Hofstede, G. - The Diversity of LoveThe Diversity of Love

Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1014

The Hofstede model of six national cultural dimensions is briefly described in this article. These six dimensions of culture are Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint.

Hofstede describes the conceptual and research work that preceded and led up to it. The author also presents the model and the research that followed and built on it. The structure of dimensions has formed a paradigm for comparing cultures.

The article emphasizes that dimensions differ depending on the level of aggregation. It discusses the six distinct dimensions discovered in the research of Hofstede and his colleagues (Hofstede et al., 2010). The author advises researchers to avoid the confusion of the differences in these societal dimensions with differences at the individual level. The article also outlines a perspective on future studies of national cultural dimensions and how countries can be positioned on them.

Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1014

Hofstede, G., Garibaldi de Hilal, A. V., Malvezzi, S., Tanure, B., & Vinken, H. (2010). Comparing regional cultures within a country: Lessons from Brazil. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 41(3), 336-352.

The authors examine the widespread assumption that a culture measure produced for the national level can also be used to compare regions within a country. Three separate study initiatives used a variant of Hofstede’s Values Survey Module to measure cultural differences throughout the Federal Republic of Brazil (VSM). The largest offered scores for each of Brazil’s 27 states, while the next largest provided scores for 17 of the country’s most populous states.

Factor analyses of VSM item scores across states only partly replicated Hofstede’s cross-national dimension structure; only Individualism versus Collectivism reappeared clearly. The authors attributed this lack of fit to a restriction in the range of VSM item scores among states within a common Brazilian national culture.

Results also showed that the item scores did show a cultural clustering of states that fairly closely followed the administrative division of the country into five regions. The culture profiles for these regions reveal significant contrasts between the Northeast, which has Afro-Brazilian roots, and the North, which has indigenous Indian roots.

When comparing regional cultures, the authors found the VSM, based on global differences, too coarse a net for catching the finer cultural nuances between Brazilian states. Adding locally defined items would have made the studies more meaningful to Brazilians.