Hofstede Essay

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THE EUROPEAN UNION IN THE LIGHT OF HOFSTEDE’S DIMENSIONS
Table 1 summarizes the Hofstede’s dimension (Hofstede et al., 2010) for all Member States of the European Union and for 3 of the Associate Countries (Candidate States): Albania, Serbia and Turkey.
Though the cultural dimensions of Cyprus are not included in the countries, described by Hofstede’s model (Hofstede et al., 201o), the same indexes as for Greece are used here, as suggested by the work of Stylianou, Kyriakoullis, & Savva (2012). The same assumption was applied in the paper of De Angeli & Kyriakoullis (2006).

Figure 1 illustrates the Power Distance Index from Table 1, after the arrangement of the countries by increment of the PDI. Austria and Denmark are the countries in Europe …show more content…

It can be easily seen, however, that the countries with highest investment in production, retailing and brands (European Apparel and Textile Confederation, 2015) like Italy, France, United Kingdom and Germany are demonstrably on the individualistic side of the scale. At the same time countries from Eastern Europe, where big share of the outsourcing from these countries is situated (like Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic), are on the collectivistic side of the …show more content…

6 show the increment of the Indulgence Index for the investigated European countries. It is clear that a substantial part of the cultures of the continent rather put down the gratification of people’s needs and regulate them via creation of exacting social norms. It is interesting that all countries, having high employment in the textile and clothing industries belong to the group of restraint cultures, having Indulgence Index below 50. In fact only 10 of the investigated countries can be assessed as having indulgent cultures (all of them being Member States). The United Kingdom is the only country in Top 10 of employment in textiles and clothing sector, which have high IND (over 50).

Figure 5. Long Term Orientation of European Union Member States (EU-28) plus Albania, Serbia and Turkey.

Figure 6. Indulgence vs. Restraints of European Union Member States (EU-28) plus Albania, Serbia and

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