Sterotypology and stereotypometry

Stereotypology and stereotypometry: pitfalls of comparative value studies

Author Jeroen Oskam (University of Professional Education Zuyd), Program Director of the MBA Hotel & Tourism Management at Maastricht Hotel Management School. Ph.D. in Sociology of Literature from the University of Amsterdam (1992).

Abstract Since several decades, there has been an increasing interest in studying cultural differences. Initially, these studies focused on ways of approaching people, negotiating and similar practical matters, but since the 1980s the focus has shifted to the underlying patterns of thinking. In his famous Culture’s Consequences (1980), Hofstede set the trend for research into differences in values between different countries. In this paper, I will examine the premises of this type of research and its alleged objectivity. Can these studies really reveal the essential values of cultures around the world, or are they just a scientific cover-up for stereotyping?

Keywords Stereotype – Value-study – Nation

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Last year, a Dutch television manufacturer presented a rather puzzling TV commercial for its latest model. First, the screen would show a blurred image, and a voice-over would ask: “Are you still watching television like this?”, thus suggesting tha t this was the quality of our own TV set that we were watching. Then, the picture would turn completely sharp and focused, and the voice-over would comment: “… while you can watch TV like this!”. So the odd suggestion was that what we were seeing on our own TV-screen was something that our television was not yet capable of; instead, we would have to buy this latest model to be able to see it.

Of course, this television manufacturer had hit on a basic problem: it is not possible to show features of one television set through another one, because this last TV will determine the final image viewers will see. The same thing occurs when we analyze another culture, for we cannot step momentarily out of our own culture in order to show what this other culture looks like. The final image our readers will see will necessarily be determined by the culture of the researcher. In this paper, I will examine the distortions that take place in comparative studies of cultural values, especially the theories of Hofstede and Trompenaars, based on the results of more or less extensive international questionnaires.1 In spite of the sophistication of these questionnaires and elaborate statistical analyses, they do not fundamentally undermine stereotyping, but merely rationalize and quantify our categorizations.

Definitions of culture It is important to notice that there is not one generally accepted definition of “culture”, but that most authors feel the need to make their own statement or to add some amendments. Most definitions mention elements such as knowledge, behavior and values, things that are learned; some stress the social aspects of culture, limiting the concept to “shared” knowledge, behavior and values. Finally, some authors introduce the notion that culture does not include those things that are shared by all of mankind, but that it should be seen as a distinctive feature of groups of people. Hofstede is an exponent of this last category, defining culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (2001: 9); a definition that not only contains the requirement of separatism, but also changes the concept of “learning” into “programming of the mind”.

It should be clear that different definitions will lead to different outcomes. We have to observe, however, that in many intercultural studies definitions of culture are frequently quoted as an intellectual exercise rather than as a true basis for research. Pragmatic reasons are usually invoked to establish an unfounded equation between the concepts of “culture” and “nation-state”.2 Secondly, we frequently encounter an equivocal use of “culture” as referring to the people holding certain beliefs, knowledge and behavior  when we say that someone “belongs” to a culture  , thus making the meaning of the word similar to that of “society”. And, finally, in practice the values, knowledge and behavior of people are reduced to states-of-mind and opinions about determinate aspects of society, something which in other traditions of research would be called “ideology”. All this makes that the following statement, which is often held to be the conclusion of intercultural studies, is in fact their underlying premise: societies, as delimited by the borders of today’s nation-states, have distinct ideologies.

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The confusion of “cultures” and “nation-states” is questionable for numerous reasons. It is evident that there are multicultural political entities  such as Spain, India or the USA  , cultures divided among different states  such as the Kurds and that part of Jewish, African or Chinese culture exist in diaspora; there is no justification for pretending these cultures are just not there. It is also obvious that national identities have not always been around, but that they have been created as a result of specific social and political formations, the industrialized European nation-states. It is not so much that national identities arise from common myths, traditions and language, but rather the reverse: nation-states have, many times consciously and artificially, fabricated these common ties for the people living in their territory.3 This means that our national identity is not a spontaneous feeling, and that the degree of adherence to national values is a political choice. Immigrants to the United States are asked to embrace the principles of their new homeland, Belgium seceded from the Netherlands because of national feelings and thousands of Spaniards were once put to death for defying national values.

