Page 556 - Cultures and Organizations

Glossary 521

POWER DISTANCE: the extent to which the less powerful members of insti-
tutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power
is distributed unequally. One of the dimensions of national cultures (from
small to large).

POWER DISTANCE INDEX (PDI): a measure for the degree of power distance
in a country’s culture, originally based on the IBM research project.
PRACTICES: the scope of what people do, including the symbols to which
they respond, the heroes they venerate, and the rituals in which they take
part, but not their values.
PURCHASING POWER PARITY (PPP): a basis for comparing gross national
income that takes the local purchasing power of money into account.

PROXIMATE MECHANISM OF EVOLUTION: the actual process of replica-
tion and selection that leads to evolution of the units that undergo it. For

instance, stories evolve through retelling with modifications, orally or in
writing; individuals evolve through sexual reproduction with mutation.

RELATIVISM: a willingness to consider other persons’ or groups’ theories
and values to be as reasonable as one’s own.

REPLICATOR: a unit of selection in an evolutionary process. A replicator can
be a gene, an individual, a group, or a cultural value or practice—anything
that reproduces with variation, whether biologically or otherwise.

RESTRAINT: the opposite of indulgence; together, they form one of the
dimensions of national cultures. Restraint stands for a society that sup-
presses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social

norms.

RISK: the chance that an action will have an undesirable but known
outcome.
RITUALS: collective activities that are technically superfluous to reach

desired ends but that, within a culture, are considered to be socially essen-
tial; they are therefore carried out for their own sake.
SHORT-TERM ORIENTATION: the opposite of long-term orientation; together,
they form a dimension of national cultures. Short-term orientation stands
for the fostering of virtues related to the past and present, such as national