Unveiling Dimensions of Culture
So! I’ve established 1) deep culture engages deeply seated emotions 2) deep culture comes from values across any culture but HOW they show up could be very different and 3) deep cultural values establish safety and belonging which is why they engage deeply seated emotions.
How do we get to those deep cultural values? How do we get past behaviors and move toward the importance of the behavior? How do you make something intangible easier to talk about? And what does it have to do with education?
This is where Hofstede’s cultural dimensions come in. Hofstede started his work in the 60s when he realized that thousands of IBM employee surveys tended to gravitate toward certain responses depending on the country they were from. His work defined certain dimensions that researchers have been able to replicate in subsequent studies—and they are SO HELPFUL in bring the tangible to culture:
Group Orientation versus Individual Orientation: Does your culture lean toward thinking as “I” or as “we”? Does your culture focus on benefitting the individual or benefitting your group?
Hierarchical Orientation versus Participatory Orientation: Does your culture accept inequalities and hierarchy as how people are organized, or does it want to minimize inequality and hierarchy?
Uncertainty Avoidance versus Tolerance for Ambiguity: Does your culture set rules and find ways to make things more predictable, or does it accept ambiguity as a normal way of life?
Long Term versus Short Term Orientation: Does your culture lean towards values that focus on the future such as delayed gratification and perseverance, or does it tend to value immediate results?
Achievement versus Quality of Life Orientation: Does your culture tend to focus on status and traits that increase achievement, or does it focus on traits that increase quality of life?
Indulgence versus Restraint Orientation: Does your culture have a more optimistic and adventurous attitude toward novelty and fun, or does it lean toward pessimism and is guarded toward novelty?
Using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions appropriately means a couple things:
A) This is the general cultural understanding—this is not a personality test nor it is a personal preference. These are messages that are built from a collection of people over time. While you can get an individual score using Hofstede’s Culture in the Workplace Questionaire, it tell you what cultural messages resonate with you and how you relate to these dimensions.
B) The dimensions are never an either/or. Everything is always on a spectrum and may even shift based on the context you are in.
C) This is most important. There is no better or worse orientation. Cultural dimensions are just different, and there are many positive and negative attributes on each end of the spectrum. In fact, people may find what is negative as a positive and vice versa based on the cultural upbringing you’ve had. That is why someone who is more uncertainty avoidance or more group-oriented may have strong feelings about people in the opposing dimension. Those people may be “lazy”, “wrong,”
”clueless,” “irresponsible,” “immoral,” etc.
Schools here in the US are SO multicultural—their students, their parents, their staff come from very different orientations that relate to work, fairness, responsibility, uncertainty, indulgence… How can we not explore these dimensions that create clarity and provide means for productive dialogue so that we can create space and safety for our staff and our students to succeed? We don’t know what we don’t know, and without an awareness of where I am sit in my cultural values that these dimensions help describe, how am I to be culturally responsive?
For more on Geert Hofstede, go to Geert Hofstede biography in brief since 1928 until the present day
I started my exploration of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions with Project Ready, a curriculum for librarians to be more anti-racist. See more by clicking here: Module 7: Exploring Culture – Project READY: Reimagining Equity & Access for Diverse Youth