Cultural Differences in a Globalizing World
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CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD BY MICHAEL MINKOV FOREWORD BY GEERT HOFSTEDE United Kingdom North America Japan India Malaysia China Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2011 Copyright r 2011 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85724-613-4 Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Howard House, Environmental Management System has been certified by ISOQAR to ISO 14001:2004 standards Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print Contents Quotes vii Acknowledgements ix Foreword xi Introduction xv 1. The Study of Culture and its Origins 1 2. Major Cross-Cultural Studies 45 3. Industry versus Indulgence 51 4. Monumentalism versus Flexumility 93 5. Hypometropia versus Prudence 137 6. Exclusionism versus Universalism 179 7. A Cultural Map of the World 225 8. Conclusions and Final Remarks 237 Research Notes 241 References 257 About the Author 281 Author Index 283 Subject Index 291 Studying culture is asking for trouble. Geert Hofstede Dutch organizational psychologist and cultural anthropologist It has been the office of others to reassure; ours to unsettle. Clifford Geertz American cultural anthropologist If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing. Sir Kingsley William Amis English novelist, poet, and critic Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my illustrious mentor and personal friend, Geert Hofstede, the father of modern cross-cultural research. He guided my academic development for a decade, served as an official reviewer of my PhD dissertation in social anthropology, and recommended my work for publication by leading international publishing houses. I have found Geert to be not only a great academic but also a remarkable person. For this book and for my academic work in general, I am also indebted to a number of other scholars: Vesselin Blagoev, Vice-rector of International University College, Sofia, Bulgaria, for supporting my academic endeavors. Ronald Inglehart, Chairman of the World Values Survey, for generously sharing the results of the World Values Survey with the whole world, providing me personally with some of his research findings and allowing me to reproduce copyrighted material. Romie Littrell of the Auckland University of Technology, Mark Peterson of the Florida Atlantic University, Peter Smith of the University of Sussex (emeritus), and Evert van de Vliert of the University of Groningen (emeritus), for writing positive reviews of my work and helping me with constructive suggestions for improvement. Melvin Ember, the late editor of Cross-Cultural Research, where I published my first peer-reviewed cross-cultural studies. Melvin believed in my work and supported it despite the novel and bold elements in it. Foreword This book is the breakthrough in cross-cultural research that we have been waiting for. It was inspired by Michael Minkov’s linguistic and anthropological scholarship and our long academic collaboration and personal friendship. It also draws on a substantial international experience. Minkov, known to his friends as Misho, has studied and worked in his native Bulgaria, Tunisia, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Slovenia, and other exotic places, including the United States. His studies and publications include ancient languages, anthropology, and management science. Our acquaintance started on December 7, 1999, when my son Gert Jan Hofstede forwarded me an email ‘‘from a Bulgarian disciple and admirer.’’ It was the beginning of an exchange of ideas continuing to the present day. After Misho arranged for the Bulgarian translation and publication of my 1991 book Cultures and Organizations; Software of the Mind, we met in Sofia in 2001 during its presentation, on the occasion of which the New Bulgarian University granted me an honorary doctorate. My own comparisons of national cultures were first published as a book called Culture’s Consequences in 1980. They were based on both intense personal experience and the statistical analysis of survey data. By exceptionally good luck, I had access to an international file with the answers of similar people in different countries to the same questions about their values. As far as I know, at that time my matched samples of IBM employees across more than 40 countries formed the largest cross- cultural survey database available anywhere. In the years following my book’s publication, more and more researchers and organizations around the world produced and published comparative cross-national data sets. Some followed my method of clustering the answers into cross-national dimensions. Although the names, numbers, and contents of the resulting dimensions varied between studies, the dimension approach itself developed into a true new paradigm for cross-cultural research. Country scores on dimensions from different studies were often significantly correlated. In 2001, I published an entirely rewritten second edition of Culture’s Consequences, trying to integrate all new studies that meaningfully related to mine and contributed to the interpretation of the dimensions I had found. I often remarked to colleagues that if I had to start all over again, I would have a much larger choice of data to work with. I would probably have begun with the World Values Survey, which covered a xii Foreword broader range of respondents, more value domains and more countries. Also, it repeated itself about every five years, showing developments over time. To my excitement, Misho Minkov was doing exactly what I said I would have done if I had to start all over. He had thoroughly investigated all large cross-cultural databases in the constantly growing World Wide Web, looking for dimensions of culture that are meaningful from an anthropological and practical point of view. And, as I would have done, he had started with the World Values Survey. What I also found enriching is that Misho is Bulgarian while I am Dutch. National cultural differences are reflected in the minds of researchers and authors as much as in those of their respondents. The majority of cross-cultural researchers are Americans who rarely read anything non-American, so their cultural bias is seldom exposed. Misho brings a new cultural perspective and sheds new light on the cultures of the world. In 2007, Misho Minkov wrote an English-language book on cultural differences — the first edition of the present one. After reading it, I felt that some of his discoveries could be used to enrich and expand the Hofstede model of cultural differences. An academic collaboration arose between Minkov and the two Hofstedes (myself and my eldest son Gert Jan) that has continued to the present time. Most importantly, in 2010 Misho and Gert Jan became my co-authors for the third edition of Cultures and Organizations; Software of the Mind, first published in 1991 and by now translated into 17 other languages. They both contributed significantly to the enrichment and expansion of the Hofstede doctrine that we discuss there. But the full picture of Misho’s original ideas can only be obtained from the book now in front of you. It is with great pleasure that I recommend it as I believe that it represents a substantial contribution to the existing body of knowledge on cultural differences. Misho tackles a number of important global issues in a new way. He discusses societal differences in speed of economic growth, thrift, and saving, attitudes toward work, leisure, freedom of speech and deviations from norms, happiness, educational achievement, religiousness and national pride, suicide rates, lethal violence, HIV and adolescent fertility, corruption, road death tolls, and various aspects of the rule of law (to name only a few of the important indicators analyzed in this book) and finds that they form convincing cultural structures that shed light on the national cultures of all major regions of the world and help us understand their peculiarities. His analysis represents a blend of established theories and novel interpretations that will certainly intrigue most readers. As some reviewers of previous books by Minkov noted, when he feels that he has to choose between Western political correctness and what he considers a scientifically justifiable statement, he prefers the latter. He is bold enough to reject the view that any discussion of a potential link between culture and biology is a mortal sin. Although he realizes that the exposure of some cultural differences — as those involving economic growth, educational achievement, or murder rates — may create an unpalatable taste in some mouths, he devotes specific attention to these phenomena, his philosophy being that a spade must be called a spade. Minkov’s Foreword xiii native Bulgaria does not receive a privileged treatment either. His cultural portraits are motivated by a strong desire for objectivity. His statistical analyses suggest that he has reached his goal. It is naturally up to the readers to decide how they feel about the interpretations of those analyses. Geert Hofstede Velp, the Netherlands, September 2010 Introduction Why I Have Written This Book Globalization seems pervasive. So, one might think that the world’s cultures must be converging into one homogenized global value system.