ABSTRACT
Cultural Theory's (CT's) dynamism examines the alternating dominance of two of its archetypal cultures, Individualism and Hierarchy over the extended periods of economic cycles. Long-wave economic cycles were first promulgated by N. D. Kondratieff and later elaborated by others. It is now necessary to examine their bases and to consider the criticisms to which his work has been exposed. Kondratieff's evidence was based on just two and a half cycles beginning in the 1780s and calculated on commodity prices, the cost of industry's raw materials and on wages and interest rates in England, France and the United States as well as levels of foreign trade. First, Schumpeter's refinement of Kondratieff's cycles maintains an overall cyclical element while accounting for some of their varying lengths. Schumpeter recognized four shorter cycles as operating within the longer Kondratieff waves. It is the simultaneous movements of the four cycles, Schumpeter argued, that define Kondratieff's turning points.
