Page 152 - Cultures and Organizations

I, We, and They 131

Origins of Individualism-Collectivism Differences

The origins of differences on the individualism-collectivism dimension,
just as with those on power distance, are a matter of conjecture. Never-
theless, statistical relationships with geographic, economic, and historic
variables can support the guesswork.
It is a common assumption among archaeologists that the development
of human societies started with groups of hunter-gatherer nomads; that
subsequently people settled down into a sedentary existence as farmers;
and that farming communities grew into larger settlements that became

towns, cities, and finally modern megalopolises. Cultural anthropologists
have compared present-day hunter-gatherer tribes, agricultural societies,
and urbanized societies. They have found that from the most primitive
to the most modern society, family complexity first increased and then

decreased. Hunter-gatherers tend to live in nuclear families or small bands.
Sedentary agricultural societies mostly show complex extended families
or village community in-groups. When farmers migrate to cities, the
sizes of extended families become reduced, and the typical urban fam-

ily is again nuclear. In most countries today, one finds only agricultural
and urban subcultures. For these two types, modernization corresponds to
individualization.
Information about one hunter-gatherer society comes from an Aus-
tralian researcher, Ray Simonsen, who administered the VSM94 (the 1994
improved version of the IBM questionnaire) to aboriginal entrepreneurs in
Darwin, Northern Territory, and to a comparable group of white Austra-
lians. Aboriginal society is still largely based on hunting and gathering.
While unlike the white Australians, the aborigines scored high on power
distance, low on masculinity, and high on uncertainty avoidance, on indi-
vidualism they scored as high as their white compatriots. 57

In Figure 4.1 we find societies with a large traditional rural sector
mostly at the collectivist side and modern industrial societies at the indi-
vidualist side. There are some exceptions, especially in East Asia, where
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore have retained
considerable collectivism in spite of industrialization.
As in the case of PDI in Chapter 3, we used stepwise regression to
determine what quantitative information about our countries best explained