Love for Life

Gert Jan Hofstede Associate Professor
Gert Jan Hofstede Associate Professor

Gert Jan Hofstede son of Professor Geert Hofstede

To know more about my books, click the pictures.

Clicking Cultures and Organizations will take you to a page on my father and the VSM. To know what I'm working on at the moment, click my photograph. Or go to my non-university personal site.

For anything else in this site, press the site map on the left.

For university news, go to the new pages of my department.

Throughout most of history, the state has acted more like the Mafia than an organization that was concerned with economic growth. Douglass C. North, "Institutions, transaction costs, and the rise of merchant empires", in James D. Tracy (ed) The political economy of merchant empires, state power and world trade 1350-1750. Cambridge University Press 1991.

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Professor Geert Hofstede is my father.

He travels less than he used to, due to his age, but he is otherwise active as ever. A second, entirely updated edition of Culture's Consequences appeared in 2001, including and discussing work that many, many others have done since the first edition appeared in 1980. The 2nd edition of the popular version, the best-selling Cultures and Organizations, written by Geert and myself, is now available with McGraw-Hill. Translations into various languages are under way. I am regularly engaged in discussions with users of Geerts work (Find discussions about the five dimensions, or read some discussions about the VSM on this page).

Both Geert and myself regularly lecture about his work, which is now becoming our work. If you need in-company training programmes on cross-cultural communication that use his work, try ITIM Business Culture and International Management (Netherlands, with related companies in other countries) or other companies. In the US, www.itapintl is a good cross-cultural consulting company.

When I started using Geerts work, in 1996, it did feel peculiar: at 40, I was suddenly more my father's son than I'd been since the age of 16. But when somebody asked me "aren't you tired of standing in your father's shadow?" I replied "I'm not standing in his shadow. I'm standing in his light".

Exploring Culture (2002), a book with many exercises and brief stories about cross-cultural incidents, as well as simulation games for cross-cultural training, is a joint publication I did with Paul Pedersen and my father.

the VSM

The institute IRIC was closed in April 2004. The copyright for the VSM (Values Survey Module) has returned to Geert Hofstede.The English text of the latest version, VSM94, is found in in Appendix 4 of the 2001/2003 editions of Culture's Consequences. Permission to use it for research purposes is granted free of charge. For reproduction in publications, Geert's permission (Geert Hofstede, Den Bruijl 15, NL 6881 AN Velp, the Netherlands) is required. Other language versions are now published on Geert's website www.geerthofstede.com: English, French, German, Spanish. If you want to work with the VSM, reading the last chapter of Cultures and Organizations first is a good start.

On this page, you can read some discussions I had with VSM users: Face validity of the VSM, Comparing new VSM scores with existing ones.
Face validity of the VSM

In early 2005, I received the following message:

Dear Professor Hofstede,
I am having some trouble with the use of the VSM94 and especially concerning some items. I find many items not fitting with the definition of the concepts. I am wondering whether there are some errors in the assignment of some items to some scales.

I just give you the most striking exampl e, namely the items for individualism:

The index formula is IDV = –50m(01) +30m(02) +20m(04) –25m(08) +130

So the scale for measuring individualism is made up with :

Item 1: have sufficient time for your personal or family life

Item 2: have good physical working conditions (good ventilation and lighting, adequate work space, etc.)

Item 4: have security of employment

Item8: have an element of variety and adventure in the job

Basically, my problem is that non of these items deal with "thedegree to which people in a country prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of a group".

Is it an error on the online version of the VSM94 or something else?

Thank you for your help,

Kind regards,

Marco Caramelli, Montpellier
My answer was as follows.

Dear Marco,

Good question. But this is most definitely NOT an error. You should read Culture's Consequences if you wish to get the full explanation.

In brief, let me say that culture is not personality. This is not a marketing-type questionnaire. The questions originate of a questionnaire about work satisfaction, not values. Through statistical analysis it was fond that a number of the questions, including these four, were correlated, AND correlated with cultural value patterns that had already been identified by anthropologists.
If you look at the four items again (and remember plus and minus signs) you can appreciate that behind a person's opinion on these matters there can be an implicit opinion about the role of employers. To a collectivist mindset, an employer has a parental responsibility to care for work conditions and job security. In an individualis t minset, the employer should leave people alone so that they can do their own thing as much as possible. These implicit values have caused respondents to answer as they did. But you should only use the questionnaire for comparing matched samples of sufficient size.

