Page 125 - Cultures and Organizations

104 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

in-groups, these people are usually also dependent on power fi gures. Most
extended families have patriarchal structures, with the head of the family
exercising strong moral authority. In cultures in which people are rela-
tively independent from in-groups, they are usually also less dependent on
powerful others.
However, there are exceptions. The Latin European countries, and in
particular France and Belgium, combined medium power distances with
strong individualism. The French sociologist Michel Crozier has described
his country’s culture as follows:

Face-to-face dependence relationships are . . . perceived as diffi cult to bear
in the French cultural setting. Yet the prevailing view of authority is still
that of . . . absolutism. . . . The two attitudes are contradictory. However,
they can be reconciled within a bureaucratic system since impersonal rules
and centralization make it possible to reconcile an absolutist conception of
authority and the elimination of most direct dependence relationships. 16

Crozier’s compatriot Philippe d’Iribarne, in his comparative study of
a French, a U.S., and a Dutch organization, describes the French principle
of organizing as “the rationale of honor” (la logique de l’honneur). This

principle, which he finds already present in the French kingdom of the
eighteenth century, prior to Napoleon, means that everybody has a rank
(large power distance) but that the implications of belonging to one’s rank
are less imposed by one’s group than determined by tradition. It is “not so
17
much what one owes to others as what one owes to oneself.” We could call
it a stratifi ed form of individualism.
The reverse pattern, small power distance combined with medium col-
lectivism, was found in Austria and Israel, and fairly small power distance

is combined with strong collectivism in Costa Rica. Costa Rica, one of the
six Central American republics, is widely recognized as an exception to the
Latin American rule of dependence on powerful leaders, which in Spanish is
called personalismo. Costa Rica does not have a formal army. It is described

as Latin America’s “most firmly rooted democracy,” in spite of its relative
poverty as compared with the industrial market economies of the world. In
a comparison between Costa Rica and its larger but much poorer neighbor
Nicaragua, U.S. development expert Lawrence E. Harrison has written:

There is ample evidence that Costa Ricans have felt a stronger bond to
their countrymen than have Nicaraguans. That bond is refl ected in Costa