Another essential operation in these theories is the reduction of culture to individual states-of-mind, of sociology to psychology. This contradicts our definition of culture as a social phenomenon, and causes us to ignore its underlying mechanisms: the process of learning, or in other words, socialization. This means that the origins of our shared values remain concealed; nevertheless, these theories venture into historical explanations of culture.

Let us finally consider some sophisms about culture in Trompenaars’ research. His management-guru definition is that “Culture is like gravity: you do not experience it unless you jump six feet into the air” (p. 5). His misunderstanding of culture is similar to that of gravity: both are not just limitations to our free wi ll, but unavoidably shape the things we do and make. Transportation, sewers and clothing all depend on gravity; for a skirt to be worn, gravity is as important as the fabric.

Cultural identities are explained by Trompenaars as “normal distributions”: cultures can be distinguished from each other as distributions of patterns of behavior around an average.4 This idea is illustrated by the following graph:

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The extremes of these patterns are then the images that become known as stereotypes:

This sounds very convincing; but what does it mean? Let us say that the French “pattern” includes eating garlic, flamboyance and hierarchy at work; now where do we position someone who is flamboyant but doesn’t like garlic? Or worse: if there really is a coherent pattern of “Frenchness”, then does this not mean that only a small minority of the French represents this pattern, and that most French people score only average on “Frenchness”? But then, why do we consider “Frenchness” French?5 Stereotypes Trompenaar’s explanation of stereotypes does not seem to make a lot of sense. First of all, a nation is normally not just stereotyped in one way: the British have other stereotypes about the French than Spaniards, North-Africans or Germans. Furthermore, a stereotype is always formed on the basis of a selection of “typical” features: the British may stress the fact that French people eat garlic, while Spanish prejudice ignores this characteristic. How do we explain this selective character of stereotypes? Finally, this view of stereotypes supposes that every stereotype contains an element of truth, which is obviously not the case.6 We have to realize, therefore, that this explanation is founded on a basic misconception: stereotypes are not part of the stereotyped culture, but of the stereotyping culture. British ideas about the French are part of British culture, and by no means of French culture.

This also clarifies the selective nature of stereotypes. In their view of other cultures, the British will stress those elements that are absent in their own culture, and thus draw a boundary around Britishness at the exact point where garlic starts being eaten. The Spaniards draw their own boundary, and when they characterize the French for their exaggerated sophistication, they also define their own culture as down-to-earth and lacking French pretensions. In other words, their view of the “Other” has its primary function in the definition of the “Self”.7 Such an image of the Other can either be a generalization  an observation of something that is true, or was once true, in a particular instance , or the arbitrary attribution of something different from the own culture, a fabrication with no basis in reality.

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We find evidence of this last phenomenon in perhaps the most extreme form o f stereotyping: the accusation of cannibalism. Throughout history, the fear and ignorance of other peoples has been expressed by invoking the primal fear of being eaten.

Herodotes asserted that there were anthrophagi beyond the land of the Scythians, Columbus discovered cannibalism among the native Antilleans and Jews have been accused of cannibalism and drinking the blood of ritually murdered children throughout the history of European antisemitism. Most historical allegations have been so evidently untrue that some anthropologists have called the entire existence of cannibalism into question.8 Stereotypes transform these momentary images  whether true observations or lies and misunderstandings into fixed and timeless categories. They are popular because they create a false sense of order and understanding in a constantly changing world.9 It does not matter how accurate our observations are, or how objective our statistics. The problem lies not here, but in the subsequent interpretation of what we observe, in theories that seem to slip through the loopholes of scientific law.

Autostereotypes Stereotypes have a particular significance in the formation of national identities. If people identify with a certain subculture or with a culture of smaller dimensions  such as people from a certain neighborhood, motorbike-riders, homosexuals, environmentalists, Muslim fundamentalists, tourism professionals or philatelists  , they do in fact share values, knowledge or behavior this identity can refer to. But since national identities are artificial constructions, those who wish to adopt one have to rely strongly on stereotypes in order to decide who belongs and who does not, to define and delimit the Self and the Other.

Consequently, it is another misconception to think that people’s ideas and statements about their own culture are true and devoid of prejudice. Besides ideas about other nations, their national identities are built up of autostereotypes. These self-images are hybrids of descriptive and prescriptive characteristics, for in a tautological reasoning those who do not fit the description are banned from the culture as “bad citizens” or “traitors”.

