Page 146 - Cultures and Organizations

I, We, and They 125

Individualism, Collectivism, and the State

Alfred Kraemer, an American author in the field of intercultural commu-
nication, cited the following comment in a Russian literary journal by a
poet, Vladimir Korotich, who had completed a two-month lecture tour at
American universities:

Attempts to please an American audience are doomed in advance, because
out of twenty listeners five may hold one point of view, seven another, and

eight may have none at all. 50

What strikes the Western reader about this comment is not the described
attitudes of American students but the fact that Korotich expected other-
wise. He was obviously accustomed to audiences in which people would
not express a confronting view, a characteristic of a collectivist culture.
Table 4.1 shows Russia to score considerably more collectivist than West-
ern countries.
Naive observers of the world political scene often see only the different
political systems and are not aware of the different mind-sets of the popu-
lations that led to and maintain these different systems. If the commonly
held value system is that collective interests should prevail over individual
interests, this leads to a different kind of state from the kind that results if
the dominant feeling is that individual interest should prevail over collec-
tive ones.
In American parlance the term collectivist is sometimes used to describe
communist political systems. Countries in Table 4.1 that had or still have
either communist or state capitalist governments are found on the medium
to low IDV—that is, the collectivist side. The weaker the individualism in
the citizens’ mental software, the greater the likelihood of a dominating

role of the state in the economic system.
Since the 1990s increasing individualism has been one of the forces
leading to deregulation and reduction of public expenditures in Western
countries. Even public monopolies such as energy provision and public
transportation have sometimes been privatized at the expense of their per-
formance and reliability, for ideological rather than pragmatic reasons—
which shows the power of cultural values.
The capitalist invention of the joint-stock company—an enterprise
owned by dispersed shareholders who can trade their shares on a stock