Page 291 - Cultures and Organizations

260 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

GLOBE’s future orientation “as is,” meant to express long-term orienta-
tion, did not correlate with either of our measures of LTO but did with a
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combination of low UAI and low PDI. It is about planning for the future,
and GLOBE respondents in relatively relaxed, egalitarian societies claimed
to do more of this.
GLOBE’s future orientation “should be” correlated with a combination
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of high PDI and low LTO-WVS. It stands for “the accepted norm should
be to plan for the future” and “people should worry about current cri-
ses.” Respondents in cultures that are more authoritarian and with more
of a short-term orientation were more likely to agree with such “should”
statements.
GLOBE’s attempts to replicate long-term orientation as “future ori-
entation” has therefore completely failed; the only signifi cant correlation
between the two is negative.

Long- and Short-Term Orientation, Family
Relations, and School Results

In Chapters 4 and 5 we referred to a 2005 market research study on ideals

of beauty and body image held by fifteen- to seventeen-year-old girls from
ten countries around the world. The same study also conducted telephone
interviews with larger samples of women between the ages of eighteen
and sixty-four in the same ten countries. Women in cultures with a short-
term orientation more often mentioned their mothers as having positively

influenced their feelings about themselves and beauty and said that the
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mother’s ideas of beauty had shaped their own. We recognize the mother’s
contribution to the daughter’s self-enhancement as part of the short-term
orientation of a culture.

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is
an international comparative test of mathematics and science performance
administered every four years in now more than fifty countries among all

continents. Its latest round, at the time of this writing, was in 2007. Par-
ticipants are fourth-grade students (age about ten) and/or eighth-grade
students (age about fourteen). Consistently, the East Asian students (those
from Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan) outperform
all other students, especially in mathematics. The lowest-achieving nations
are found in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Using TIMSS data from 1999, Geert had found that performance in
mathematics correlated significantly with LTO-CVS; performance in sci-