Cultural Dimensions: the Hofstede Model

Hello people!

Last week we can't speak with our American friends because they were on holiday!
So we continued our discussion about cultural competence and culture in general. In particular, we considered how Italian culture is perceived by the members of other countries.
We visited a very interesting website called Kwintessential Site Map which lists tha main social habits, attitudes and behaviours of Italian people.
We discussed in class about the reliability of these characteristics: we realized that some of them can be true but others are simply silly stereotypes.
This fact was valid not only for Italy but also for the other different cultures we analyzed.

At the end of the class, we had a look to a cultural model called The Hofstede Model. According to the analysis made by Geert Hofstede, national cultures can be described on the basis of 5 cultural dimensions.

1.Power Distance
2.Individualism
3.Masculinity
4.Uncertainty Avoidance
5.Long-Term Orientation

These five dimension should enable us to quickly see how silmilar or different countries are.
I think the Model it's quite interesting..it is exciting to compare the different data and to discover that USA can be seen as individualistic, while Japan has the highest level of masculinity!

As always, we have to approach things with a CRITICAL eye: these data are only a general model applied to general population...obviously, not all individuals or smaller regions have the same characterstics!
We can't label the single member of a community in the same way!
Everyone has his/her own way of thinking and behaving!

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