Page 168 - Cultures and Organizations

144 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

nine-scoring cultures were the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South
America, the Flemish (Dutch-speaking Belgians), and countries from the
East African region.
The top third of Table 5.1 includes all Anglo countries: Ireland,
Jamaica, Great Britain, South Africa, the United States, Australia, New
Zealand, and Trinidad. Also from Europe are Slovakia (with a rank of 1),
Hungary, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Poland,
and the French-speaking Belgians and Swiss. In Asia are Japan (rank 2),
China, and the Philippines. From Latin America are the larger countries
around the Caribbean—Venezuela, Mexico, and Colombia—and Ecuador.
The United States scored 62 on MAS (rank 19) and the Netherlands

14 (rank 73), so these two countries figuring in the story at the beginning
of this chapter were markedly far apart.

Masculinity and Femininity in Other

Cross-National Studies

Masculinity-femininity has been the most controversial of the fi ve dimen-
sions of national cultures. This is a matter not only of labeling (users are
free to adapt the labels to their taste—for instance, performance-oriented
versus cooperation-oriented) but also of recognizing that national cultures
do differ dramatically on the value issues related to this dimension. At the

same time, ever since Geert’s first publication on the subject in the 1970s, the
number and scope of validations of the dimension have continued to grow.
Several of these validations have been bundled in a 1998 book, Masculinity
4
and Femininity: The Taboo Dimension of National Cultures. Of note is that the
dimension is politically incorrect mainly in masculine cultures such as the
United States and the UK, but not in feminine cultures such as Sweden and

the Netherlands. Taboos are strong manifestations of cultural values.
One reason the masculinity-femininity dimension is not recognized
is that it is entirely unrelated to national wealth. For the other three IBM
dimensions, wealthy countries are more often found on one of the poles
(small power distance, individualist, and somewhat weaker uncertainty
avoidance), and poor countries on the other. The association with wealth
serves as an implicit justification that one pole must be better than the

other. For masculinity-femininity, though, this does not work. There are