Abstract
Geert Hofstede published his first book in 1980, titled "Culture's Consequences", at a time where empirical studies were particularly needed instead of proliferating theories on cultural issues (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). His findings were, in their own way, revolutionary.
But as Kuhn mentioned earlier (1970)"paradigm shifts in any science meet with strong initial resistance" (Hofstede, 2001). Hofstede has indeed faced large criticism regarding various aspects of his research and one of them is identified here.
In his research, Hofstede claims to have identified a series of cultural differences amongst various national cultures, but does not claim to have found precisely all characteristics of all national cultures. Also, he recognizes the existence of other possible classifications of National culture (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005a).
In order to realize his study, Hofstede used three surveys (Mc Sweeney, p. 91, 2002), two from IBM, the other from "The Chinese Culture Connection (1987)". In these surveys, he selected what he felt were pertinent questions in the right countries as he expected the answers to be good in analysing statistics. Then statistics results and theoretical reasoning brought him to identify five bi-polar dimensions in 40 countries. All of these countries were administered a certain index for each of these dimensions.
Tags: Geert Hofstede, Culture's Consequences
