International Studies of Management & Organization

ISSN: 0020-8825 (Print) 1558-0911 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mimo20

Culture and Organizations

Geert Hofstede

To cite this article: Geert Hofstede (1980) Culture and Organizations, International Studies of
Management & Organization, 10:4, 15-41, DOI: 10.1080/00208825.1980.11656300

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00208825.1980.11656300

Published online: 09 Feb 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1

View related articles

Citing articles: 14 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=mimo20

Download by: [University of Sussex Library] Date: 24 August 2016, At: 08:03
Int. Studies of Man. & Org., Vol. X, No.4, pp. 15-41
M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1981

CULTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS

Geert Hofstede (The Netherlands)

Social systems can exist only because human behavior is not

random, but to some extent predictable. For each prediction of
behavior we try to take both the person and the situation into
account. We assume that each person carries a certain amount
of mental programming that is stable over time and causes that
person to display more or less the same behavior in similar
situations. Our prediction is never completely sure; but the
more accurately we know a person's mental programming and
the more accurately we know the situation, the more sure our
prediction will be.
It is possible that our mental programs are physically deter-
mined by states of our brain cells. We cannot directly observe
mental programs; what we can observe is only behavior, words
or deeds. When we observe behavior, we infer from it the
presence of stable mental programs. This type of inference is
not unique to the social sciences; it exists, for example, in
physics as well, where the intangible concept of "forces" is
inferred from its manifestations in the movement of objects. (.!)
Like "forces" in physics, "mental programs" are intangibles,
and the terms we use in social science to describe them are

This article is a modified version of the first chapter of the

author's book Culture's Consequences (Beverly Hills, Calif.:
Sage Publications, 1980).
Dr. Hofstede is now Director, Human Resources, Fasson
Europe, Leyden, the Netherlands.

15
16 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

constructs. A construct is "not directly accessible to observa-

tion but inferable from verbal statements and other behaviors
and useful in predicting still other observable and measurable
verbal and nonverbal behavior" (Levitin, 1973. P. 492). Con-
structs do not "exist" in an absolute sense: we define them into
existence, as Christian Morgenstern did to his Nasobem. (~)
What we actually do when we try to understand social sys-
tems is use models. Models are lower-level systems that we
can better understand and that we substitute for what we cannot
understand. We simplify because we have no other choice. It
is in this simplification that our subjectivity enters the process.
What it means for the use of constructs is that the definition of
constructs in social science reflects not only its object but also
the specific mental programming of the scholar who makes or
borrows the particular constructs. Therefore, no single defini-
tion of a construct in social science is likely to do justice to its
complexity (Williams, 1968. P. 283).
A cursory inventory in social science literature (anthropol-
ogy, economics, political science, psychology, sociology) of con-
structs dealing with human mental programs in some way or
another yielded the following fifty terms:

aspirations goals motives residues

attitudes habits myths rules
beliefs ideas needs satisfaction
cathexes ideologies norms sentiments
culture instinct objectives standards
derivations intentions obligations stereotypes
desires interests opinions temperament
dispositions life styles paradigms traits
drives models perceptions utilities
emotions morale personality valences
ethics morals philosophies values
ethos mores preferences
expectancies motivation purposes

No two of these terms are exactly synonymous, but many over-

Culture and Organizations 17

lap to some extent. Several of the terms are used to mean dif-
ferent things in different subdisciplines and by different - or
even the same - authors; and even if they are meant to refer
to the same thing, definitions vary.
Among the fifty terms, some can be applied to the mental
programs of individuals (e.g., personality); some apply only to
collectivities (e.g., culture); and some, to both. In fact, every
person's mental program is partly unique and partly shared
with others. We can distinguish"at least three levels of unique-
ness in mental programs, as pictured in Figure 1.

Individual

Collective

Universal

Figure 1. Three levels of uniqueness in human mental pro-

gramming.

The least unique but most basic is the universal level of men-
tal programming, which is shared by all, or almost all, man-
18 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

kind. This is the biological "operating system" of the human

body; but it includes a range of expressive behaviors, such as
laughing and weeping, and associative and aggressive behaviors,
which are also found to some extent in higher animals.
The collective level of mental programming is shared with
some but not all other people; it is common to people belonging
to a certain group or category, but different from the program-
ming of people belonging to other groups or categories. The
whole area of subjective human culture (called "subjective" to
distinguish it from "obj ecti ve" artifacts; see Triandis, 1972.
P. 4) belongs to this level. It includes the language in which we
express ourselves; the deference we show to our elders; the
physical distance between ourselves and other people that we
maintain in order to feel comfortable; and the way we eat, make
love, and defecate.
The individual level of human programming is the truly unique
part: no two people are programmed exactly alike, even if they
are identical twins reared together. This is the level of indi vid-
ual personality; it provides for a wide range of alternati ve be-
haviors within the same collective culture.
Mental programs can be inherited - transferred in our genes
- or they can be learned after our birth. From the three levels
in Figure 1, the bottom, "universal" level is most likely entirely
inherited: it is that part of our genetic information that is com-
mon to the entire human species. At the top, "individual" level,
at least part of our programming must be inherited; it is diffi-
cult to explain otherwise the differences in capabilities and
temperament among children reared in very similar environ-
ments. It is at the middle, collective, level that most or all of
our mental programming is learned, which is already shown by
the fact that we share it with people who went through the same
learning process but do not have the same genes. The existence
of the American people as a phepomenon is one of the clearest
imaginable illustrations of the force of learning: with a multi-
tude of genetic roots, it demonstrates a collective mental pro-
gramming that is striking to the non-American. The transfer
of collective mental programs is a social phenomenon, which,
Culture and Organizations 19