Autostereotypes are, by their very nature, mirrored images of stereotypes of other cultures. In some cases, an external stereotype will be imported into the own culture, normally from a more powerful culture. I will try to clarify the formation of these autostereotypes with three examples: the romantic passion of Spain, the primitive sensuality of the Caribbean and the consensus-seeking open-mindedness of the Dutch.

The passionate character that many people ascribe to Spanish culture has its origin in a stereotype that developed in the nineteenth century in the rest of Europe. Until then, Spain had been known as a collapsed world-power, discredited because of its economic and cultural backwardness. The industrial revolution and its cultural impact made travelers from England, France and other countries now turn to this same backwardness and idealize its romantic values.10 The idea of “passion” has ever since been popular in Spain’s tourist promotion. 11

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My second example is a sexual stereotype. It is curious to see that this kind of stereotype can be found frequently, in spite of the fact that it refers to activities that normally take place in intimacy. It is hard for individual people to acquire a statistically significant overview of other cultures in this respect, unless they blindly trust the testimonies of others. Moreover, fertility rates do not give any evidence for cultures especially gifted for procreation. Yet, Hippocrates knew and explained that the Scythians had “no great desire for intercourse”12, and many people seem to have detailed information about the specific capacities and talents of other nations.

The Caribbean, for instance, has become known as a place of sensuality and unrestrained sexual activity, perhaps as the result of adding up two stereotypes: Hispanic passion and African primitive lack of self-control.13 Historically, however, sensuality was not an immediate contribution by African culture since for almost two centuries only male slaves were imported.14 It is more likely that we owe the myths about the sensuality and sexual talents of the Caribbean people to the vanguard of Europeans and North-Americans who migrated to the islands  adventurers, slaveholders, priests, soldiers and who engaged in behavior that back home would have been deemed immoral. Also in this case we see that the stereotype  which for today’s standards is not entirely negative has found its way into Caribbean culture.

The Dutch, on the other hand, have become known, especially to themselves, for their tolerance. This reputation has no solid factual basis if we compare social and political reactions to immigration in the Netherlands and in other European countries. I want to point out two possible sources15 for this flattering self-image, one of them a stereotype of a neighboring country and the other an autostereotype with its roots in a specific political situation. In the post-war years, Dutch tolerance was the mirrored image of the German “Other”, stereotyped as racist and aggressive. This image fit well into an earlier constructed image of peacefulness and tolerance, not especially meant for foreigners but designed for domestic use. Tensions between rivaling religious forces had been resolved, in the beginning of the twentieth century, in a political and social system of consensus and co-existence. This system known as “pillarization” was the result of a rational policy, no t of a national spirit of consensus and tolerance  as has been suggested : this spirit was called into life as its political message.16 Hofstede’s “cultural dimensions” Does Hofstede offer an objective alternative to stereotyping? When analyzing the IBM questionnaire, Hofstede was particularly interested in those answers that revealed four aspects of culture: relations with the community, assertiveness, relations with authority, and flexibility. The model hardly conceals its ideological inspiration. Two of these points of interest are formulated as binary scales  individualism versus collectivism and masculinity versus femininity , which suggests that the neutral point lies in the middle.

The remaining two 17 are absolute scales  power distance and uncertainty avoidance , with zero as their neutral point. These formulations reflect Western European ideals, a Goldie Lock’s culture which is neither as individualistic as the US, nor as collectivist as the Chinese; not as ambitious as the American Dream, but where private initiative cannot be restrained by social considerations 18; a culture that considers exaggerated hierarchy and rigidity as hindrances that may occur to a certain extent or not.

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These categories have been coined “dimensions” by Hofstede, which is not accurate, since cultures are not cubes. This is not a game of words, because the definition conditions our interpretation. We choose four distinctions out of an infinite number of possible cultural differences; we then prioritize these distinctions in a system with a finite number of dimensions where all cultures can be positioned. Consequently, all cultural differences become dependent on our prioritized set of distinctions.

Placing our observations or the answers to our questionnaires into one of the dimensions is a matter of interpretation. A U.S. President can only be re-elected once; for us this may seem aimed at keeping power distance reduced, but a Chinese observer may argue that it is proof of short-term thinking. Disobedient American children are grounded by their parents, but Japanese children are punished by not allowing them back into the house. They feel that way, apparently, because of their uncertainty avoidance; but what to say of the recklessness of Japanese parents?

