Hofstede's Limitations Of National Culture

HOFSTEDE’S DIMENSIONS OF THE NATIONAL CULTURES

Geert Hosfede gives two definitions of “culture” in his books (Hosftede, 1991). In the first one culture is determined as refinement of the mind, which is associated with education, art and literature. The second definition, named “software of the mind”, determines the culture as collective programming of the mind that distinguishes a group of people or category of people from another group or category. This programming can be performed through education and social reproduction that are done in schools and families. Another way of transmission of culture is through the contact with individual on the same level of the society, for example children study from other children, teachers from other teachers,

Taking the nationality as a starting point the scores may not be applicable for each person or group of people. Being a relatively new notion of the relationship between the state and people, living in a particular territory, the nationality has been largely criticized to be used as a peculiarity of a human society. Thus, it was not accepted to be unit for analysis and comparison of cultures (Lenartowics & Roth, 2001; McSweeney, 2002; Jones, 2007). Another argument against the national culture is that several ethnic cultures compose one nation or one culture (society of one and the same culture) is parceled out between two or more countries. The dissolution of multi-ethnic countries in Europe (due to social developments, political decisions and military conflicts), for example, let to the appearance of new independent countries and new

Actually the authors have used as a background the cultural dimensions of Hofstedes’ model (Hofstede et al., 2010), finding similarities between the European Social Survey and Hofstede’s dimensions. The results of their analysis confirmed that some European countries (nations) have strong cultural variations within their territory, while others are homogeneous in terms of culture (Kaasa et al., 2013).

An earlier publication of Minkov and Hofstede (2012) discussed in details the meaning of the national culture as a concept for comparison in cross cultural management, cross cultural psychology and other fields. Their study has refuted several arguments against the concept of national culture. The authors have found that when basic cultural peculiarities are subject of comparison, the inside regions of any particular country tend to unite alongside the national lines, instead of disperse or intermix with regions from the neighbor countries with similar cultural