The absence of women's voices in Hofstede's Cultural Consequences

Abstract

Purpose -Embedded in Western scientific rationality, Hofstede's model on national culture is constructed on a quantitative method, which among other things is characterized by its carefully selected sample consisting of a group of well educated white "men" from the middle classes working for the same company and sharing identical or similar occupations. The appointment of well educated men from the middle classes as the norm for national culture might mislead one to believe that Hofstede perceives of culture as equally distributed among men and women and that there are no differences in regard to the possession of power. However, considering that he has dedicated one of his five dimensions to gender and constructed his model on a bipolar distinction between masculinity and femininity this is clearly not the case. The purpose of the paper is to show that Hofstede's masculine/feminine dimension unveils a distinct perception of gender differences, even though women's voices were kept silent in his survey. Design/methodology/approach -The paper approaches Hofstede's masculine/feminine dimension from a postcolonial angle, and focuses on how he discursively makes use of a gender dichotomy in his construction of national culture. Findings -The analysis supports the argument that Hofstede's masculine/feminine dimension contributes to reproducing a collective and prejudiced understanding of both culture and gender. Originality/value -The value of the paper is in its attempt to urge for a relocation of research on culture and gender from logocentrism and dichotomies to a discourse that take local variations and multiplicity into consideration.

Guanxi and social capital: Networking among women managers in China and Finland

“…In the cultural clusters classified according to Hofstede's (2001) value dimensions, China's country index score is significantly different to Finland's, especially for the individualism/collectivism dimension (China scores 20, making it firmly collectivist, while Finland scores 63 and is individualist), the masculinity/femininity dimension (China scores 66 and is more masculine, while Finland scores 26 and is more feminine) and the power distance dimension (China scores 80, while Finland scores 30). Although Hofstede's cultural consequences have been criticized for the absence of a woman's voice (Moulettes, 2007), there is an obvious difference between China and Finland in terms of traditional culture, social system, economic structure and IT industry (Aaltio & Huang, 2007;Aaltio & Heilmann, 2006;Cooke, 2004;Hofstede, 2001;Kolbe, 2005). Moreover, the Global Gender Gap Report 2008 (Hausmann, Tyson & Zahidi, 2008) shows that China's global gender gap index was 0.6878 (rank 57), while Finland's was 0.8195 (rank 2), indicating Finnish women enjoy much more gender equality than their Chinese counterparts.…”

A postcolonial and anti-colonial reading of ‘African’ leadership and management in organization studies: tensions, contradictions and possibilities

“…Fougére and Moulettes, 2009;Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006;Jack and Westwood, 2009;Özkazanç-Pan, 2008;Westwood, 2006); cross-cultural and comparative management (e.g. Kwek, 2003;Moulettes, 2007;Westwood, 2001); globalization (Banerjee et al, 2009); workplace diversity (Prasad, 2006);); organization control (Mir et al, 2003); workplace resistance (e.g. Ong, 1987;Prasad and Prasad, 2003); silencing of the 'Other; (Calás, 1992); and organization culture (Cooke, 2003).…”

The Moderating Effect of Cultural Values on the Relationship between Corporate Social Performance and Corporate Financial Performance

“…Future research could examine whether cultural and CSP initiatives interact in a similar way when CSP initiatives are explored at the individual CEO level in addition to the firm level. Also, Hofstede's dimensions for measuring culture do suffer from their own limitations; namely, Hofstede's interviewees consisted of sales and engineering personnel with few women and few social minorities participating (Moussetes, 2007). As such, an argument can be made that the interview results may not fully represent the cultural values of their respective nations.…”