Page 63 - Cultures and Organizations

48 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness. To the plain
man, such as the present writer, this situation is discouraging. I observe,
however, that the type of problem which a man naturally sets to an animal
depends upon his own philosophy, and this probably accounts for the dif-
ferences in the results. The animal responds to one type of problem in one
way and to another in another; therefore the results obtained by different
investigators, though different, are not incompatible. But it remains neces-
sary to remember that no one investigator is to be trusted to give a survey
of the whole fi eld.
—Bertrand Russell, Outline of Philosophy, 1927 31

This quote from an eminent British philosopher, written three genera-
tions ago, is a warning that results of scientific research depend on the

researcher in ways that may not even be conscious to him or her. The same
theme returns in a different way in the work of Thomas Kuhn, whom we
quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Scientists are caught in the para-
digms of their contemporaries.
Intercultural comparative studies often belong to a new normal science
in the Kuhn sense. A common approach is for a master’s or doctoral student
to take an instrument (mostly a paper-and-pencil questionnaire) developed
in one country, usually in the United States by a U.S. scholar who tested it
on U.S. respondents, and to have it administered to respondents in one or
more other countries. Unfortunately, such instruments cover only issues
considered relevant in the society in which they were developed, and they
exclude questions unrecognized by the designer because they do not occur
in his or her society. Such questions are precisely the ones most interest-
ing from a cultural point of view. The hidden ethnocentrism in this type
of research leads to trivial results.

Prospective cross-cultural researchers who feel inspired by this book
and who want to use parts of its approach in their own project are referred
to the 2001 edition of Geert’s scholarly volume Culture’s Consequences, espe-
cially its Chapter 10. This will caution them against many pitfalls that
continue to await novice and even experienced researchers.
One strong piece of advice we offer is to think twice before collecting
one’s own culture scores. Research is about interpreting data, not necessar-
ily about collecting them. A search of the literature and the Internet will
show that for almost any application, relevant and professionally collected