Abandon Hofstede-based research? Not yet! A perspective from the philosophy of the social sciences

ABSTRACT

Hofstede’s framework has been immensely popular among practitioners and researchers because of its undeniable practicality. Despite several limitations, the framework has been widely adopted and in continued use. However, recent scholarly critiques have raised serious concerns, even calling for the rejection of the future use of the framework. A deeper analysis is necessary to understand the fundamental considerations in knowledge creation before contemplating an abandonment of a long research tradition. This article systematically examines Hofstede’s framework from a philosophy of science perspective by examining its ontological and epistemological considerations, and related issues, and presents important implications for researchers and managers.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemology
• Hofstede
• national culture
• ontology
• philosophy of the social sciences
• pragmatics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editor Professor Rowley and anonymous reviewers for constructive suggestions that helped improve the manuscript; Arijit Chatterjee, Devi Vijay and Zahid Riaz for reviews; and Mark F. Peterson, Geert Hofstede and Vasyl Taras for their kind guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the original work, Hofstede (1980) surveyed data on work-related values from more than 116,000 IBM employees across 72 countries in 1968–1972. The factor-analysis for a reduced sample of 50 countries and three regions revealed four statistically independent dimensions to explain the inter-country variation in the survey responses. Hofstede named these four dimensions as power-distance, uncertainty-avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity-femininity and assigned scores varying between 0 and 100 to these dimensions for each country in his sample. In a later study across 23 countries, Hofstede and Bond (1984) discovered a new dimension, initially termed the Confucian dimension, and later christened Long-Term Orientation, which was added to the Hofstede (1991) framework and replicated using the World Value Survey (Hofstede and Minkov 2010; Minkov and Hofstede 2010). Finally, Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov (2010) also included Indulgence-Restraint as the sixth dimension of culture, to provide the six-dimensional Hofstede framework that is now widely used.

2. Cultures appear to be static but are continuously undergoing change, however, there is layering of traditions, hence meta-traditions and myths arise as mechanisms to cope with the dissonance.

3. Salmon (1998, 257) argued that ‘we must build into our theory of explanation the condition that causes can explain effects, but effects do not explain causes’. Whether national cultural differences (effects) exist due to differential mental programming (causes) manifesting as differing value systems in different nations or vice versa may benefit from a deeper analysis from a perspective of scientific explanation.

4. For instance, Beugelsdijk et al. (2017, 43) in a commentary on studies that used the much-criticized ‘cultural distance’ construct using Hofstede’s dimensions opine: ‘it is important to realize that Hofstede-inspired country-level culture research is more than just distance research. Hofstede himself did not develop the distance concept; it was “us” (i.e. the international business and management community), as “heavy” users of his framework on national cultural differences that allowed the cultural distance concept to feature so prominently in national culture research in international business. It is important to keep in mind that cultural differences and cultural distance are not the same. In fact, one can see value in Hofstede’s effort to differentiate cultures but be critical of the idea to measure cultural distance’.

5. Welzel (2013) argues that emancipative values do not guide people’s actions as long as existential constraints on human life are powerful. However, such values start guiding people’s actions or ‘freedoms’ gain utility when living conditions improve. The cool water hypothesis refers to cool temperatures with continuous seasonal rainfall and permanently navigable waterways, which is prominent in certain geographies of the world (Welzel 2013: 340). This set of conditions provide disease security and water autonomy, and therefore people in these areas were able to progress more quickly towards technological advancement, with greater utility of freedoms and thereby achieve human empowerment early on as compared to people from other areas or countries.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ramya T. Venkateswaran

Ramya T. Venkateswaran is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. She joined academia after completing more than a decade of corporate work experience. Her research interests are in the areas of national culture in international business, critical perspectives in strategic management, and strategy-as-practice. She has published in the Journal of Critical Perspectives on International Business and IIMB Management Review and presented her research at several international conferences. She was recognized as a Best Instructor in the 2018 track of the X-Culture project. Her email is [email protected].

Abhoy K. Ojha

Abhoy K. Ojha is a Professor in the Organization Behaviour area at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. His research interest is in the area of Organization Theory, particularly Institutional Theory. He also has an interest in Philosophy of Social Sciences and teaches a course on the subject to the doctoral students. He has published in Indian and international journals and is quite active as reviewer and presenter at conferences. His email is [email protected].