according to Durkheim (1895. P. 107), we should try to explain

socially and not reduce to something else, like race. Societies,
organizations, and groups have ways of conserving and passing
on mental programs from generation to generation, with an ob-
stinacy that many people tend to underestimate. (~)
The learning and transferring of collective mental programs
continues throughout our lives, but we learn most and most easily
when we are very young: when our minds are still relatively
empty, programs are most easily registered. Intelligence
versus age curves usually show a very rapid development of
intelligence in the early years, from two to about seven, with
a slowing down after age nine (Bloom, 1964. P. 64). Adequate
measures of personality development are harder to get at; but
such characteristics as intellectual interest, dependency, and
aggression seem to a considerable extent to be developed be-
fore age five (Bloom, 1964. P. 177). What applies to these in-
di vidual characteristics should apply equally to learned collec-
tive characteristics: most of them are developed early in a
person's life.

Values

Two key constructs are values and culture. Values are an

attribute of both individuals and collectivities; culture presup-
poses a collectivity. I define a value as "a broad tendency to
prefer certain states of affairs over others." This isa sim-
plified version of the more precise anthropological definition
by Kluckhohn (1951b. P. 395): "A value is a conception, ex-
plicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic
of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from
available modes, means and ends of actions." It is also in line
with the definition of Rokeach (1968. Pp. 159-60): "To say
that a person 'has a value' is to say that he has an enduring
belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence
is personally and socially preferable to alternative modes of
conduct or end-states of existence." These definitions reserve
the word "value" for mental programs that are relatively non-
20 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

specific: the same "value can be activated in a variety of sit-

uations." Rokeach thinks that an adult possesses "only several
dozens of instrumental values and perhaps only a handful of
terminal values" (Rokeach, 1968. P. 162). For mental pro-
grams that are more specific, Rokeach and others use the
terms "attitudes" and "beliefs."
Becaus,e' our values are programmed early in our lives, they
are nOQritional (although we may subjectively feel ours to be
perfectly rational!). In fact, values determine our subjective
definition of rationality. "Values are ends, not means, and their
desirability is either nonconsciously taken for granted (a zero-
order belief) or seen as a direct derivation from one's experi-
ence or from some external authority (a first-order belief)"
(Bern, 1970. P. 16). Our values are mutually related and form
value systems or hierarchies; but these systems need not be in
a state of harmony: most people hold simultaneously several
conflicting values, such as ''freedom'' and "equality." Our in-
ternal value conflicts are one of the sources of uncertainty in
social systems: events in one sphere of life may activate latent
values that suddenly affect our behavior in other spheres of life.
A change in our perception of a situation may swing the balance
in an internal value conflict, in particular, the extent to which
we perceive a situation as "favorable" or "critical."
Values have both intensity and direction (Kluckhohn, 1951b.
Pp. 413-14. He refers to ''intensity'' and "modality."). Mathe-
matically, values have a size and a sign; they can be repre-
sented by arrows along a line. H we "hold" a value, this means
that the issue involved has a certain relevance for us (intensity)
and that we identify certain outcomes as "good" and others as
"bad" (direction). For example, "the amount of money we have"
may be highly relevant to us (fntensity), and we may consider
"more" as good and "less" as bad (direction); but someone else
may differ from us with regard to this value in intensity,
direction, or both. A person who takes the Christian Bible (St.
Mark 10: 21-25) seriously could consider having money equally
relevant, but with a reversed direction sign, "more" being bad,
and "less" being good. For still another person, the entire
Culture and Organizations 21

issue of having money may be less relevant. In some primitive

societies, "witchcraft" is both relevant and good; in medieval
Europe, it was relevant and bad; to most of us today, it is sim-
ply irrelevant.
We should further distinguish between values as the desired
and values as the desirable: what people actually desire versus
what they think ought to be desired. Although the two are, of
course, not independent, they should not be equated. Equating
them is a ''positivistic fallacy" (Levitin, 1973. P. 497); in re-
search it leads to confusion between reality and social desir-
ability. In most psychological and sociological research liter-
ature, "social desirability" is treated as something undesirable
for the researcher. The term is used in two ways: as a quality
of certain measurement items, or as a personality construct of
the respondents (Phillips and Clancy, 1972. P.923). In both
senses it usually represents "noise" in the measurement. In
the study of values, however, asking for the desirable is per-
fectly respectable; it is part and parcel of the phenomenon
studied. So in this case "social desirability" in our measure-
ments is not undeSirable; we just have to realize that we are
dealing with two different kinds of values.
AVOiding the positivistic fallacy is especially important if we
try to relate values to behavior. Responding to questionnaires
or interviews is also a form of behavior, but I shall distinguish
"words" (questionnaires, interviews, meetings, speeches) from
"deeds" (nonverbal behavior). Values should never be equated
with deeds, for the simple reason that behavior depends on both
the person and the situation; but values as the desired are at
least closer to deeds than values as the desirable. The de-
sired-desirable distinction relates to several other distinc-
tions, as illustrated in the accompanying table.
This table refers to norms of value; we can speak of norms as
soon as we deal with a collecti vity. In the case of the desired, the
norm is statistical: it indicates the values actually held by the ma-
jority. (4) In the case of the desirable, the norm is absolute or de-
ontological (pertaining to what is ethically right). The desired re-
1ates more to pragmatic issues, the desirable, to ideology.
22 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

The Distinction between the Desired and the Desirable

and Associated Distinctions
Nature of the value
Distinguishing
characteristics The desired The desirable
Dimensions of Intensity Direction
the value
Nature of corres- Statistical, phenom- Absolute, deontol-
ponding norms of enological, prag- ogical, ideological
value matic
Corresponding Choice and differen- Approval or dis-
behavior tial effort allocation approval*
Dominant outcome Deeds and/or words Words
Terms used in mea- Important, success- Good, right, agree,
suring instrument ful, attractive, pre- ought, should
ferred
Affective meaning Activity plus eval- Evaluation only
of these terms uation
Person referred to in Me, you People in general
measuring instrument
*The distinction between approval and choice, etc., is based
on Kluckhohn (1951b. Pp. 404-405).

