Page 45 - Cultures and Organizations

30 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

ing of societies, of groups within those societies, and of individuals within
those groups:

■ Relation to authority
■ Conception of self—in particular:
■ The relationship between individual and society
■ The individual’s concept of masculinity and femininity
■ Ways of dealing with conflicts, including the control of aggression

and the expression of feelings 3

Twenty years later Geert was given the opportunity to study a large body
of survey data about the values of people in more than fifty countries around

the world. These people worked in the local subsidiaries of one large mul-
tinational corporation: International Business Machines (IBM). At fi rst
it may seem surprising that employees of a multinational corporation—
a very special kind of people—could serve for identifying differences in
national value systems. However, from one country to another they repre-
sented almost perfectly matched samples: they were similar in all respects
except nationality, which made the effect of nationality differences in their
answers stand out unusually clearly.
4
A statistical analysis of the country averages of the answers to ques-
tions about the values of similar IBM employees in different countries
revealed common problems, but with solutions differing from country to
country, in the following areas:

■ Social inequality, including the relationship with authority
■ The relationship between the individual and the group
■ Concepts of masculinity and femininity: the social and emotional
implications of having been born as a boy or a girl

■ Ways of dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity, which turned out to
be related to the control of aggression and the expression of emotions

These empirical results covered amazingly well the areas predicted by
Inkeles and Levinson twenty years before. The discovery of their predic-
tion provided strong support for the theoretical importance of the empirical
findings. Problems that are basic to all human societies should be refl ected

in different studies, regardless of their methods. The Inkeles and Levinson
study had strikingly predicted what Geert found twenty years later.