Culture at Work Questionnaire National

Culture at Work Questionnaire

National Character Studies: All Grown Up

The second edition of Dutch scholar Geert Hofstede's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations provides both a broader and a deeper perspective on Hofstede's decades-long interest in creating a mechanism that allows for a comparison of key traits across cultures. Hofstede's primary goal was to create more accurate and less conflictual methods of communication. There have been and continue to be significant criticisms of his work, primarily on the grounds that this measure is not valid. However, I believe that these criticisms are in fact themselves not valid and arise from a consideration either of his earlier work or from an ongoing bias toward conventionally quantitative research and concepts of validity.

This last objective is the most important one and has been the most potent in terms of dismissing the validity of Hofstede's work. Current quantitative research is far more (analytically) statistical than is Hofstede's work, based entirely on random sampled data that create data bases that can be examined and mined for patterns through statistical modeling. There is, of course, absolutely nothing at all wrong with such research; indeed, of course, a great deal of it is highly valuable.

What I am arguing here, however, in support of the validity of Hofstede's work, is that there are other valid and productive ways in which to conduct quantitative research. Another way to phrase this is to state that current quantitative researchers in the human sciences reject a priori any research that does not follow a statistical model. Such a dismissal of all other forms of research without a careful examination of any specific examples of it is itself bad scholarship. Such an inclination to dismiss work like Hofstede's might rather be defined as bad science, because the definition of validity that is used in the human sciences now is one that has been imported from the hard sciences in an attempt to transfer to the human sciences the prestige of the hard sciences.

However the concept of validity is not based on a single research methodology. Instead it refers to a specific epistemological approach, which is that to be valid a study has to be able accurately to answer any question(s) that it is intended to provide a response to. Experimental validity arises from the fact that the research methodology and design provide an accurate way to measure what it is intended to measure.