MANAGEMENT

National Culture and Diversity

National Culture and Diversity

The Concept of National Culture

Is national culture a meaningful concept? The issue is extremely important because many cultural indices in cross-cultural psychology, cross- cultural management, and other fields are provided for nations as if they were single entities, not only politically but also culturally. In recent years, Cross-Cultural Research, a journal of comparative anthropology, has also published articles that present national cultural indices. However, if it is not justifiable to speak of national culture, there is little point in cultural comparisons of nations. Peterson and Smith (2008) identified three main types of critiques of the use of nations as units of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is grounded in correct empirical findings but it is logically flawed. When national cultures are compared, it does not matter whether individual differences are large and whether they are larger or smaller than national differences. Saying that groups, such as nations or ethnic groups, should not be studied because the individuals that they consist of are much more heterogeneous than the groups that they make up is like saying that individuals need not be studied because the cells that they are made of are much more diverse than the human beings on our planet. The existence of intra-national subcultures is a more serious argument against using nations as a unit of cross-cultural analysis (Baskerville, 2003, pp. 1-14).

One might wonder if the cultures of large countries, such as China, India, and Indonesia, or even those of far smaller but seemingly diverse nations, such as Belgium, Spain, and Switzerland, are homogeneous enough to be studied as single entities. For instance, some countries have sizable subcultures that appear so different from the other subcultures in the same countries that they should probably be viewed as distinct from them. However, some of these national subcultures may show similarities across national borders. A case in point is that of the Balkan Gypsies that are found throughout the peninsula and beyond. The question of whether there are trans-nationally shared cultures, of which Gypsy culture may be an example, has not been studied sufficiently. However, even if one could demonstrate the existence of a Gypsy culture that is markedly different from the cultures of the majority populations of Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, or Slovakia, that would not mean that those countries do not have mainstream cultures, shared by the majority populations of ethnic Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs, or Slovaks, that can be viewed as national cultures (Baskerville, 2003, pp. 1-14).

There are a number of studies that compared in-country regions on cultural indicators. The totality of their evidence is inconclusive. Hofstede (1980) found that, despite sharing a language, Flemish Belgium and the Netherlands had quite different scores on his dimensions and were consequently distinguishable, whereas the German-speaking regions of Switzerland were closer to Germany than to the French-speaking region. A classic study of the values of school teachers and university students by Schwartz (1994) showed that when countries and in-country regions were ranked on cultural dimensions of ...