Going Beyond Hofstede: Why We Need to and How

Abstract

In 1980 Geert Hofstede published his landmark study, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work Related Values. The book described what has been the largest survey of work values, encompassing 88,000 employees in 72 countries. An updated version expanded the survey to an additional ten countries and three regions (Hofstede, 2001). Arguably more important than the scale of the study was the framework it introduced. Based on the survey data, Hofstede put forth a new and parsimonious conceptualization of culture, accompanied by measurements and indexes. He proposed that culture is the “collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another” (1980, p. 13), and more specifically identified five universal values occurring to varying degrees in each country: individualism, masculinity, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. The framework translated the rather amorphous idea of culture into a tractable construct amenable to empirical research. Subsequently, the framework has been widely applied in various business disciplines, as well as spilling over into the social sciences.