Alternative Cross-Cultural Theories : Why Still Hofstede?

Ignoring culture can lead to bad policy, and culturally-based analyses substantially enhance the understanding of economic behavior. However, culture is a collective phenomenon which is so broad that it is hard to design testable hypotheses for research. The primary achievement of Hofstede, a pioneer in intercultural research, was that he formulated an empirical mapping of countries across certain cultural dimensions. He moved the concept of culture to the cross-cultural arena based on variations in culture across countries. His dimensions have been extensively used by researchers in a variety of settings. Subsequently, a number of cross-cultural theories have been proposed in the literature to operationalize national culture empirically. This paper gives an overview of the alternative cultural theories, along with a brief summary of Hofstede dimensions, and identifies the areas of key strengths of Hofstede model. It also looks at the common criticisms of Hofstede theory and their pragmatic rebuttals