Gert jan
Marco then replied

Dear Gert Jan

I have just ordered the new edition of Culture's Consequences, I will receive it within one week I guess.
Your response is the best I have received until now about the VSM94, so thank you again.
So the index for individualism does not "directly" measures individualism but elements correlated with individualism. I guess that my worries come from the fact that I am mentally programmed to the Churchill paradigm of scales development which suggests that the items of a scale should reflect the domain (definition) of the construct. That is why I would have expected to find items closely related to the definition of individualism/collectivism.
I have decided to develop 4 scales for the four cultural variables (I don't use LTO in my study) because I must follow the Paradigm of Churchill (this is a strict rule here) in developing my questionnaire.

Thank you again,

Marco

And then I said

Hi Marco.

You know, we are in the middle of a profound discussion about questionnaires and validity here.

If one wishes to measure individual values, Churchill's advice is quite sound. One should of course still beware of the difference between practices ( 'I do x'), values as the desired ('I like x') and values as the desirable ('x is good').
But in order to measure culture, the content of questions can seem very misleadingly valid. Culture resides in implicit context expectations, not only in explicit value statements. After you have administered your questionnaire, try an exploratory factor analysis first. Churchill approves of this! Then you will see whether the respondents' minds worked according to the logic with which you create your dimension question sets, or not. You might set up a two-step process, testing a first questionnaire version for scale coherence before moving on.

Good luck!

Gert Jan
Replicating VSM survey research

In April 2005, I received the following message.

Dear Professor Hofstede,

My name is Yuliya Yakupava and I'm a MBA student at Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus).
I'm doing a research on intercultural communication and as a part of it I used VSM-94 questionnare in order to obtain scores on five dimensions of national culture and then to compare them with different cultures.
As you know Belarus was neither in the IBM study no in the latest studies and no attempts to define five dimension s were made.

The results I got surprised me a lot as they reallly differed fr om what I expected:
PDI 30
UAI 36
IDV 56
MAS 90
LTO 55

Could these results be valid and reliable?
They strongly differ from the scores obtained for Russia and Poland.
Where can I find the detailed information on researches conducted in these two countries?

I will really appreciate your answer and advice concerning my results.

Sincerely,

Yuliya Yakupava

This is what I answered, and how the conversation went on.

dear Yuliya,

Thank you for your valiant attempt.

However, you cannot just compare these data to existing data. VSM-type results always have to be calibrated. The best way to do so is to obtain results from MATCHED samples of respondents in e.g. Poland and Russia. Then by correcting for the differences of those samples with the original country scores, you will be able to find more reliable scores for Belarus. My father's and my books give some methodological advice as to how to conduct such a study - both the fat volume 'Culture's Consequences' and the popular 'Cultures and Organizions'. Read it carefully, would be my advice, and then continue with the research.

If your respondents were students or similar, they are not likely to give average aswers - so you should not be surprised to find data rather different from those in the existing database. Also the time at which you ask questions is important: there is a lot of political unrest in Ukraine and Belarus right now and that sets people thinking, and it might change their perception and their questionnaire answers (though not their culture).

good luck!

Gert Jan Hofstede

Dear Gert Jan,

Thank you for your prompt reply! I deeply appreciate it.

My respondents were not only MBA students: I distributed more than 200 questionnaires and got back 173. I used 4 respondent samples: MBA graduate students, managers and academically trained professionals, vocationally trained workers, and full-time third- and fourth-year students.
You gave me a good advice regarding obtaining results from Russia or Poland though I don't have opportunity and enough time now to conduct my research there.
Don't you think that I could give some clear ideas of these results if I use Economic and Demographic Indicators for comparison as it is discribed in 'Culture's Consequences'?

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Yuliya Yakupava

Hi Yuliya.

Comparing your four subgroups will be valuable. It will be interesting to see how they differ. But you cannot relate the results to existing VSM country scores unless you carry out matched sample research. Perhaps you could find a student in Poland or Russia to do it? You might have a look at www.dialogin.com , where many interculturalists have a homepage.

good luck

Gert Jan

Dear Gert Jan,

Thank you for your e-mail.
For now I'll compare the results obtaining from these 4 samples but I think I'm going to find someone in Russia or Poland who is interested in such kind of research.

