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One of Sławomir Magala’s lasting contributions to the still developing scholarly field of cross-cultural management is his critical discussion of essentialist or reified conceptualizations of culture. In his book Cross-Cultural Competence (Magala, 2005), he takes to task three influential theories that use such conceptualizations: Huntington’s (1996) Clash of Civilizations, Ritzer’s (2011) McDonaldization thesis, and Hofstede’s (2001) cultural dimensions. While Huntington and Ritzer have been influential in political theory and sociology, respectively, Hofstede’s main influence has been on management studies. It is for that reason that this paper will primarily engage with Hofstede’s work. The conceptual criticism of his work, however, also applies to other scholarly work using a similar conceptualization of culture. Nevertheless, if this critique is to be taken seriously, why do Hofstede’s ideas and models continue to dominate the field of cross-cultural management? In this paper, I will argue for the use of national habitus as an interpretive framework, both to re-introduce the national into (or on top of) constructivist alternatives to Hofstede’s work and to formulate an alternative to Hofstede which might actually be used by practitioners.
This paper is structured as follows: in the next section, Hofstede’s conceptualization of culture will be discussed, followed by a section in which the main points of criticism against this conceptualization of culture will be presented. The subsequent section will discuss the predominantly offered constructivist alternative, followed by a section in which I try to find out why this constructivist alternative has hardly been used in cross-cultural management. I will then discuss yet another alternative, which shares its main assumptions with the constructivist alternative. In the final section, I will briefly explore the applicability of such a conceptualization of culture.
Hofstede’s conceptualization of culture
As most management scholars are familiar with Geert Hofstede’s work, a brief introduction will do.
Based on surveys of the worldwide workforce of IBM, Geert Hofstede constructed four dimensions, along which the preferences and attitudes of the employees could be plotted: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs collectivism, and masculinity vs femininity. In later editions, long-term orientation and indulgence vs restraint were added. When he split up his research population per nationality, he noted that the average scores per nationality were vastly different. He also found that these scores, were, to...