Page 557 - Cultures and Organizations

522 Glossary

pride, respect for tradition, preservation of face, and fulfi lling social
obligations.
SIGNIFICANT: see statistically signifi cant.

SOCIALIZATION: the acquisition of the values and practices belonging to a
culture, by participating in that culture.
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION: the existence of two or more classes in a society
that have markedly different status and prerogatives.

STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT: the state in which the relationship between
two measures for which only a sample of the entire population has been

investigated is sufficiently strong to rule out the possibility that this

relationship is due to pure chance. The “significance level,” usually 0.05,
0.01, or 0.001, indicates the extent to which the relationship could still be
accidental.

STEREOTYPING: a form of reasoning in which similar characteristics are
ascribed to all members of a collective (group, category, or culture).

SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING: a person’s evaluative reaction to his or her life,
in terms of either life satisfaction (cognitive evaluations) or affect (ongoing
emotional reactions).

SYMBOLS: words, pictures, gestures, or objects that carry a particular
meaning recognized as such only by those who share a culture.

TYPOLOGY: a set of ideal types used to describe a phenomenon.
UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE: the extent to which the members of a culture
feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations. One of the dimen-
sions of national cultures (from weak to strong).

UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE INDEX (UAI): a measure for the degree of uncer-
tainty avoidance in a country’s culture, originally based on the IBM research
project.

UNIVERSALISM: a way of thinking prevailing in individualist societies, in
which the standards for the way a person should be treated are the same
for everybody. Together with its opposite pole, exclusionism, this is one of
Misho Minkov’s WVS-based dimensions of national cultures.