Page 129 - Cultures and Organizations

108 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

family of twenty persons has a paid job and the others do not, the earning
member is supposed to share his or her income in order to help feed the
entire family. On the basis of this principle, a family may collectively cover
the expenses for sending one member to get a higher education, expecting
that when this member subsequently gets a well-paid job, the income will
also be shared.
In individualist cultures, parents will be proud if children at an early age
take small jobs in order to earn pocket money of their own, which they alone
can decide how to spend. In the Netherlands, as in many other individual-
ist Western European countries, the government contributes substantially
to the living expenses of students. In the 1980s the system was changed
from an allowance to the parents to an allowance directly to the students
themselves, which stressed their independence. Boys and girls are treated
as independent economic actors from age eighteen onward. In the United
States it is normal for students to pay for their own studies by getting tem-
porary jobs and personal loans; without government support they, too, are
less dependent on their parents and not at all on more distant relatives.
In individualist cultures, most children expect, and are expected, to
move out of their parents’ home and live on their own when they start pur-
suing higher education. In collectivist cultures, this is less the case. Euro-
barometer survey data across nineteen relatively wealthy European Union
countries show that whether young people use the argument “can’t afford
to move out” is a matter of collectivism, not of national wealth! Economic
arguments are often rationalizations of cultural values. 24
Obligations to the family in a collectivist society are not only fi nan-
cial but also ritual. Family celebrations and observances such as baptisms,
marriages, and, especially, funerals are extremely important and should
not be missed. Expatriate managers from individualist societies are often

surprised by the family reasons given by employees from a collectivist host
society who apply for a special leave; the expatriates think they are being
fooled, but most likely the reasons are authentic.
In an individualist culture, when people meet, they feel a need to com-
municate orally. Silence is considered abnormal. Social conversations can
be depressingly banal, but they are compulsory. In a collectivist culture,

the fact of being together is emotionally sufficient; there is no compulsion
to talk unless there is information to be transferred. Raden Mas Hadjiwi-
bowo, an Indonesian businessman from a Javanese noble family, recalled
the family visits from his youth in the 1930s as follows: