ABSTRACT
My awareness of Hofstede started in the early 1990s when I was teaching undergraduate courses in ESADE business school. The original aims of the course were language oriented and directed at non-native English speakers, but the content focus on culture and cross-cultural communication in business soon gave the course a non-linguistic status. Much of the inspiration for the course coincided with our belated discovery of the first edition of Culture’s Consequences, which rapidly became, as it were, the cultural Bible and maintained that status for a number of years. I did not then realize how revolutionary the book had been when it appeared, though significantly there was not at that time a course in the school dealing explicitly with doing business across cultures, as I christened the new course. I presented Hofstede’s four dimensions and the infrastructure of statistical analysis on which it was based as the value dimensional manifestation of underlying value orientations in turn stemming from external factors and societal and historic factors. This meant presenting Hofstede’s dimensions as a development in the world of work and organizations of the Kluckhohn value orientations derived from anthropological studies in the south-west of the United States.
