The Challenges of Multiculturalism for the American Church

Malcolm Webber, Ph.D.

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How Do Cultures Vary?

In the first half of the twentieth century, social anthropologists developed the conviction that all societies, modern or traditional, face the same basic problems; only the answers differ. These problems and their answers represent "dimensions" of culture. Thus, a cultural dimension is an aspect of culture that can be measured relative to other cultures (Hofstede, 1997).

In 1980, Geert Hofstede published his seminal study on "Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values." Based on the analysis of about 72,000 survey answers from IBM employees from 40 countries, Hofstede proposed four dimensions along which to distinguish countries regarding the values that the majority of their people hold at work. Hofstede’s four dimensions are:

1. Power Distance. This indicates the extent to which a society accepts the fact that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally. Citizens of the Philippines, Mexico, Venezuela, India and Singapore ranked highest in power distance; residents of New Zealand, Denmark, Israel and Austria the lowest.
2. Uncertainty Avoidance. This indicates the extent to which a society feels threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations and tries to avoid these situations by providing greater career stability, establishing more formal rules, not tolerating deviant ideas and behaviors, and believing in the attainment of expertise. Citizens of Greece, Portugal, Belgium and Japan reported the highest uncertainty-avoidance ratings; residents of Singapore, Denmark and Hong Kong the lowest.
3. Individualism-Collectivism. Individualism implies a loosely knit social framework in which people are supposed to take care of themselves and of their immediate families only, while collectivism is characterized by a tight social framework in which people distinguish between in-groups and out-groups; they expect their in-group (relatives, clan, organizations) to look after them, and in exchange for that, they give absolute loyalty to it. Moreover, individualistic cultures emphasize that the needs and goals of the individual and his or her immediate family are most important. The United States ranked as the most individualistic culture in Hofstede’s sample, followed by Australia, Great Britain and the Netherlands. Venezuela, Columbia, Pakistan were the most collectivistic.
4. Masculinity-Femininity. Measurements in terms of this dimension express the extent to which the dominant values in society are "masculine" – that is, assertiveness, the acquisition of money and things, and not caring for others, the quality of life, or people. Japan, Austria, Venezuela and Italy were the most masculine cultures surveyed, while Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark were the most feminine.

Table 1 shows the scores of 10 countries along Hofstede’s dimensions of national values, and reveals the significant and complex differences between them.

A fifth dimension of culture was added on the basis of a study of the values of students in 23 countries carried out by Michael Bond (1987), a Canadian working in Hong Kong. Bond and Hofstede had cooperated in another study of students’ values which yielded the same four dimensions as the IBM data (Hofstede & Bond, 1984). However, they wondered to what extent their common findings in two studies could be the effect of a Western bias introduced by the common Western background of the researchers. Michael Bond resolved this dilemma by deliberately introducing an Eastern bias. He used a questionnaire prepared at his request by his Chinese colleagues, the Chinese Value Survey (CVS), which was translated from Chinese into different languages and answered by 50 male and 50 female students in each of 23 countries in all 5 continents. Analysis of the CVS data produced three dimensions significantly correlated with the three IBM dimensions of power distance, individualism, and masculinity. There was also a fourth dimension, but it did not resemble uncertainty avoidance. It was composed, both on the positive and on the negative side, from items that had not been included in the IBM studies but were present in the Chinese Value Survey because they were rooted in the teachings of Confucius. Hofstede labeled this dimension: Long-term versus Short-term Orientation. On the long-term side, one finds values oriented towards the future, like thrift and persistence. On the short-term side, values are rather oriented towards the past and present, such as respect for tradition and fulfilling social obligations (Hofstede, 1993). On the Long-term Orientation index, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea scored very high; whereas Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, Canada, Zimbabwe, Great Britain and the U.S.A. scored low (Hofstede, 1997, p. 166).

Hofstede’s theory of dimensions of national values forms one of the more important and popular theories of culture. A study of Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) listings found 1036 quotations from "Culture’s Consequences" in journals during the period 1980 to September 1993. In comparison, another famous typology in a different field of management – Miles and Snow’s typology of strategy – was only cited 200 times in almost the same number of years (Sondergaard, 1994).

As Hofstede (1980b) points out, "characterizing a national culture does not, of course, mean that every person in the nation has all the characteristics assigned to that culture" (p. 45). Nevertheless, a number of replications of Hofstede’s work have confirmed the validity of Hofstede’s dimensions in a variety of circumstances (e.g., Sondergaard, 1994). For example, Michael Hoppe (1990), a German-American management educator, replicated the IBM study on a population of political and institutional elites.

This kind of replication needs to be done in the context of the American church. The author has yet to find a single example of a replication of Hofstede’s work in the context of the American Christian church. In fact, several otherwise excellent texts on models of multiculturalism in the American church make no mention at all of Hofstede’s work or paradigm of culture (Breckenridge & Breckenridge, 1997; Rhodes, 1998; Ortiz, 1996)! Hofstede (1984) wrote:

the consequences for organizational, national, and international policy of a better insight into dimensions of national culture should be elaborated. My theory of cultural differentiation is like a product of the research laboratory, which awaits the efforts of the development technicians to elaborate it into something of practical use…I count on the critical support of enlightened and creative practitioners to, for example, learn about how the new insights can contribute to turning cultural conflict in multicultural organizations into cultural synergy. (p. 279)

If secular organizations need a better understanding of the organizational consequences of culture for the sake of increased synergy, how much more does the church!

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« What is Culture?

How Do Cultures Vary?

The Consequences of Culture for Organizational Leadership »

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© Malcolm Webber, Ph.D., www.healthyleaders.org.

Reproduced on this web site by permission.