Geert Hofstede’s legendary national culture research is critiqued. Crucial assumptions which underlie his claim to have uncovered the secrets of entire national cultures are described and challenged. The plausibility of systematically causal national cultures is questioned.

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National models of social action over-privilege continuity and uniformity. They discount change -which they lack the capacity to explain (other than through exogenous shocks) -and neglect diversity within countries. This paper focuses on the national culture model which it argues requires commitment to illogical arguments and to suppositions which are theoretically and empirically untenable. An evaluation of each, it is argued, points to the existence of, and possibilities for, considerable national diversity and change -not pervasive and enduring national uniformity. Reflecting on the model's rise and fall in anthropology, the paper also provides an outline explanation of its retention within organization studies and speculates about its future within that discipline.In a range of literature each country is said to be characterized by distinctive, pervasive and enduring patterns of practices. The bedrock source of these patterns is either said to be national institutions (Hall and Soskice 2001, for instance) or national culture (Hofstede 2001, for example). This paper focuses on the claim that there is a national cultural imperative, that identifiable national culture is enduring, pervasive and constitutive -a view described here as the national culture model (hereafter 'the model'). It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the critiques of overly determining and unchanging versions of the institutional model and their limited ability to explain behaviour at the organizational level. For these, the reader is referred to the new wave of neoinstitutional literature (Djelic and Quack 2005;Crouch 2005; Streeck and Thelen 2005, for instance; see also Smith et al. 2008).Although once popular in a number of academic disciplines, the model is now employed almost exclusively within the discipline of organization studies and in a small sub-field of psychology -cross-cultural psychology. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the model is unable to explain organizational diversity and change within any one country. The model, it is argued, requires commitment to illogical arguments and to presuppositions that are theoretically and empirically untenable. Each of these is described and analysed. And the logical conclusion in each case, it is argued, points not to a pervasive uniformity, but to the existence of diversity within countries. An adequate theory of social action needs to be able to explain variations over time as well as continuity and variations article title Organization Studies 30(09): 933-957

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -According to an extensive and growing literature, we are in the twilight of bureaucracy. The labels applied to the supposed new organizational form include: post-bureaucratic; post-modern; post-hierarchical; and the virtual organisation. The purpose of this paper is to consider the various claims for "epochal" change by evaluating the supporting and contrary evidence. Design/methodology/approach -The paper draws on evidence on the reform of the UK Civil Service over the last few decades to show the intensification of bureaucracy. Findings -The paper takes issue with the "epochalist" visions of sudden transformation which have underpinned much of the comment on post-bureaucracy, arguing that the concept of post-bureaucracy is analytically blind to the diversity and complexity of contemporary organizational change. Originality/value -Locating the debate on post-bureaucracy in the broader political economy of Neo-Conservatism reveals an authoritarian dimension which has been absent from most commentaries.

I shall attempt to engage with Geert Hofstede's reply to my January 2002 article -a reply which is unfortunately characterized by evasion. Evasion 1: I've answered elsewhereHofstede states that the new edition of Culture's consequences (2001a) (hereafter the second edition) makes 'many [of my] comments obsolete'. If Hofstede really meant 'obsolete' then he would be acknowledging that my criticisms had been valid prior to the remedial work on his research for the second edition. However, I presume that instead he is claiming that he answered criticism of my type in the new edition. If my criticisms are answered in the second edition, then Hofstede could readily have engaged with them and rebutted them. But he does not. Instead, he reproduces a lengthy extract from the second edition and fails to respond to the multiple issues I raised. The fact is that the same profound methodological flaws that characterize his original analysis of the IBM data remain in the second edition, and my criticisms of them remain unanswered. Evasion 2: Other people laud my workHofstede -relying on a misunderstanding of the magnitude of Kuhn's concept of a paradigm shift which encompasses, for example, the change in physics from Newton to Einstein -boasts that he achieved such a shift. He also claims to have 'introduced' the 'four or five dimensions' into the cultural literature. No mention of the pioneering work of others; or of the existence of earlier literature on the dimensions he claims to have discovered; or of the 1 3 6 3