The association among the various rows in the table should be

seen as probabilistic, not rigid; for example, we may approve with
deeds rather than words, or what is desired may never become ex-
pressed in deeds. There remains a discrepancy between actual be-
havior (deeds) and the desired, but there is another discrepancy be-
tween the desired and the desirable. Norms for the desirable
can be completely detached from behavior (Adler, 1956. P. 277).
The tolerable size of the discrepancies may differ from person
to person and from group to group, depending on both
Culture and Organizations 23

personality and culture. In Catholicism, the practice of confessing

can be seen as a device for coping with both discrepancies and thus
making them tolerable. Ideological indoctrination will more easily
affect the desirable than the desired; it is possible that itwidens
the gap between the two without changing the desired.
A related issue is whether there are absolute values at all
or only relative ones. Anthropologists have tried to identify
absolute values in the form of cultural universals from a phe-
nomenological aspect (Bidney, 1962. P. 450). The systems
philosopher Ervin Laszlo (1973) concludes that such cultural
universals exist and argues from the deontological aspect that
"good" in absolute terms is what contributes to the survival of
the world system, and that error tolerance for the world has
become so small that relativism is obsolete. His position, how-
ever, itself reflects a value choice. The problem is that man
is at the same time the source of values and their instrument -
a problem for which, as far as I know, systems theory has no
solution. A comparative study of human values in any case pre-
supposes in the student a certain amount of relativism, or at
least tolerance of deviant values.

Culture

Culture has been defined in many ways. Kluckhohn (1951a.

P. 86, note 5) quotes the following as a consensus of anthropolog-
ical definitions: "Culture consists in patterned ways of think-
ing' feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by
symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human
groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential
core of culture consists of traditional (Le. historically derived
and selected) ideas and especially their attached values." Kroe-
ber and Parsons (1958. P. 583) arrive at a cross-disciplinary
definition of culture as "transmitted and created content and
patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic-meaningful sys-
tems as factors in the shaping of human behavior and the arti-
facts produced through behavior." Triandis (1972. P. 4) dis-
tinguishes "subjective" culture from its expression in "objec-
24 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

tive" artifacts and defines the former as "a cultural group's

characteristic way of perceiving the man-made part of its en-
vironment." My personal definition is that culture is the collec-
ti ve programming of the human mind that distinguishes the
members of one human group from those of another. Culture,
in this sense, is a system of collectively held values.
Culture is to a human collectivity what personality is to an
individual. Personality is defined by Guilford (1959) as the in-
teractive aggregate of personal characteristics that influence
an individual's response to the environment. Culture could be
defined as the interactive aggregate of common characteristics
that influence a human group's response to its environment.
Culture determines the identity of a human group in the same
way that personality determines the identity of an individual.
Moreover, the two interact; culture and personality is a classic
term for psychological anthropology (Barnouw, 1973). Cultural
traits can sometimes be measured by personality tests.
The word culture is most commonly reserved for societies
(in the modern world we speak of "nations") or for ethnic or re-
gional groups, but it can also be applied to other human collec-
tivities or categories: an organization, a profession, a family.
In this paper, to avoid confusion, I shall reserve the word cul-
ture for societies, and in other cases use subculture. The de-
gree of cultural integration varies from one SOciety to another,
and may be especially low for some of the newer nations. Most
subcultures within a nation, however, still share common traits
that make their members recognizable to foreigners as belong-
ing to their society.
There must be mechanisms in societies that permit the main-
tenance of stability in culture patterns across many generations.
I suggest that such mechanisms operate as in Figure 2 (in which
the terminology is taken partly from Berry, 1975, and elements
can be recognized from the cybernetic hierarchy of Par-
sons, 1977. P. 10).
In the center is a system of societal norms, consisting of the
value systems (the mental programs) shared by most of the pop-
ulation (Parsons would call this the cultural system). Their
Culture and Organizations 25

OUTSIDE INFLUENCES
Forces of nature
Forces of man:
Trade, conquest
Scientific discovery

ORIGINS SOCIETAL NORMS CONSEQUENCES

Ecological factors: Structure and
Geographic Value systems functioning of
Economic shared by institutions:
Demographic majority Family patterns
Genetic/hygienic Role differentiation
Historical Social stratification
Technological Socialization em-
Urbanization phases
Education
Religion
Political structure
Legislation
Architecture
Theory develop-
ment
_1' Reinforcement j'
Figure 2. The stabilizing of culture patterns.
origins are a variety of ecological factors (in the sense of fac-
tors affecting the physical environment). The societal norms
have led to the development and pattern maintenance of social
institutions with a particular structure and way of functioning.
These include the family, education systems, politics, and leg-
islation. These institutions, once they have become facts, re-
inforce the societal norms and the ecological conditions that led
to them. Institutions may be changed, but this does not neces-
sarily affect the societal norms; and when these norms remain
unchanged, the persistent influence of a majority value system
patiently molds the new institutions until their structure and
26 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

