英语论文网

ny different
levels—family, social, group, geographical
region, professional environment—this article
deals specifically with the influence of
our national environment; that is, our country.
Most countries' inhabitants share a national
character that's more clearly apparent
to foreigners than to the nationals themselves;
it represents the cultural mental programming
that the nationals tend to have in
common.
NATIONAL CULTURE IN FOUR DIMENSIONS
The concept of national culture or national
character has suffered from vagueness.
There has been little consensus on what represents
the national culture of, for example,
Americans, Mexicans, French, or Japanese.
We seem to lack even the terminology to describe
it. Over a period of six years, I have
been involved in a large research project on
national cultures. For a set of 40 independent
nations, 1 have tried to determine empirically
the main criteria by which their national
cultures differed. I found four such criteria,
which I label dimensions; these are Power
Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism-
Collectivism, and Masculinity-Femininity.
To understand the dimensions of national
culture, we can compare it with the dimensions
of personality we use when we describe
individuals' behavior. In recruiting,
an organization often tries to get an impression
of a candidate's dimensions of personality,
such as intelligence (high-low); energy THE RESEARCH
The four dimensions of national culture were found through a combination of theoretical
reasoning and massive statistical analysis, in what is most likely the largest survey material ever
obtained with a single questionnaire. This survey material was collected between 1967 and 1973
among employees of subsidiaries of one large U.S.-based multinational corporation (MNC) in
40 countries around the globe. The total data bank contains more than 116,000 questionnaires
collected from virtually everyone in the corporation, from unskilled workers to research Ph.D.s
and top managers. Moreover, data were collected twice—first during a period from 1967 to 1969
and a repeat survey during 1971 to 1973. Out of a total of about 150 different survey questions (of
the precoded answer type), about 60 deal with the respondents' beliefs and values; these were
analyzed for the present study. The questionnaire was administered in the language of each
country; a total of 20 language versions had to be made. On the basis of these data, each of the
40 countries could be given an index score for each of the four dimensions.
I was wondering at first whether differences found among employees of one single corporation
could be used to detect truly national culture differences. I also wondered what effect
the translation of the questionnaire could have had. With this in mind, I administered a number
of the same questions in 1971-1973 to an international group of about 400 managers from different
public and private organizations following management development courses in
Lausanne, Switzerland. This time, all received the questionnaire in English. In spite of the different
mix of respondents and the different language used, I found largely the same differences
between countries in the manager group that I found among the multinational personnel. Then
I started looking for other studies, comparing aspects of national