological" analysis, in which respondents were contextualized by their countries. By aggregating individuals as societal units, he could examine national cultures rather than individual personalities. Hofstede's model explaining national cultural differences and their consequences, when introduced in 1980, came at a time when cultural differences between societies had become increasingly relevant for both economic and political reasons. The analysis of his survey data and his claims led many management practitioners to embrace the model, especially after the publication of his 1991 book,
Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. In 1980, Hofstede co-founded and became the first Director for the IRIC, the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, located at Tilburg University since 1998. Much of Hofstede's research on the basic dimensions of nations came through the IRIC. In 2001, Hofstede published an entirely re-written second edition of ''Culture's Consequences
. In 2010, a third edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind'' was published with Gert Jan Hofstede, Michael H. Bond and as co-authors. In this book, there were two new dimensions that were added, and the number of countries covered was between 76 and 93. This book also introduced the topic of organizational cultures as a separate and different phenomenon.
Critiques Despite the popularity of Hofstede's model, some critics have argued that his conceptualization of culture and its impact on people's behavior might be incorrect. The most cited criticism of his work is by Professor
Brendan McSweeney (Royal Holloway, University of London and Stockholm University), who argues that Hofstede's claims about the role of national culture indicates too much determinism that might be linked to fundamental flaws in his methodology. Hofstede replied to this critique, arguing that the second edition of his book had responded to many of McSweeney's concerns and that he viewed the resistance to his ideas as a sign that he was
shifting the prevalent paradigm in cross-cultural studies. Another key critique, which largely focuses on level of analysis, is by Professor
Barry Gerhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Professor
Meiyu Fang (National Central University, Taiwan), who point out that among other problems with Hofstede's research (and the way it is widely interpreted) is that his results actually only show that around 2 to 4 percent of variance in individual values is explained by national differences – in other words 96 percent, and perhaps more, is not explained. And that there is nothing in Hofstede's work that pertains to individual-level behaviours or actions. In a 2008 article in the
Academy of Management's journal, The Academy of Management Review,
Galit Ailon deconstructs ''Culture's Consequences'' by mirroring it against its own assumptions and logic. Ailon finds several inconsistencies at the level of both theory and methodology, and cautions against an uncritical reading of Hofstede's cultural dimensions.
Philippe d'Iribarne, director of research at the
CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in
Paris expressed concern that "a theory of culture that considers culture to be 'shared meaning' does not allow for representation of the forms of unity and continuity". Part of d'Iribarne's objections have been with the weaknesses of Hofstede's terminology in general and category names specifically (e.g., power distance as a culture as whole versus a culture's acceptance of hierarchy only within organizational settings). More pointedly, d'Iribarne questions the generalized conclusions that Hofstede draws from the data, imposing Hofstede's own value system on what the data show. For instance, d'Iribarne questioned Hofstede's conclusions from the uncertainty avoidance statistics, arguing that Hofstede superimposes his own view that data. For d'Iribarne, Hostede simply presumes that showing high stress at work correlates with weak uncertainty avoidance, while d'Iribarne asserts that the presence of high stress could just as readily indicate high stress results from high uncertainty avoidance, since no external control exists in low uncertainty avoidance cultures. Finally, d'Iribarne questions Hofstede's implicit assumption of uniformity in complex organizations, let alone entire national cultures. Such assumptions of uniformity are useful, d'Iribarne writes only "if one thinks of a culture specific to a close-knit community." Instead, though, d'Iribarne notes that in most situations, "society is split into more or less antagonistic groups" Other academics also point to a fundamental flaw in the common application of Hofstede's culture dimensions. Hofstede's culture dimensions and scores are national or "ecological" in nature and do not apply to
individual people living in the sampled countries: In Hofstede's analysis, the correlations of his culture variables are significant when aggregated to the national level but not significant at the individual level. This means that no cultural implications can be drawn about individual people living in a certain country; to do so is to commit an “
ecological fallacy”. To avoid this fallacy and resulting confusion Brewer and Venaik recommend avoiding the use of the Hofstede dimension scores in management research and training. The same authors compare the Hofstede culture dimension scores with equivalent dimension scores from the GLOBE culture model and show severe problems in face, discriminant and convergent validity across the two models.
Reception of his work Hofstede's books have appeared in 23 languages. His publications have been cited several ten thousand times, which makes him one of the currently most cited European social scientist. He received much recognition for his work in cross-cultural analysis. In 2004, the
Hanze University Groningen,
the Netherlands established the Geert Hofstede Lecture, a bi-annual conference in the area of intercultural communication. In 2006,
Maastricht University,
the Netherlands inaugurated a Geert Hofstede Chair in cultural diversity. In 2008, six European universities united to create the Master in International Communication (MIC), and named themselves the Geert Hofstede Consortium. In 2009, Reputation Institute, which "recognizes individuals who have greatly contributed to the field of reputation through both scholarship and practice", nominated Hofstede as the Best Scholar of the year. In October 2010,
Maastricht University School of Business and Economics launched the Geert Hofstede Fund, aiming at encouraging activities around multicultural interactions and research about the impact of cultural differences. == Archives ==