functioning are again adapted to the societal norms. An exam-

ple of this process is the history of France since Louis XIV
(Peyrefitte, 1976). Change comes mainly from the outside,
through forces of nature (changes of climate, silting up of har-
bors) or forces of man (trade, conquest, colonization). The ar-
row of outside influences is deliberately directed at the origins,
not at the societal norms themselves. I believe that norms
change rarely by direct adoption of outside values, but rather
through a shift in ecological conditions: technological, eco-
nomic, hygienic. In general, norm shifts will be gradual, unless
the outside influences are particularly violent (as in the case
of military conquest or deportation).
One of the most effective ways of changing mental programs of
individuals is changing behavior first (Bem, 1970. P. 60). That val-
ue change has to precede behavior change is a nai've (idealistic) as-
sumption that neglects the contribution of the situation to actual be-
havior. This applies on the level of societies as well. Kunkel (1970.
P. 76), dealing with the economic development of societies, con-
cludes that "The major problem of economic development is not the
alteration of character, values or attitudes, but the change of those
selected aspects of man's social environment which are relevant
to the learning of new behavior patterns." I would in this case
omit "social."
The system in Figure 3 is in a homeostatic (self-regulating)
quasi-equilibrium. History has shown cases of peoples that,
through such a system, have maintained an identity over hun-
dreds and thousands of years, even in the face of such sweeping
changes as loss of independence, deportation, or loss of lan-
guage; examples are Jews, Gypsies, and Basques (Spicer, 1971).
Other peoples in similar conditions have disappeared, however,
when their self-regulating cycle was too much disturbed by out-
side influences. Obviously, both the strength of the existing
self-regulation and the strength of the outside forces have
played a role in these cases.
Culture and Organization
As nearly all our mental programs are affected by values,
Culture and Organizations 27

nearly all are affected by culture, and this is reflected by our

behavior. The cultural component in all kinds of behavior is
difficult to grasp for people who remain embedded in the same
cultural environment; it takes a prolonged stay abroad and mix-
ing with the people there to recognize the numerous and often
subtle differences in the way they and we behave because that
is how our society has programmed us. It has been said that
the last thing a fish will discover is water; it finds out about
water only when it has landed in a fisherman's net. If I take the
train from Brussels to Rotterdam, I can tell the Belgian passen-
gers from the Dutch: most Dutch people greet strangers when
entering a small, closed space such as a train compartment,
elevator, or doctor's waiting room; most Belgians do not.
Even clearer than cultural differences in individual behavior
are cultural differences in institutional behavior: in families
and in organizations such as schools, churches, public services,
businesses. The subculture of an organization reflects national
culture, professional subculture, and the organization's own
history. Professional subcultures are to some extent interna-
tional: there is something common in the behavior of bank em-
ployees, journalists, policemen, or university professors from
one country to another.
The influence of an organization's own history on its subcul-
ture has long been neglected by organization sociology (Petti-
grew, 1977); but it is a fact that as soon as an organization has
a history, the options for organizational behavior thereafter are
constrained by it. Beyond the history of individual organizations
there is a striking historical continuity in the forms and tech-
niques used to control hierarchically structured organizations,
which go back even to pre-industrial state and church bureau-
cracies (Luhmann, 1976. P. 102). The rules of behavior in in-
dustrial workshops in the nineteenth century were modeled after
those in armies and monasteries. The structure and functioning
of organizations are determined not merely by rationality, or,
if they are, by rationality that varies according to the cultural
environment. Technology contributes to the shaping of organi-
zations, but it is insufficient for explaining how they work.
28 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

There is no "one best way" that can be deduced from technical-

economic logic (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977. P. 168). Harri-
son (1972) speaks of "organizational ideologies" that vary not
only among 0 rganizations but even among parts of organizations.
Culture affects organizations in a variety of ways. First, it
affects them through its influence on the distribution of power.
Whereas social systems in general can exist because human behav-
ior is predictable, organizations can exist because that behavior is
controllable. The control of human behavior necessary for organi-
zations is achieved through an unequal distribution of power. Any
organization has its dominant coalitions and its other members;
but the relative size of the dominant coalition, the fixity of its
composition, and the distribution of power between it and the
other members can vary widely under the influence of, among
other things, culture.
Second, culture affects organizations for various reasons and
in various ways, through its influence on the values of the domi-
nant coati tions:
1. Because the dominant coalition defines organization goals
and objectives and identifies the stakeholders whose interests
have to be respected. Business organizations, for example, face
a value issue with regard to social responsibility versus eco-
nomic success to which they will respond according to the values
of their elites (Lindstedt-Axhamre and Stymne, 1977). In West-
ern countries "success" is usually seen as the satisfaction of
more demands, which leads to goals different from those of so-
cieties that follow the Buddhist view of success as a reduction
in demands.
2. In decision-making processes, both through the alterna-
tives that are considered and the actual choice among them.
These include values in the form of economic utilities and indif-
ference curves but also valuation criteria in accounting - for
example, in the fact that machines are usually considered "invest-
ments, "but people are not. Decision -making processes lead to the
attribution of scarce resources among competing applications.
3. In shaping the organization structure and its formal pro-
cedures. For example, U.S. subsidiaries of business firms in
Culture and Organizations 29

