Book review by Emilia our Intern

Cultures and Organizations – Software of the Mind by Hofstede&Hofstede

“The revolutionary study of how the place where we grew up constrains the way we think, feel and act.” Hofstede writes about cultural differences across nations from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. Hofstede has defined cultures along five different dimensions, these include: Individual/collective, power distance, masculine/feminine, time orientation, uncertainty avoidance.

‘Cultures and Organizations’ is a must for people working and living in a global world – that means all of us. Reading the book is a thought-provoking journey into one’s own mind. For me, it provided explanations to some of the questions that I have been wondering about while studying, working and travelling around the world. Yet, the most exciting part of the book is that it enables you to see your own values; That, I think is mind broadening. I understand my values much better after reading the book.

I have studied Hofstede’s cultural dimensions before, but I never actually realised that they go so deep to our mind and ways how we act as culturally taught human beings. That we are actually “products” of our culture and cannot avoid that, because we are culturally programmed from as early as 6 months old.

The examples Hofstede uses are old and occasionally I cannot see the link between a real life example and his study. Sometimes he goes too far with his analysis or interprets some real life situations; seeing only his own study. On the other hand, these things are something that all of us interpret in a different way. Even though he tries to avoid stereotyping, I had a feeling that sometimes he doesn’t succeed. Fair enough, breaking our stereotypes is really hard. I was still left wondering: would this study and the book be written differently if the author wasn’t a white male?

The dimensions about cultural differences provide very interesting figures to study, but everything cannot be interpreted by these measures alone. Also I think everything is just not culturally related. As much as we misunderstand people from other cultures, we misunderstand people from our own culture too. Our values and thinking aren’t the same in any given culture.

I think the main point of this book is to point out how we are victims of ‘groupthink’.  Human beings are just “sheep” behaving the way we have been taught without realising it. We all definitely need more cross cultural awareness and knowledge of other ways of thinking, but more than that I think we need to question our own values that are inherited via our culture.

Emilia