Sincerely,

Yuliya Yakupava

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QUOTES

Some of my favoured quotes are collected here. If I don't do this I keep forgetting them, or who said it. Most are in English but some may be in other languages. Gert Jan Hofstede

It is an unfortunate truth that nothing is absolutely clear and uncontroversial that is not utterly trivial (Peter Alexander, An Introduction to Logic, 1969)

On ne bâtit pas de vieilles amitiés (Julos Beaucarne, Chandeleur '75, 1975)

Populist politicians are better at cultivating fear than at taking away its causes. (Bernard Bot, Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands, 2005).

We notice the ripple and take the lake for granted (John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid 2000, The Social Life of Information, Harvard Press, p. 138).

The measure of a man's life is not "how long?", but "how good?" around 525 B.C., Confucius, according to H.G. Creel (Chinese Thought, London: Methuen, 1954)

Destroying things in the name of justice is one of mankind's greatest satisfactions (Theodore Dalrymple 2005, INRC Handelsblad 12/13 nov p. 13)

The world may be confusing, but that is no excuse for thinking about it in a confused way (Christie Davies 2002, The Mirth of Nations p 227).

It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities (Albus Dumbledore (J.K. Rowling, in Harry Potter vol 2 p. 245)

People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right (Albus Dumbledore; J.K. Rowling, in Harry Potter vol 6 p. 95)

In de wetenschap is een geluid pas een geluid als het op een echo lijkt (Kees Fens, "Levenswerk", de Volkskrant 3 februari 1990)

What it is convenient to believe is greatly preferred (John Kenneth Galbraith, The economics of Innocent fraud, Penguin 2004)

Une constitution n'est pas plus ou moins sociale. Elle fonctionne comme les statuts d'un club de football. Ces statuts régissent le club, ils ne disent pas comment on jouera la prochaine partie (Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, 2005).

We are traditionally worried by the unpredictability of events, while those that do take place remain unexplained for decades (Dmitry Kavtaradze, "Election in the land of independent buttons", in Geurts et al (eds) Gaming/Simulation for Policy Development and Organizational Change, Tilburg Univ Press 1998)

It is amazing that theology and sociology should not have given more attention to the measure in which ritual holy actions are carried out in a spirit of game playing (Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1937)

"De Europese Grondwet was en is een ongeschikt vraagstuk voor een referendum. De één stemde tegen omdat Brussel zich teveel met Europa bemoeit, de ander omdat Brussel zich te weinig met Spanje (stierenvechten) bemoeit, een derde omdat de Duitsers zich niet aan het stabiliteitspact houden, een vierde omdat er teveel Turken zijn, een vijfde omdat "alles maar duurder is geworden", enzovoorts, enzovoorts." (Ben Knapen, NRC Handelsblad 2 juni 2005)

"The myths of management require executives to exhibit certainty, consistency, single-mindedness, and clarity in a world of ambiguity, ambivalence, paradox, and confusion. These aspirations are inconsistent with the capabilities of managers in the worlds in which they live. So they lie. They lie to the world. They lie to themselves. And they lie to the scholars studying them.” (James G. March, Ibsen, Ideals, and the Subornation of Lies, Organization Studies 28(08) pp.1277-1285)

"Apparently, ends in themselves are far more universal than the roads taken to achieve those ends, for these roads are determined locally in the specific culture. Human beings are more alike than one would think at first” (Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, Harper Collins, 1970, p.6)

Throughout most of history, the state has acted more like the Mafia than an organization that was concerned with economic growth. Douglass C. North, "Institutions, transaction costs, and the rise of merchant empires", in James D. Tracy (ed) The political economy of merchant empires, state power and world trade 1350-1750. Cambridge University Press 1991.

When I say, "Quality cannot be defined," I'm really saying formally, "I'm stupid about Quality". Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974

I've thought myself out of happiness a million times, but never once into it. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely loud & incredibly close, London: Penguin 2005.

Learning what to want is the most radical, the most painful and the most creative art of life. (Geoffrey Vickers, Freedom in a Rocking Boat, 1970, p. 76)

We are much more likely to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think our way into new ways of acting (Karl Weick, quoted by Henry Mintzberg in a lecture, 2004)

'Knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge. Tom Wilson, Information Research 8(1) p. 1, 2002