India have fewer hierarchical levels than comparable local In-

dian firms (Negandhi and Prasad, 1971. P. 158). French firms
tend to use different internal transfer pricing procedures than
British ones (Granick, 1975).
4. In reward systems. BOth in schools (Hofstede, 1978) and
in business organizations (Senger, 1971), members of dominant
coalitions have been shown to rate people with similar value
systems higher in competence. This has consequences for fi-
nancial rewards and promotion, and it is one of the processes
by which the continuity of the dominant value system in the or-
ganization is guaranteed.
Third, the values of the none lites that form the majority of
an organization's members have an indirect but profound impact
on the functioning of organizations:
1. By determining the members' reasons for complying with
organizational requirements. A well-known distinction has been
introduced by Etzioni (1975. Pp. 12 fL): Members'involvement
with an organization can be alienative, calculative, or moral;
the kind of power commonly used within the organization can be
coercive, remunerative, or normative. Members will comply
best with organizational requirements if there is congruence
between type of power and type of involvement - coercive power
for alienative involvement (as in a prison), remunerative power
for calculative involvement (as in a business firm), normative
power for moral involvement (as in a church). Business orga-
nizations assuming calculative involvement of workers and, con-
sequently, using remunerative power may meet with growing
alienation in more-educated workers valuing jOb-content factors
besides money.
2. By determining what regulation apd control processes are
necessary to guarantee desired behavior. If people cooperate
spontaneously, rules for cooperation can be minimal; if conflict
is frequent, there should be rules for conflict resolution (Vick-
ers' 1970. P. 142; 1973. P. 171).
3. Generally, by determining members' zone of manageability.
Laaksonen (1977) has shown how in present-day China, work
organizations can function with relatively little supervision be-
30 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

cause members are very manageable. It should be noted, how-

ever, that great efforts are spent in ideological training to assure
that the zone of manageability is not reduced by a shift in values.
4. By affecting, through value consensus between the dominant
coalition and other members and among members themselves,
the accuracy of communication going .on within the organization
(Connor and Becker, 1975. P. 556).
5. By determining members' support to competing elites in
alternative organizations, such as labor unions, or in pressure
groups that directly affect the organization's functioning.
Fourth, culture affects organizations through the values of
nonmembers of the organization: values of members of com-
peting organizations, interacting organizations, and govern-
ments, and of representatives of the press and of the public at
large. The values dominant in the environment of the organiza-
tion to a large extent determine what an organization can and
cannot do. Shifting values in society may lead to a legitimacy
crisis for organizations (Habermas, 1975. P. 96).

Culture and Organization Theory

The cultural relativity of the laws that govern human behavior

was recognized as early as the 16th century in the skepticism
of Montaigne (1533-1592): "QueUe verite que ces montagnes
bornent, qui est mensonge au monde qui se tient au dela?"
[What kind of truth is it that is bounded by these mountains and
is a lie to people living elsewhere?] .(~)
The founding fathers ofthe theory of modern organizations, such
as Tolstoy (1828-1910), Fayol (1841-1925), Taylor (1856-1915),
Weber (1864-1920), and Follett (1868-1933), and most of their
successors up until the present day have not taken Montaigne's
wisdom to heart, but have typically looked for universal princi-
ples. The paradox is that in their theories, the influence of
their own cultural environment is clearly discernible.
Let us take the issue of the exercise of authority. Weber, who
was German (and, as his other work shows, quite sensitive about
the role of values in society), whote about authority in a bureau-
Culture and Organizations 31

cracy - by which he meant any large organization, public, vol-

untary, or private: 'The authority to give the commands re-
quired for the discharge of these duties is distributed in a sta-
ble way and is strictly delimited by rules concerning the coer-
cive means ...which may be placed at the disposal of officials"
(from Wirtschaft lind Gesellschaft, 1921. PartIII, ch. 6, p. 650;
English version in Weber, 1958. P. 196). For Weber, authority
is in the office, not the man.
Fayol, who was French, puts it differently: 'We distinguish
in a manager his statutory authority, which is in the office, and
his personal authority, which consists of his intelligence, his
knowledge, his experience, his moral value, his leadership, his
service record, etc. For a good manager, personal authority
is the indispensable complement of statutory authority"
(Fayol,1916. P. 21 [my translation - a.H.]).
Mary Parker Follett was American. She wrote: "How can we
avoid the two extremes: too great bossism in giving orders, and
practically no orders given? . .. My solution is to depersonalize
the giving of orders, to unite all concerned ina study of the situation,
to discover the law of the situation and obey that .... One per-
son should not give orders to another person, but both should
agree to take their orders from the situation" (from a paper
presented in 1925; in Metcalf and Urwick, 1940. Pp. 58-59).
With regard to the same issue of the exercise of authority,
Weber stresses the office; Fayol, the person; Follett, the situa-
tion. Between the American and the French view, a direct dis-
pute was started elsewhere by Fayol when he took issue with
Taylor's proposition of eight functionally specialized superiors
for one person. Fayol (1916. P. 84) calls this idea "wrong and
dangerous" because it "flagrantly violates" the principle of unity
of command. This principle, however, is much more sacred in
France than in the United States. It must be admitted that U.S.
practitioners were not too eager to try this idea of Taylor's
either; but some of it can be recognized in the mode~n model
of matrix management, which was developed in the United States
and, not surprisingly, is not popular in France (Laurent, 1978).
What is available as organization theory today is written
32 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