Moreover, it is not possible for any selection of differences to be exhaustive, and consequently, certain cultural variations will remain invisible if we use this model of analysis. These variations may be considered irrelevant in research aimed at specific goals or professions, but that does not mean that this appreciation is objective. The discrepancies between the classifications of Hofstede and perceptions of people’s own culture is probably the result of these omissions.

Let us consider one clear example of this problem. In the Roman Empire, infanticide was accepted as a way of birth control and selection.19 This practice has been eradicated from the 3d century onward, probably as a result of both economic changes and of a shift in religious beliefs. There is a strong contrast between contemporary Southern Europe and the Romans at this point, for this ancient tradition is nowadays considered as one of the most horrifying kinds of crime, to such a degree that its practice can only be rationally explained by a form of insanity. Nevertheless, the distinctions by Hofstede will not highlight this contrast, if not keep it completely hidden.20 Besides the selective character of the “cultural dimensions”, the equivalence of categories poses an important problem. Linguistically, this matter may have been taken care of in the questionnaires; this cannot be said of the fact that social phenomena are reduced to psychological cases of individual perceptions, and therefore only considered in abstracto. Questions about “Power distance” will not be understood in the same way by individuals from a participatory democracy, an inhumane despotic regime or from an impersonal bureaucracy. “Uncertainty” and its consequences have to do with death, famine and natural disasters in some parts of the world, whereas in other countries they are related with missing a job promotion or not finding one’s favorite brand of ice-cream in the supermarket.21 Speculative extrapolations The data obtained from the IBM survey by Hofstede were taken for representative of the nation they had been pronounced in. This generalization is speculative, not only because of the geographical spreading and grouping of IBM subsidiaries  one might suspect an under-representation of rural, peripheral or economically depressed areas , but also socially, since IBM employees were not exactly a cross-cut of the population in

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most countries in the sixties. South-Africa, for instance, was only represented by white respondents (2001: 252). This middle-class bias of his research does not worry Hofstede; middle -class values have greater social and political relevance, he argues, and their modernizing tendencies make international differences seem even less pronounced than they would be for the entire population.22 There is an obvious contradiction here: does society follow middle-class values, or are middle-class values a weak reflection of the deeper feelings of society? Anyway, sociologically these assumptions about the relations between the values of one social class and others are pure speculati on. In view of the fact that the degree of adherence to national values is a political choice, there is no ground for Hofstede’s assumption that his appreciation of cultural differences is conservative; historical evidence would suggest the contrary.

This is not the only inadmissible extrapolation. There is no reason, let alone any evidence, to believe that the data obtained in the IBM survey would have any validity beyond the generation of the participants, or even beyond the moment of the survey.23 Nevertheless, Hofstede conjectures that national cultures possess a timeless essence, hardly changeable by history. In his explanations, historical data are used eclectically: remote events are used as evidence, just as others are ignored. There is no need for a coherent historical explanation of cultural processes, and the starting point of cultures can thus be fixed without any further motivation. But if the Romans discovered the secret formula for founding a culture, where did they bury their treasure? In this part of his theory, Hofstede follows his intuition, “much as an archaeologist completes ancient pottery from which shards are missing” (2001: 97). But the shards are not missing, they are discarded. And the result is a messy vase, where Israeli culture resembles Austria because Israel was founded by Austrian intellectuals (2001: 62); where Belgium has a French culture because it once belonged to the Spanish and Austrian empires (2001: 63) and where cold climates lead to a low power distance (2001: 117).24 Cultural stability can be explained, he argues, “from the reinforcement of cultural patterns by the institutions that themselves are products of the dominant cultural value systems” (2001: 34). Another tautology, which clarifies neither stability nor the origin of institutions. Once again, they cannot be explained if we neglect the relations between culture and society, which can be found precisely in these institutions and in socialization. Hofstede and others cannot be outside observers of this process:

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Instead, they become part of the process and end up reinforcing their own categories:

Conclusion For a final evaluation, let us judge Hofstede’s theory by his own rules. For his statements to be “scientifically valid” instead of “unsupported stereotypes” they have to meet the following four criteria (2001: 14): 1. Be “descriptive, not evaluative”. As Leerssen has pointed out, “who is to judge whether a description is value-free?” (p. 421). I have discussed several ways values color Hofstede’s interpretations. A clear example is the assumption of timelessness: Hofstede does not just say how cultures are , but also how they will be.

