Page 340 - Cultures and Organizations

Pyramids, Machines, Markets, and Families: Organizing Across Nations 305

avoidance as dimensions of country cultures. These two dimensions resem-
bled those found a few years earlier through a piece of academic research
commonly known as the Aston Studies. From 1961 through 1973 the Uni-
versity of Aston, in Birmingham, England, hosted an Industrial Adminis-
tration Research Unit. Among the researchers involved were Derek Pugh,
1
David Hickson, and John Child. The Aston Studies represented a large-
scale attempt to assess quantitatively—that is, to measure—key aspects of

the structure of different organizations. At first the research was limited
to the United Kingdom, but later on it was replicated in a number of other
countries. The principal conclusion from the Aston Studies was that the
two major dimensions along which structures of organizations differ are
concentration of authority and structuring of activities. It did not take

much imagination to associate the first with power distance and the second
with uncertainty avoidance.
The Aston researchers had tried to measure the “hard” aspects of orga-
nization structure: objectively assessable characteristics. Power- distance
and uncertainty- avoidance indexes measure soft, subjective characteristics
of the people within a country. A link between the two would mean that
organizations are structured in order to meet the subjective cultural needs
of their members. Stevens’s implicit models of organization in fact provided
the proof. French INSEAD M.B.A. students with their “pyramid of peo-
ple” model, coming from a country with large power distance and strong
uncertainty avoidance, advocated measures to concentrate the authority
and structure the activities. Germans with their “well-oiled machine”
model, coming from a country with strong uncertainty avoidance but small
power distance, wanted to structure the activities without concentrating
the authority. British INSEAD M.B.A. students with a “village market”
model, and with a national culture characterized by small power distance
and weak uncertainty avoidance, advocated neither concentrating author-

ity nor structuring activities. And all of them were dealing with the same
case study. People with international business experience have confi rmed
many times over that, other things being equal, French organizations do
concentrate authority more, German ones do need more structure, and
people in British ones do believe more in resolving problems ad hoc.
Stevens’s three implicit models leave one quadrant in Figure 9.1 unex-
plained. The upper right-hand corner contains no European countries, only
Asian and African ones, and, just in the corner, the French-speaking part
of Canada. People from these countries at that time were rare at INSEAD,