ERASMUS+ PROGRAMME, KEY ACTION 2

CAPACITY BUILDING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Furthering International Relations Capacities and Intercultural Engagement to

Nurture Campus Diversity and to Support Internationalisation at Home
(FRIENDS)

Unit 3: Dimensions of culture - cultural distances between countries:

identity, power, gender, uncertainty, time and gratification of needs
Part 1
Prof. Michael Minkov
TRANSCRIPT

The study of cultural differences between nations has sometimes been criticized. Some
scholars say that nations do not have homogeneous cultures. There are many nations
consisting of different cultural, racial, ethnic groups.
For example, in South Africa, there are blacks and whites, but even among the blacks, there
are large differences because there are different ethnic groups in the United States. There
are white Americans, black Americans, people of Latin American origin, people of Asian
origin in many Asian countries like Malaysia. There are Chinese and Indians and Malays and
there are very few countries. Japan is one of the countries that is culturally homogeneous.
But when we analyze the constituents of these nations, different religions and different
ethnic groups, we see that they're much more similar, that we might expect they form fairly
homogeneous clusters, which means that, for example, people from different religions who
live in the same nation have quite similar values and beliefs.
For example, the Egyptian Muslims and the Egyptian Christians are much more similar
culturally than the Egyptian Muslims and any other Muslims outside Egypt. So it is the
national environment that creates the local culture, not so much the different religions that
people follow.
Some scholars say that differences between individuals can be much bigger than differences
between nations, which is true, of course. But this doesn't mean that we should not study
national differences. If we look inside human beings, we will see the differences between the
cells that we are made of.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views
only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein. 1
For example, brain cells and heart cells and muscle cells are much more different than
individuals. That doesn't mean that we should study only cells and not individuals. Nations
have clearly defined identities. People belong to different nations. They have different
identities and they're interested in their nations and they would like to know why.
As a whole, their nations differ from other nations, for example, people would like to know
why some nations are rich and others are poor. Why there is more corruption in some
nations and less corruption in others? Why some nations do better in studies of differences
in education than other nations? Why some nations have more crime than others? This
justifies the use of nations as units of analysis.
As I said, Hofstede as a model of national culture has triggered many controversies. It's been
used very widely across the world, but many scholars felt that there were some issues with
it because when they tried to use it for some specific purposes or when they tried to replicate
some of its aspects - the results were not satisfactory. Five years ago, I had an opportunity to
do a study that focused on the hopes of that model. The idea was to repeat it and update it
and find out what could be improved and what could not be improved. In that case, it would
need to be abandoned.
The study was sponsored by the big British multinational company media.com because they
realized that culture and cultural differences have implications for international business
and by Hofstede Insights consulting company. That was also interesting in this study for
these cultural differences that we would find, and we interviewed about 53000 respondents
from 56 countries across the world. The samples were probabilistic, meaning that they
reflected the national census quite well in most of these countries. So they're quite
representative and trustworthy. The data collection was mostly online and it was done in
2015 in 2016.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views
only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein. 2