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2. Be “verifiable from more than one independent source”. His questionnaires and statistics can indeed be replicated, but not the interpretative parts. How can we verify his separatist definition of culture, the validity of his dimensions, the assumption of cultural stability or the historical links to the Roman Empire?

3. Apply, “if not to all members of the population, at least to a statistical majority”.

Hofstede has acknowledged and defended the middle-class bias of his work.

4. Discriminate, or indicate “those characteristics for which this population differs from others”. This point is questionable, since stereotypes also discriminate. Besides, it is tautological, because culture was defined as distinctive in the first place. But are all observations relevant? If Hofstede concludes that there were no significant cultural differences in former Yugoslavia in 1971 (2001: 65), and we assume culture to be stable, then how can later cultural divisions and civil war be explained?

“Software of the mind” We have seen the following pitfalls for this type of study: subjectivity, because of the cultural identity of the researcher; reductions, which leave the origins of cultural phenomena unexplained, tautologies  cultures are the way they are because they once became that way ; partiality or irrelevance of the “dimensions” and essentialism. There are no “mental programs”; culture is not a mysterious force but, simply, the things we have been taught. But unlike computers and their software, we can obey but we do not necessarily have to. We can add things, change things or adopt things from elsewhere, and then retransmit our contributions.25 An Englishman may decide that his beer tastes better if it is cold, elderly people from northern Europe migrate to Spain and abandon the climate they grew up in, and Somalian women start opposing female ablation. The fixed categorization of stereotyping denied us this flexibility; the theory of nation-determined “software of the mind” follows the same pattern of thinking and therefore leads to strikingly similar conclusions.

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Hofstede, the most renowned of the two, has based his theory on surveys in IBM subsidiaries in 50 different countries and on their elaborate statistical analysis. He classifies cultures according to five dimensions, that will be discussed later. Trompenaars’ theory is more intuitive, and based on a personal database.

2 “My answer: True, but [nations] are usually the only kinds of units available for comparison, and they are better than nothing”. Hofstede (2001): 73.

3 Cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger. Many traditions that celebrate national feelings, such as French Bastille th Day, the public celebration of monarchs’ birthdays, 4 of July and Thanksgiving, were in fact invented around 1880 (pages 269-282).

4 “People within a culture do not all have identical sets of artifacts, norms, values and assumptions. Within each culture there is a wide spread of these. This spread does have a pattern around an average. So, in a sense, the variation around the norm can be seen as a normal distribution. Distinguishing one culture from another depends on the limits we want to make on each side of the distribution. In principle, each culture shows the total variation of its human components. So while America and France have great variations, there are also many similarities. The ‘average’, or ‘most predictable’ behaviour […] will be different for these two countries” (page 25).

5 Leerssen already denounced this kind of logic in Hofstede: “In view of [the inversion of predicate and subject], one tends to lose sight of the fact that the Dutch ideally include all Dutchmen; the exchangeability of subject description and predicate attribution constantly simplifies the heterogeneity of the group in question making it into a ‘representative’ group of typical Dutchmen. Supposedly, the question asked is: ‘What are the typical characteristics of the Dutch?’, but it conceals the tautological circle question: ‘What

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are the typical characteristics of the typical Dutch?’  selecting the ‘typical’ Dutchman out of the total population precisely through those ‘typical’ characteristics that are subsequently assigned to him. The measuring instruments are being calibrated by their own misreadings. Everything fits. No wonder that so much can be ‘verified’” (423-424, translation JO).

6 Michael Pickering discusses this “kernel of truth” hypothesis; pages 25-26.

7 For an accurate description of stereotyping as part of the process of “othering”, cf. Pickering 47-78.

8 William Arens has questioned the existence of cannibalism in The Man-Eating Myth (1978). Lynn Holden 15-20.

9 Pickering makes a distinction between “categories” as necessary “cognitive devices” and stereotyping, which “attempts to deny any flexible thinking with categories” (3-9).

10 Cf. Calvo Serraller 17-29.

11 The slogan España: Pasión de vivir was used in the 1990s. The distinct character of Spanish culture was, of course, one of the postulates of the Franco-dictatorship, and its slogan of the late sixties ”Spain is different” still reflected the external origin of this idea.

12 Hippocrates stated that this was “because of the moistness of their constitution and the softness and chill of their abdomen, which are he greatest checks on venery. Moreover, the constant jolting on their horses unfits them for intercourse. Such are the causes of barrenness in the men; in the women they are the fatness and moistness of their flesh, which are such that the womb cannot absorb the seed. For neither is their monthly purging as it should be, but scanty and late, while the mouth of the womb is closed by fat and does not admit the seed. They are personally fat and lazy, and their abdomen is cold and soft.”

