FAQDoes Magee‘s content include Hofstede?

Geert Hofstede is a Dutch organizational sociologist, born 1928, who studied the interactions between national cultures, for example within IBM in the 1970s. Hofstede concluded that there are four dimensions of culture: How much the less powerful members of institutions and organizations expect and accept that power is distributed unequally; How much members of the culture define themselves apart from their group memberships; The value placed on traditionally male or female values; How much members of a society are anxious about the unknown, and as a consequence, attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty.

Hofstede‘s work has been more or less expanded upon by many others. Then there are the results of the recent Globe Project, a network of social scientists and management scholars examining societal culture, organizational culture and organizational leadership. Their aim was to predict the impact of cultural variables on leadership and organizational processes.

I have looked at, but not studied, this academic research. In the 1990s I collaborated with a management institute in Bonn which used some of Hofstede‘s material. My sense is that the work by these interculturalists is valuable as an introduction, as one way of thinking about national cultures. It offers a kind of framework.

At the same time, it does not address the realities, the specific situations, the bilateral interactions, for example between Germans and Americans. It comes across theoretical. Dimensions of culture – whether they be four, seven, nine – make me nervous. They‘re attempts to categorize cultures, as a botanist would categorize species of plants. The social sciences have the tendancy to apply to inherently complex questions the tools and methods of the natural sciences: observation, quantification, categorization.

Frankly, we believe that this approach often misses the point. I sincerely believe that folks need to do their homework, to dive deep into another culture, over a long period of time, in order to understand it. First, you need to master that other culture‘s language, in order to enter into their categories of thought. If you can‘t listen to them in their language, if you can‘t read what they have written in their words, you can‘t begin to understand them. You don‘t have access. Mastering a foreign language takes time. Years. Many years.

You can‘t make an end-run around language. Language opens the door. It‘s the initial step. A prerequisite. Whenever someone claims to know another culture, or to at least be familiar with it, but turns not to be fluent in that culture‘s language, I immediately stop listening.

With the language you study the history, about how the society has developed, about the choices it has made and the consequences. The politics of the national culture need to be understood also, ideally from the inside, through involvement. And if your overall goal is to understand the influence of national culture on business, well, you need to work in that culture‘s business context. Again, for an extended period of time, in that country, among and with its people, in their language, as one of them, not as a temporary delegate for a few years, requiring of them to communicate with you in a language foreign to them.

Finally, living in that foreign culture over an extended period of time means that you are experiencing everyday life on a daily basis. And that involves literally thousands of interactions of all shapes and sizes. Just imagine for a minute those kinds of interactions in your home culture – in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, small town Ohio, in the Southwest, near Seattle – over five, ten, fifteen years. Neighborhoods, churches, stores, post offices, parks, transportation, sports, holidays, dentist, yardwork, attorneys, schools, relatives, birthdays, daytrips to the country, movies, Christmas, marriage, children, funerals, local politics. The list goes on almost indefinitely. The fullness of life. A culture‘s thinking, its logic, is deeply imbedded in all of these actions and interactions.

Now suddenly transplant yourself from your home culture into another. German. Japanese. Indonesian. Mexican. Russian. Lebanese. Chinese. Imbed yourself into any one of those cultures. Now imagine those five, ten, fifteen years of everyday life.

Allow me to provoke. Provoke in the sense of stimulate or call forth reflection and discussion. Who better understands, and can better explain, that foreign culture, you, with years of being imbedded in it – language, history, politics, business, daily life – or the social scientist observing it from the comfort of their campus office in their home culture?

So, I am instinctively skeptical, allergic, to mechanical approaches, to sophisticated quantitative analyses. Their conclusions leave me cold, they remain plastic, two-dimensional, lofty, detached, impersonal, abstract.

Understanding is participatory, not objective, not distanced. People, cultures, the histories of people are complex, multi-dimensional. You have to enter into, in order to begin the process of understanding. There are no shortcuts. Theories, constructs, models cannot substitute for understanding.

By the way, there is nothing new in what I have just stated. The interculturalists have not discovered anything. Differences between cultures have existed since time immemorial. Interactions, trade, migrations, wars, intermarrying, alliances. This is the stuff of human history. Throughout the ages people have understood the influence of culture on all forms of interaction. Those who did not understand, or understood but ignored, did so at their own peril. This is the case in war and peace, just as it is in global business.