• Flaws of Geert Hofstede Culture Dimensions

    日期:2008-09-30 | 分类:Nonsense

    版权声明:转载时请以超链接形式标明文章原始出处和作者信息及本声明
    http://keilt.blogbus.com/logs/29772765.html

    Geert Hofstede Culture Dimensions is a model conducted by Geert Hofstede to judge a nation's culture or compare between cultures of different countries. Lately I've been studied a lot about it, and I feel that his viewpoints and research results are not as correct as they look like.

    1. Geert Hofstede fails to consider the culture difference between different groups of a same country and simply disposes all the people in the same country as a whole.
    His result is applicable for a country like China, in which most of people (are forced to) have the same religious and political beliefs and heretics will be XXX by XXX. But consider a immigration country like Singapore, such result may not be so applicable because the society is consisted by different groups, in Singapore, the Chinese, the Indians and the Malaysians, each of them has unique ways because they inherit the customs from their own country, and thus, they can't be treated as a whole.

    2. Geert Hofstede didn't mention that how the nation's score of each index is calculated.
    At least, I didn't find it on his website (after search for a long time, and i appreciate if someone could tell me). Obviously, to make people convinced, he needs to provide not only the scores but also the ways how they are calculated.

    3. Geert Hofstede has a fatal flaw in choosing samples.
    Geert Hofstede's first study was based on data collected among IBM employees. And his subsequent studies' samples are consisted by airline pilots, civil service managers, “up-market” consumers, social elites and so on. Neither of these can be described as “randomization”. Most of his samples are living in the up class society, and we are all aware that the elites are always minority and they may have different values from other groups. Consequently, they can not speak for their whole nation. This makes his research result really doubtful.


    收藏到:Del.icio.us




    评论

  • are you preparing GRE AW?
    Mr. Kei回复grady说:
    No, and as far as I know, the AW section is finished now
    2008-10-05 18:11:21