Page 98 - Cultures and Organizations

80 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

In world history, philosophers and founders of religions have dealt
explicitly with questions of power and inequality. In China around 500 b.c.,
Kong Ze, whose name the Jesuit missionaries two thousand years later lati-
nized as Confucius (from the older name Kong-Fu Ze ), maintained that the
stability of society was based on unequal relationships between people. He

distinguished the wu lun, the five basic relationships: ruler-subject, father-
son, older brother–younger brother, husband-wife, and senior friend–junior
friend. These relationships contain mutual and complementary obligations:
for example, the junior partner owes the senior respect and obedience,
while the senior partner owes the junior protection and consideration. Con-
fucius’s ideas have survived as guidelines for proper behavior for Chinese
people to this day. In the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong tried to
wipe out Confucianism, but in the meantime his own rule contained strong
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Confucian elements. Countries in the IBM study with a Chinese major-

ity or that have undergone Chinese cultural influences are, in the order
in which they appear in Table 3.1, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South
Korea, Taiwan, and Japan; they occupy the upper-medium and medium
PDI zones. People in these countries accept and appreciate inequality but
feel that the use of power should be moderated by a sense of obligation.
In ancient Greece around 350 b.c., Plato recognized a basic need for
equality among people, but at the same time, he defended a society in which
an elite class, the guardians, would exercise leadership. He tried to resolve
the conflict between these diverging tendencies by playing on two mean-

ings of the word equality, a quantitative one and a qualitative one, but to
us, his arguments resemble the famous quote from George Orwell’s Ani-
mal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than
others.” Present-day Greece in Table 3.1 is found about halfway on power
distance (rank 41–42, score 60).
The Christian New Testament, composed in the fi rst centuries a.d.,

preaches the virtue of poverty. Pursuing this virtue will lead to equal-
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ity in society, but its practice has been reserved to members of religious
orders. It has not been popular with Christian leaders—neither of states,
nor of businesses, nor of the Church itself. The Roman Catholic Church has
maintained the hierarchical order of the Roman Empire; the same holds
for the Eastern Orthodox churches, whereas Protestant denominations to
various degrees are nonhierarchical. Traditionally Protestant nations tend
to score lower on PDI than Catholic or Orthodox nations.