What is culture?

A reply to Baskerville
Geert Hofstede
Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation (IRIC),
University of Tilburg, PO Box 90153, Tilburg 5000 LE, The Netherlands
Abstract
Baskerville does not realize that there exist dierent paradigms in the social sciences about the meaning of culture,
leading to dierent research approaches. Her arguments are therefore largely irrelevant to cross-cultural accounting
research.
#2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
When I hear anyone talk of culture, I reach
for my revolver attributed to Hermann
Goering, 18931946
Some self-proclaimed fans of my work make me
feel that with such friends, I dont need any ene-
mies. Reading Rachel Baskervilles (2003) critique
gave me the unusual reverse sensation: with such
critics, I dont need any fans. Her careful analysis
of citations of my work up till 1998 must have cost
her a lot of time, and I nd it very helpful indeed.
The acknowledgements in Baskervilles article
reveal that it had a long publication history,
starting 1998. This explains why she missed the re-
written second edition of Cultures Consequences
which appeared in 2001, capitalizing on 20 years
of applications of the ideas in the 1980 edition.
From the over 1500 references it analyses, some
900 are posterior to the writing of the rst edition.
This makes parts of her critique rather obsolete.
Baskervilles argument runs about as follows.
My work, identifying four (later ve) dimensions
of (national) culture, has become more than a
super-classic. With some delay, accounting stud-
ies too have incorporated some or all of my
dimensions, following Gray (1988). However, my
work has rarely been cited by sociologists and
anthropologists, who are the only ones who know
about culture. Therefore I never studied culture.
Baskerville recognizes that my dimension indices
correlate with the results of other cross-national
studies, but these are not cultural dimensions,
but they reect mechanisms of social organiza-
tion, or strengths and opportunism of dierent
nations, which may be epiphenomenal to histor-
ical origins (Baskerville, 2003, p. 10).
Whether or not one calls these characteristics
culture, arent they precisely the ones account-
ing research is interested in when moving across
national borders? Most accounting researchers
couldnt care less about what anthropologists call
whatas little, by the way, as anthropologists
care about accounting research.
About my work not being cited by sociologists
and anthropologists: for sociologists I wonder whe-
ther that is true, as Baskerville still found 43 articles
in the Social Science Citation Index 19811998 cit-
ing me; in addition, she classied 126 articles as
0361-3682/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
doi:10.1016/S0361-3682(03)00018-7
Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 811813
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
E-mail address: hofstede@bart.nl (G. Hofstede).
URL: http://www.geerthofstede.nl.
business-related, organizations and those can
also be considered as (organization) sociology.
Pugh and Hicksons (1993) Great Writers on
Organizations puts my contribution next to those
of sociologists like Etzioni, Fayol, Gouldner,
Lindblom, Michels, Silverman and Weber.
Anthropologists have, indeed, shown little
interest in my approach (Baskerville found only
ve citations). An explanation is supplied in an
issue about Social anthropology, business stud-
ies, and cultural issues of the journal Interna-
tional Studies of Management and Organization
(1997), which Baskerville unfortunately over-
looked. The issues guest editor is Malcolm Chap-
man, an Oxford anthropologist who moved to the
School of Business of Leeds University. Chapman
describes how social anthropology and business
studies are separate worlds, using very dierent
paradigms: a focus on meaning, accepting the
subjectivity of the observer, in anthropology; a
focus on comparison and objectivity in business
studies. My own move in 1989 into a business
school, Chapman writes in his Preface, was
regarded, both among fellow anthropologists and
among the receiving community, as eccentric
perhaps laughable, perhaps reckless, probably
interesting, but certainly not normal. But he
continues: If anthropology has wielded little
inuence on business studies, then anthropology is
greatly to blame.
Chapmans Preface contains a section entitled
Geert Hofstede and comparative management,
from which I quote:
It is not possible to deal with culture in
the area of business and management without
becoming aware of the long shadow cast by
the work of Geert Hofstede (1980, 1991).
Hofstedes work is often regarded as
anthropological by those within business
and management studies. This is not necessa-
rily a misnomer, for no one denition trans-
cends others. It is worth noting, however, that
most British social anthropologists have not,
in my experience, even heard of Hofstede.
