Page 82 - Cultures and Organizations

64 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Power Distance Differences Within Countries:
Social Class, Education Level, and Occupation

Inequality within a society is visible in the existence of different social
classes: upper, middle, and lower, or however one wants to divide them—
this varies by country. Classes differ in their access to and their oppor-

tunities for benefiting from the advantages of society, one of them being
education. A higher education automatically makes one at least middle class.
Education, in turn, is one of the main determinants of the occupations to
which one can aspire, so that in practice in most societies, social class, edu-
cation level, and occupation are closely linked. In Chapter 1 all three have
been listed as sources of our mental software: there are class, education,
and occupation levels in our culture, but they are mutually dependent.
The data used for the computation of the PDI in IBM were from
employees in various occupations and, therefore, from different education
levels and social classes. However, the mix of occupations studied was kept
constant for all countries. Comparisons of countries or regions should
always be based on people in the same set of occupations. One should not
compare Spanish engineers with Swedish secretaries. The mix of occupa-
tions to be compared across all the subsidiaries was taken from the sales

and service offices: these were the only activities that could be found in all
countries. IBM’s product development laboratories were located in only ten
of the larger subsidiaries, and its manufacturing plants in thirteen.
The IBM sales and service people had all completed secondary or
higher education and could be considered largely middle class. The same
applies to the people in the replication studies. The PDI scores in Table 3.1,
therefore, are really expressing differences among middle-class persons in
these countries. Middle-class values affect the institutions of a country,
such as governments and education systems, more than do lower-class val-

ues. This is because the people who control the institutions usually belong
to the middle class. Even representatives of lower-class groups, such as
union leaders, tend to be better educated or self-educated, and by this fact
alone they have adopted some middle-class values. Lower-class parents
often have middle-class ambitions for their children.
For three large countries (France, Germany, and Great Britain) in
which the IBM subsidiaries contained the fullest possible range of indus-
trial activities, PDI scores were computed for all the different occupations
in the corporation, including those demanding only a lower level of educa-