125-127.

13 “The underlying assumption [of nineteenth century beliefs about the Primitive in Europe] was that modern society had evolved from its antithesis, that non-white ‘primitives’ in the contemporary world were ‘childlike, intuitive, and spontaneous’, and that because of this required control and guidance from Europe if they were not to suffer from their inherent physical violence and sexual drives”. Pickering 53.

14 Midlo Hall 23.

15 D’Iribarne suggests that this mentality has some more remote origins: not only the Union of Utrecht, in the sixteenth century, but “[cette manière de vivre ensemble] ne paraît pas depourvue de rapports avec la forme de vie en société des tribus bataves” (224). These remote sources are problematic, however, not only because a relation between two forms of consensus in two very different societies is hard to prove, but also because, even if there is historical evidence for a spirit of consensus in Dutch history, it is not difficult to find abundant evidence of the contrary as well.

16 For D’Iribarne there is a clear relationship between the consensus mentality and pillarization (225-227).

However, his description of this theory is not quite adequate. Arend Lijphard, who coined the concept (The politics of accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, 1968), distinguished three pillars, not four (and certainly not the ones d’Iribarne mentions); an essential characteristic of the “pillared” system was not only the consensus but also the low cohesion between pillars, and their separate existence in society. Besides, the theory is not uncontroversial, for others have interpreted the existence of (two, religious) pillars precisely as a weapon in social conflict (e.g. Siep Stuurman, Verzuiling, kapitalisme en patriarchaat. Aspecten van de ontwikkeling van de moderne staat in Nederland, 1983).

17 The model has later been extended with a fifth category of Chinese inspiration, “confucianism” or longterm versus short-term orientation, the latter pole having clearly more negative connotations.

18 In other words, examples of Barthes’ “Neither-Norism” (153), one of the figures of conservative myth; I believe the other figures are equally present in the theories of Hofstede and Trompenaars.

19 Hornblower and Spawnforth 757; Bowman, Garnsey, Rathbone 803-804.

20 Correlations with the Masculinity/Femininity Index are even ambiguous for selective infanticide (i.e. killing daughters to guarantee male offspring) in Asia (2001: 331).

21 Trompenaars gives a good example of a similar equivalence problem. His interviewees were asked whether they would be willing to paint the house of their boss. His Japanese respondents were not; they had no objection to helping out their superiors, but didn’t see the point of painting anyone’s house. Luckily, he could correct this lack of equivalence thanks to the bias of his research. The Japanese were simply reinterviewed when their response was not as expected. As Trompenaars concedes, the example “illustrates the relativity of empirical data” (page 79).

22 “[…] a good sociological reason for the study of elites is that elites are more likely than nonelites to shape the institutions that perpetuate a culture” (2001: 14). Tayeb has criticized this social bias in Hofstede’s research. Klidas, in his an extensive review of different critical approaches to Hofstede’s theory (85-97), summarizes both Hofstede’s arguments: as for the relevance of middle-class values: “first,

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because [national institutions like government and education] are usually controlled by the middle class; second, because representatives of the lower class, like union leaders, tend to adopt middle-class values due to their higher educational level; and third, because lower-class parents have often middle-class ambitions for their children” (88). Furthermore, “his conclusions on the observed differences are likely to be too conservative precisely due to this socialisation of employees in the organisational culture” and “if […] employees of the particular company in Third World countries were more exposed to ‘modernising forces’ than their colleagues in Western countries, then it is quite likely that the observed differences have been deflated by a sort of ‘convergence artifact’” (88-89).

23 Stability was quantified through a comparison of age brackets and the use of two samples that were four years apart (2001: 34).

24 From Aristotle to Montesquieu, the weather has always been an important resource to demonstrate that the hegemony of one’s people comes natural. Intelligence and stability are always the result of the right climate; that is, one’s own.

25 “[The metaphor of ‘Software of the mind’] does not mean, of course, that people are programmed the way computers are. A person’s behavior is only partially predetermined by his or her mental programs: (s)he has a basic ability to deviate from them, and to react in ways which are new, creative, destructive, or unexpected” (Hofstede, 1991: 4). But people are capable of much more: not only of individual deviations, but of changing culture.

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