mostly by Americans and hence reflects the cultural context of

one specific society. A collection of fifteen recent contributions
by leading European scholars (Hofstede and Kassem, 1976)
shows remarkable differences in focus according to culture
area. Authors from Latin Europe focus on power; from Central
Europe, including Germany, on truth; from Eastern Europe, on
efficiency; from Northern Europe, on change; and, the Western
Europeans, in this case British and Dutch, have a bit of all of
these, but more than the others display a concern with data col-
lection, which we also find in the United States.
Theorizing is only a semirational activity. "There are large
sections of culture that act as a bar to the free exercise of ra-
tionality" (Kluckhohn, 1951a. P. 91 [after E. Sapir]). Or, as I
should prefer to put it, there is no such thing as absolute ra-
tionality; there are different rationalities colored by different
culturally influenced values, your rationality differs from mine,
and there is no standard by which to determine which of the two
is more "rational." Culture particularly affects ideas that are
taken for granted without further proof, because nobody in our
environment ever challenges them. Only comparison of cultures
can show that other ideas are possible. Douglas (1973) has col-
lected documentary evidence on the relevance of an "anthropol-
ogy of everyday knowledge"; our reality is man-made. We also
have a natural tendency to choose our environment so that cer-
tain of our basic ideas are not challenged. Ideas are entangled
with our values and our interests (~, a truth we recognize more
easily in others than in ourselves. Ideas and theories become
popular or unpopular at a certain time not because they are
more or less "true," but because the value systems that support
them are activated or suppressed by ecological and institutional
developments (more or less in the way pictured by the diagram
in Figure 2). Bartell (1976) has shown why the "human relations
ideology" in the United States developed there at the time it did
(the 1930s), putting it in the context of such factors as tradi-
tional American values, labor-union expansion, the economic
depression, the New Deal, and the bureaucratization of indus-
trial organizations.
Culture and Organizations 33

The claim for universal principles in organization theory was

weakened in the "open systems" and "contingency" theories of
organization, which grew around 1950 with the work of the Ta-
vistock Institute in Great Britain (Miller, 1976). Whereas ear-
lier theories tended to treat organizations as closed systems,
able to control all relevant variables inside themselves, "open
systems" models recognize explicitly that organizations re-
spond continuously to changes in their environment, and "con-
tingency" models acknowledge that the applicability of organiza-
tion principles depends on specific outside factors ("contingen-
cies") that mayor may not occur. Initially, open systems and
contingency organization theorists were more concerned with
context factors such as technology and market uncertainty (on
which research data were more readily available) than with
culture. As studies of organization structure were repeated in
different countries, the factor culture got some attention, but
the notions of "culture" used have been vague. A general theory
of the components of culture and their impact on organizations
has been missing. Research has usually been done without a
priori hypotheses about the kind of cultural effects expected -
culture being treated as a "variable x" that should account for
the variance left unexplained by other factors. Whereas contin-
gency theories formally have dropped the claims for "one best
way," in practice this idea is sometimes reintroduced through
the back door: "Tell me what your contingencies are and I will
tell you the one best way." For cultural factors this is difficult,
which may explain the unpopularity of culture as a contingency.
Another source of cultural relativism in organization theory
could have been the "comparative management" studies con-
ducted in the 1950s and '60s, mainly by V.S. business-school
professors under the influence of the internationalization of V.S.
business organizations. Management practices in other countries
were compared with V.S. practices; but these studies looked at
commonalities rather than differences and, moreover, assumed
that where differences existed, they would become smaller over
time - the so-called "convergence theory" (Harbison and
Myers, 1959. P.1l7;Inkeles, 1960; Kerretal., 1960; Likert, 1963).
34 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

Explicit emphasis on the cultural relativity of organization

principles is recent. A seminal article was published in 1974
by Brossard and Maurice: using data comparing structures of
matched German and French business organizations, they
showed that universalist models of organization structures do
not exist but that societal influences determine what works in
a certain country. The way we organize ourselves depends not
only on the 'task at hand but also on our mental programming.
Lammers and Hickson (1979) have undertaken to develop the
beginning of a general theory of "culture and organization."
They argue that comparative studies of organizations tend to
have a bias toward showing similarities ("organizations alike")
or differences ("organizations unlike"), but that scientific integ-
rity implies that we can show similarities only by trying to
find differences, and vice versa. A general theory needs to ex-
plain similarities and differences in terms of something, so we
have to be more specific about what it is in culture that makes
organizations alike or unlike.

Resistances to Cultural Relativism

I regularly take part in international discussion groups at

scholarly meetings; and having become sensitized to it, I cannot
help but recognize the cultural influences on the interest areas
and points of view taken by Scandinavian, French, American,
German, British, Italian, and Dutch participants - not to men-
tion the cultural influence on their way of presenting their ideas.
Yet I have noticed that drawing attention to the cultural compo-
nent in our points of view is a risky strategy that polarizes the
audience. Some think it highly enlightening - an "Aha-erleb-
nis" [a revealing experience - the "aha phenomenon ,,] that
suddenly puts the entire discussion into perspective. Oth-
ers, however, rigorously reject the notion of a cultural com-
ponent, become upset, and seem to feel threatened by it. "Pos-
sibly one of the many reasons why the culture concept has been
reSisted," Hall (1959. P. 50) writes, "is that it throws doubt on
many established beliefs. Fundamental beliefs •.. are shown to
Culture and Organizations 35

