Geert Hofstede - Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind - Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival

SOFTWARE OF THE MIND

Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival

Geert Hofstede
Gert Jan Hofstede
Michael Minkov

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PART I
The Concept of Culture

PART II
Dimensions of National Cultures

PART III
Cultures in Organizations

PART IV
Implications

In the late 1960s Geert accidentally became interested in national cultural differencesand got access to rich data for studying them. His research resulted in the publication in 1980 of a book called Cultures Consequences. It was written for a scholarly readership; it had to be, because it cast doubts on the universal validity of established theories in psychology, organization sociology, and management theory: so it should show the theoretical reasoning, base data, and statistical treatments used to arrive at the conclusions. A 1984 paperback edition of the book left out the base data and the statistics but was otherwise identical to the 1980 hardcover version.

Cultures Consequences appeared at a time when the interest in cultural differences, both between nations and between organizations, was sharply rising, and there was a dearth of empirically supported information on the subject. The book provided such information, but maybe too much of it at once. Many readers evidently got only parts of the message. For example, Geert lost count of the number of people who claimed that Geert had studied the values of IBM (or Hermes) managers. The data used actually were from IBM employees, and that, as the book itself showed, makes quite a difference.

In 1991, after having taught the subject to many different audiences and tested his text on various helpful readers, Geert published a book for an intelligent lay readershipthe first edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. The theme of cultural differences is, of course, not onlyand even not primarilyof interest to social scientists or international business students. It pertains to anyone who meets people from outside his or her own narrow circle, and in the modern world this is virtually everybody. The new book addressed itself to any interested reader. It avoided social scientific jargon where possible and explained it where necessary; a Glossary was added for this purpose. Slightly updated paperback editions appeared in 1994 and 1997.

In the meantime the worlds of politics, of business, and of ideas kept changing fast. In 2001 Geert published a rewritten and updated version of Cultures Consequences that included a discussion of the many replications by other researchers that had appeared since 1980. Anybody whose purpose is research or academic scrutiny is referred to this source.

In 2005 Geert issued a rewritten and updated version of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Gert Jan Hofstede joined him as a coauthor. After having majored in biology and taught information systems at Wageningen agricultural university, Gert Jan had started to use his fathers work in his own teaching and research. In 2002 he had already published his own book, Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories and Synthetic Cultures, which included contributions from Paul B. Pedersen and from Geert. Gert Jan contributed experience with the role of culture in international networks, hands-on experience in teaching the subject through simulation games, and insight into the biological origins of culture.

Ever since his first cross-cultural research studies, Geert has continued exploring alternative sources of data, to validate and supplement his original, accidental IBM employee data set. In the past three decades the volume of available cross-cultural data on self-scored values has increased enormously. Geert used to say that if he had to start his research again, he would use a choice from these new databases. About ten years ago, Geert got into e-mail contact with a researcher in Sofia, Bulgaria, who seemed to be engaged in exactly that: scanning available databases and looking for structure in their combined results. The name of this researcher was Michael Minkov, and we learned to call him Misho. In 2007 Misho published his analyses in a book,