ABSTRACT
Hofstede’s main research on national culture is principally described in Culture’s consequences. On a few occasions he has added to his model, but he has never acknowledged any significant errors or weaknesses in that research. Hofstede’s primary data were extracted from a pre-existing bank of employee attitude surveys undertaken around 1967 and 1973 within IBM subsidiaries in 66 countries. In retrospect, some of the survey questions seemed to Hofstede to be pertinent to understanding the respondents’ ‘values’ which he defines as ‘broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others’ and which are for him the ‘core element in culture’. The scale problem of Hofstede’s research is radically compounded by the narrowness of the population surveyed. Although he speaks of ‘national samples’, the respondents were exclusively from a single company – IBM.