This may not be to their credit but it is inter-
esting as a gauge of the academic-institutional
status and lineage of Hofstedes work, which
is rmly rooted in the North American social-
psychological tradition and grew out of, and
was developed within, a rmly business- and
organization-oriented research perspective.
These are compelling reasons why an anthro-
pologist, even one exclusively concerned with
European matters (such as myself), would not
readily nd Hofstede in view on the intellectual
horizon. For myself, when I rst came into
temporary possession of Cultures Con-
sequences in 1990, I found it strange and quirky
and well outside the research and intellectual
traditions with which I was familiar . . . It was
with growing surprise that I discovered that
Hofstedes work, far from being strange and
quirky, was central to academic dealing with
cultural matters in the business and manage-
ment arena. (Chapman, 1997, p.18).
Chapmans remarks certainly dont support
Baskervilles invitation to cross-cultural account-
ing researchers of rejecting my work and consult-
ing current social anthropologists instead.
Baskervilles article contains a number of other
criticisms, but they are pinpricks immaterial to her
main argument. In the 2001 edition of Cultures
Consequences (p. 73) I listed ve standard criti-
cisms of my approach found in the literature.
Baskervilles comments deal primarily with point 2:
Nations are not the best units for studying cultures,
to which my answer was: True, but they are usually
the only kind of units available for comparison and
better than nothing. Nation states cannot be equa-
ted with national cultures, but does this render
conclusions about cultural dierences based on
nation-level data invalid? Could it be that 90% of
such conclusions still hold? And isnt dierences
between nations precisely what accounting and
business research are usually concerned with?
The proof of the validity pudding is in the eat-
ing, and this proof is available on two levels. The
micro level is the large number of signicant
correlations of country-culture dimension scores
against data from a wide variety of other sources,
found by myself and others, and recognized by Bas-
kerville. The new edition of Cultures Consequences
(Hofstede, 2001, p. 520) summarizes over 400 sig-
nicant correlations. The macro level is the
812 G. Hofstede / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 811813
increasing frequency with which others have used
and continue to use my work, as Baskerville has
kindly shown in her citations analysis. Does she
really think that all these authors would refer to
my work if it does not contribute to understanding
the problems they address?
Baskerville did not read my work very carefully.
The justication of my dimensions in earlier work
by Inkeles and Levinson was not introduced in my
1991 popular book as she arguesit already g-
ured in the rst edition of Cultures Consequences
(Hofstede, 1980, p. 47).
Baskerville refers to replications of my work
that failed to produce the same dierences
between countries. The rst question, which critics
rarely ask, is how professional these replications
were carried out. Were samples well matched,
questions well formulated to deal with the same
issues, statistical analyses correctly carried out?
Even publications in respectable journals do not
always satisfy these criteria: amateurs enter the
cross-cultural study eld as elephants in a china
shop (for example, Spector, Cooper, & Sparks,
2001 and my reaction in Hofstede, 2002). And
what if competently done replications fail to con-
cur with my ndings? The reasons may be (1) sta-
tistical, (2) methodological, or (3) epistemological.
1. Statistics predicts deviations for some of
the smaller replications, many of them on
just two countries. My indices were based
on trends found across 40 countries. Ima-
gine 40 dots in a two-dimensional plot: not
every subset of two dots needs to conrm
the overall trend. Sndergaards (1994)
meta-analysis across 61 studies showed that
when taken together, the small replications
did conrm my ndings.
2. A methodological reason for occasional
non-conrmation is that the applicability of
survey questions will always depend on the
type of respondents. There is no cross-cul-
tural questionnaire that applies regardless
of the research population. For example, a
replication in consumer research across 15
European countries (de Mooij, 2001; Hof-
stede, 2001, p. 187) did not conrm the
Power Distance dimension, as consumers
were not selected on criteria relevant to
their experience with power.
3. Finally, non-conrmation may be an
authentic falsication. As I wrote at the end
of the second edition of Cultures Con-
sequences, I see my work as exploratory
research, not as a nished theory. Inspired
by Karl Popper (1959), I made an eort to
formulate my conclusions in a tentative and
falsiable wayrather unlike many current
theories in social anthropology. Basker-
villes remarks are welcome as a contribu-
tion to the discussion, but I cannot see how
they should falsify my theory.
References
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