vary widely from one culture to the next. It is easier to avoid

the idea of the culture concept than to face up to it." And fur-
ther on (P. 165)"... the concepts of culture ... touch upon such
intimate matters that they are often brushed aside at the very
point where people begin to comprehend their implications."
Nevertheless, I believe that the battle for recognition of the
cultural component in our ideas is worth waging. First of all,
now more than a generation ago, most of us meet people with
cultural backgrounds different from ours, and are expected to
work with them. If we stick to the naive assumption that be-
cause they look just like us, they also think just like us, our
joint efforts will not get very far. Second, from the moment
we start to realize that our own ideas are culturally limited,
we need the others - we can never be self-sufficient anymore:
only other people with different mental programs can help us
discover the limitations of our own. Once we have realized we
are the blind confronting the elephant, we welcome the exchange
with other blind persons.
Acceptance of cultural relativism is in itself easier in some
cultures than in others. On the level of intellectual discourse
(not necessarily on the level of practice), the French have little
trouble with it. I know of no other country where a violent
criticism of national values like Alain Peyrefitte's Le Mal
Francais (1976) could be written at all, especially by a cabinet
minister of the majority party who, instead of being publicly
rebuked, was then admitted to the country's most illustrious in-
.
tellectual club, the Academie Francaise. Perhaps the French's
sublime gift for separating theory and practice allows them to
react this way. In Germany, by contrast, any type of relati vism
is digested with difficulty; the German tradition is to search for
absolute truth; and in the sciences of man, most of the great
theorists of the Western world have been from the German cul-
ture area - Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber, Lewin. Germans
can, however, accept the relativity of their ideas as part of an
absolute truth of a higher order - some "Unzulanglichkeit men-
schlichen Strebens." [ "Insufficiency of Human Endeavor"] .(2,)
Sex was the great taboo of the Victorian age. At least in the
36 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

organization literature, power was the great taboo until

the 1960s. Both taboos have since been more or less lifted.
Culture in the organization literature may be the great taboo
of today. In all three cases, the taboo is about something we
are all involved in, but not supposed to speak about. To the ex-
tent that it breaks the culture taboo, cross-cultural research
is deliberately subversive.

Notes

1) This analogy is borrowed from Kluckhohn (1951b. P. 405).

2) This refers to a famous little German poem by Christian
Morgenstern (1871-1914), who created a magical animal by de-
fining it.
3) Those with a vested interest in societal inequality are fond
of theories trying to prove that collective differences in behav-
ior are due to heredity. The German Nazis had their race the-
0ries; in the United States not so long ago a professor from a
respectable university tried to prove that Negroes were gene-
tically less intelligent than Whites (Jensen, 1969), against which
the American Anthropological Association took a public stand
(for critiques of Jensen, see the articles following his article
in the Harvard Educational Review and also Brace and Liv-
ingstone, 1974). In Great Britain the heredity versus en-
vironment issue led to the disgrace of a once-glorified psychol-
ogist's being suspected of having manipulated his data in favor
of heredity (Sir Cyril Burt: see Wilmott, 1977). The opposite
extreme has been found in the Soviet Union, where the domi-
nant ideology favors playing down heredity in favor of environ-
mental factors, which led to the now-refuted biological theories
of Lysenko.
4) Dale (1974) and Dale and Spencer (1977) have further dis-
entangled the definitions of norms. They show that the statis-
tical norm of a "sentiment" such as a value may be different
from the perception of this norm by the majority: there is such
a thing as pluralistic ignorance.
5) Montaigne, Essais, II, XII, 34.
Culture and Organizations 37

6) The stress on interests as the source of ideas is found

throughout the works of Marx and Engels, but they focus almost
exclusively on the modes of production; Merton (1968. Pp. 516
ff.) shows how Marx's ideas have been broadened by Scheler
and Mannheim to include other institutional structures and
group formations as existential bases of ideas.
7) The title of a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.

References

Adler, F. (1956) "The Value Concept in Sociology." American

Journal of Sociology, 62, 272-79.
Barnouw, V. (1973) Culture and Personality (Rev. ed.). Home-
wood, Ill.: Dorsey.
Bartell, T. (1976) "The Human Relations Ideology: An Analysis
of the Social Origins of a Belief System." Human Rela-
tions, 28,(8) 737-49.
Bern, D. J. (1970) Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs. Bel-
mont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole.
Berry, J. W. (1975) "An Ecological Approach to Cross-cultural
Psychology." Nederlands Tijdschrift voor de Psycholo-
gie, 30, 51-84.
Bidney, D. (1962) "The Concept of Value in Modern Anthropol-
ogy." In S. Tax (Ed.), Anthropology Today: Selections.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 436-53.
Bloom, B. S. (1964) Stability and Change in Human Character-
istics. New York: Wiley.
Brace, C. L., and LiVingstone, F. B. (1974) "On Creeping Jen-
senism." In N. Alger (Ed.), Many Answers. St. Paul: West
Publishing Co. Pp. 76-98.
Connor, P. E., and Becker, B. W. (1975) "Values and the Orga-
nization: Suggestions for Research." Academy of Manage-
ment Journal, 18 (3), 550-61.
Crozier, M., and Friedberg, E. (1977) L'Acteur et Ie systeme:
Les contraintes de l'action collective. Paris: Seuil.
Dale, A. (1974) 'Words, Deeds, Values and Norms: A Con-
ceptual Scheme" (Working Paper 74-9). Brussels: Euro-
38 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

pean Institute for Advanced Studies in Management.

Dale, A., and Spencer, E. (1977) "Sentiments, Ideologies and
Myths" (Working Paper 77-7). Brussels: European Insti-
tute for Advanced Studies in Management.
Douglas, M. (Ed.) (1973) Rules and Meanings: The Anthropol-
ogy of Everyday Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Durkheim, E. (1895) Les Regles de la Methode Sociologique
(1937 ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Etzioni, A. (1975) A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organi-
zations: On Power, Involvement, and their Correlates
(Revised and enlarged ed.). New York: Free Press.
Fayol, H. (1916) Administration industrielle et generale. (New
ed., 1970) Paris: Dunod.
Granick, D. (1975) ''National Differences in the Use of Internal
Transfer Prices." California Management Review, 17
. (4), 28-40.
Guilford, R. P. (1959) Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Habermas, J. (1975) Legitimationsprobleme im Spatkapital-
ismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hall, E. T. (1959) The Silent Language. (1965 ed.) Greenwich,
Conn.: Fawcett.
Harbison, F. H., and Myers, C. A. (1959) Management in the
Industrial World: An Internaticnal Analysis. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Harrison, R. (1972) "Understanding Your Organization's Char-
acter." Harvard Business Review, 52 (3), 119-28.
Hofstede, G. (1978) "Businessmen and Business School Faculty:
A Comparison of Value Systems." Journal of Management
Studies, 15 (1), 79-89.
Hofstede, G., -aIid Kassem, M. S. (Eds.) (1976) European Con-
tributions to Organization Theory. Assen, the Netherlands:
Van Gorcum.
Inkels, A. (1960) "Industrial Man: The Relation of Status to
Experience, Perception, and Value." American Journal of
Sociology, 66 (1), 1-31.
Jensen, A. R. (1969) ''How Much Can We BoostIQ and Scholastic
Achievement?" Harvard Education Review, 39, 1-123.
Culture and Organizations 39

