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Hofstede's Cultural Indices In Relief, Development, And Social Justice Work

Decent Essays

Catherine Ariwodola
Dr. J Inslee
GLST 5503
25 September, 2014
Hofstede’s Cultural Indices in Relief, Development, and Social Justice Work
According to Hofstede, culture is defined as “the collective mental programming of the human mind which distinguishes one group of people from another” (6). Our cultural differences often times lead to misunderstanding and conflict. However, the knowledge of Hofstede indices can serve as a useful tool to understand how and why people think or act the way they do. My goal in this essay is to explain how the Hofstede indices, in addition to other skills, enables those in leadership roles and helping professions (professions like medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, psychological counseling, social work, education, …show more content…

Better understanding of their limitations may include recognizing they don’t have all the answers and helping can sometimes mean keeping an open mind and respecting the culture and beliefs of the people they are trying to help. Ethan Watter’s, from his interview on The Globalization of the American Psych,e shares a fascinating story about western psychologists trying to help Sri Lankans who had just experienced psychological trauma from the Tsunami. “The psychologists went in with the western definition of trauma and how to manage it, which contradicts the Sri Lankans definition and solutions. In the end, solutions offered were not necessarily helpful. Only made their efforts counterproductive” (Watters). From my experience growing up in Nigeria, an example that comes to mind from a social justice perspective is when groups or governments from western countries come in with the intention of upholding children and women rights. The effort is rarely successful, especially in the states controlled by Sharia (Islamic) laws. Despite the women and children living under unpleasant circumstances, they see their situation from a deeply religious and cultural perspective and may not necessarily want the help being offered. Likewise, when Non-Governmental …show more content…

This knowledge of weakness should not be used against people of other cultures or in stereotyping individuals. In obtaining the indices, research was based on data obtained from IBM employees. According to Hofstede, “dimensions and associated country scores were developed through factor analysis of the means of nationally aggregated individual item responses which were collected as part of IBM employee surveys” (Hofstede 491). The problem, however, is that as much as this may be useful in determining the culture of a country, it does not have enough diverse subjects to form a complete perception of an individual, cultural group or organization; especially an organization different from IBM. The diversity of ethnicity, religious belief, social economic status, education and other variables that makes up an individual’s value system may not be reflected in the average IBM employee. Brewer and Verniak, in their article On the Misuse of National Culture Dimensions, believe “The correlations among the items used to measure the national culture dimensions are positive and highly significant at the aggregated national (also known as “ecological”) level, but are mostly low and insignificant and sometimes of opposite sign at the individual level” (Brewer and Venaik

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