Culture's consequences

Geert Hofstede built this cross-cultural study on survey responses from the staff of a large multinational firm, IBM, whose sales subsidiaries spread across dozens of countries. Because the jobs and the formal reporting structures were nearly identical everywhere, Hofstede could attribute the attitude and value gaps he found to national culture rather than to the work itself.

From this data he identified four dimensions for comparing cultures worldwide: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity. Each dimension is examined country by country, and the book groups nations according to how they score on them.

Hofstede also offers explanations for why national cultures took the shapes they did, drawing on climate, levels of economic development and historical processes. These arguments extend the book beyond statistics into anthropology and history.

Written for managers preparing for international postings, for teachers and for researchers, the book is dense and demands careful reading, but it provides a shared vocabulary and a body of data for anyone working across cultural borders.