Kerr, C., Dunlop, J. T., Harbison, F. H., and Myers, C. A. (1960)

Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor
and Management in Economic Growth. London: Heinemann.
Kluckhohn, C. (1951a) "The Study of Culture." In D. Lerner
and H. D. Lasswell (Eds.), The Policy Sciences. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press. Pp. 86-101.
Kluckhohn, C. (19 51b) "Values and Value -Orientations in the
Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Clas-
sification." In T. Parsons and E. A. Shils (Eds .), Toward a
General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press. Pp. 388-433.
Kroeber, A. L., and Parsons, T. (1958) "The Concepts of Cul-
ture and of Social System." American Sociological Re-
view, 23, 582-83.
Kunkel, J. H. (1970) Society and Economic Growth: A Behav-
ioral Perspective of Social Change. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Laaksonen, D. J. (1977) "The Power Structure of Chinese En-
terprises." International Studies of Management & Organi-
zation' VII(l), 71-90.
Lammers, C. J., and Hickson, D. J. (Eds.) (1979) Organizations
Alike and Unlike: International and Inter-institutional Stud-
ies in the Sociology of Organizations. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Laszlo, E. (1973) "A Systems Philosophy of Human Values."
Behavioral Science, 18, 250-59.
Laurent, A. (1978) "Matrix Organizations and Latin Cultures"
(Working Paper 78-28). Brussels: European Institute for
,Advanced Studies in'Management. [See the last article in
this issue.J
Levitin, T. (1973) "Values." In J. P. Robinson and P. R. Shaver
(Eds.), Measures of Social Psychological Attitudes. (Rev.
ed.) Ann Arbor, Mich.: Survey Research Center, Institute
for Social Research. Pp. 489-502.
Likert, R. (1963) "Trends toward a World-wide Theory of Man-
agement." Proceedings of the CIOS XII International Man-
agement Congress, ~ 110-114. Also in: Institute for Social
40 Geert Hofstede (Netherlands)

Research Newsletter (Ann Arbor, Mich.), October 1963.

Lindstedt-Axhamre, M., and Stymne, B. (1977) "Social Respon-
sibility from a Management Viewpoint: A Study Carried
out in Fourteen Large-scale Swedish Corporations" (Work-
ing Paper 77-4). Brussels: European Institute for Ad-
vanced Studies in Management.
Luhmann, N. (1976) "A General Theory of Organized Social
Systems." In G. Hofstede and M. S. Kassem (Eds.), Op.
cit. Pp. 96-113.
Merton, R. K. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure. (3rd
ed.) New York: Free Press.
Metcalf, H. C., and Urwick, L. (1940) Dynamic Administration:
the Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett. New York:
Harper and Bros.
Miller, E. J. (1976) "The Open-System Approach to Organiza-
. tional Analysis with Specific Reference to the Work of
A. K. Rice." In G. Hofstede and M. S. Kassem (Eds.), Ope
cit. Pp. 79-94.
Negandhi, A. R., and Prasad, S. B. (1971) Comparative Man-
agement. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Parsons, T. (1977) (edited and introduced by J. Toby). The Evo-
lution of Societies. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.
Pettigrew, A. M. (1977) "The Creation of Organizational Cul-
tures" (Working Paper 77-11). Brussels. European In-
stitute for Advanced Studies in Management.
Peyrefitte, A. (1976) Le Mal Fran~ais. Paris: PIon.
Phillips, D. L., and Clancy, K. J. (1972) "Some Effects of 'So-
cial Desirability' in Survey Studies." American Journal of
Sociology, 77 (5), 921-40.
Rokeach, M. (1968) Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values: A Theory
of Organization and Change (1972 ed.). San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
Senger, J. (1971) "Managers' Perceptions of Subordinates'
Competence as a Function of Personal Value Orientations."
Academy of Management Journal, 14, 415-23.
Spicer, E. H. (1971) "Persistent Cultural Systems: A Com-
parative Study of Identity Systems That Can Adapt to Con-
Culture and Organizations 41

trasting Environments." Science, 174, 795-800.

Triandis, H. C. (1972) The Analysis ofSubjective Culture.
New York: Wiley.
Vickers, G. (1970) Freedom in a Rocking Boat: Changing
Values in an Unstable Society. London: Allen Lane/Pen-
guin Press.
Vickers, G. (1973) Making Institutions Work. London: Asso-
ciated Business Programs.
Weber, M. (1958) Essays in Sociology (H. H. Gerth and C. W.
Mills, Eds.; new ed. 1970). London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Williams, R. M. (1968) "The Concept of Values." In D. L.
Sills (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sci-
~. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Vol. 16,
pp. 283-87.
Wilmott, P. (1977) "Integrity in Social Science: The Upshot
of a Scandal." International Social Science Journal, 29
(2), 333-36.