Page 53 - Cultures and Organizations

38 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

tries, three dimensions of the CVS replicated dimensions earlier found in
the IBM surveys, but the fourth CVS dimension was not correlated with
the fourth IBM dimension: uncertainty avoidance had no equivalent in the
CVS. The fourth CVS dimension instead combined values opposing an
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orientation on the future to an orientation on the past and present. Geert
labeled it long-term versus short-term orientation (LTO) and adopted it as

a fifth universal dimension. Twenty years later Misho Minkov unraveled
from the World Values Survey a dimension that was correlated with LTO

and helped us to redefine it and extend it to many more countries. The full
story will be told in Chapter 7.

Validation of the Country Culture Scores

Against Other Measures
The next step was showing the practical implications of the dimension
scores for the countries concerned. This was done quantitatively by cor-
relating the dimension scores with other measures that could be logically

expected to reflect the same culture differences. These quantitative checks
were supplemented with qualitative, descriptive information about the
countries. This entire process is called validation.
Examples, which will be elaborated upon in Chapters 3 through 8, are
that power distance was correlated with the use of violence in domestic
politics and with income inequality in a country. Individualism was cor-
related with national wealth (GNI per capita) and with mobility between
social classes from one generation to the next. Masculinity was correlated
negatively with the share of the gross national income that governments
of wealthy countries spent on development assistance to the third world.
Uncertainty avoidance was associated with Roman Catholicism and with

the legal obligation of citizens in developed countries to carry identity
cards. Long-term orientation was correlated with national savings rates.
Relationships between measurable phenomena in the world can be
complex. The dimensions of national cultures described in the following
chapters are meant to improve our understanding by reducing this com-
plexity, but they cannot eliminate it. For each dimension, we describe with
which phenomena it is most strongly correlated. Sometimes we need two,
or rarely three, dimensions for our explanation, but our goal is to keep it
as simple as our data permit.
Altogether, the 2001 edition of Culture’s Consequences lists more than
four hundred significant correlations of the IBM dimension scores with