Diversity and Unity of the Global Mosaic : Reimagining National Culture in the 21st century

Our paper challenges the longstanding worldview of nations as homogeneous masses of uniform national culture that can be represented by single national culture dimension scores. We present a richer perspective of nations as diverse mixtures of global values archetypes. Our global archetypes and national mixtures of these archetypes are identified with data on Schwartz values from Wave Six of the World Values Survey provided by 83,526 individuals from 60 countries. Using archetypal analysis, we find five archetypes are adequate to capture the configurations of Schwartz values in these data, which we label Retreater, Social Conservative, Social Innovator, Social Hedonist and Maximalist. Importantly, we find each country is a mixture of individuals belonging to different archetypes, and that the composition of these archetypal mixtures varies across countries. Through their associations with other data in the World Values Survey, our five archetypes provide insight into the nature of the individuals holding these distinctly different values configurations. Projecting the 60 country mixtures into a reduced-dimensional space illustrates that most of the differences between countries can be explained by proportions of their populations who are either Maximalist or Social Hedonist. Finally, we establish external validity for our country mixtures by showing significant associations between the position of countries in this mixtures space and well-known third-party indices of country economic performance and happiness, all with large magnitude effects. Overall, our conceptualization of nations as mixtures of global values archetypes has important implications for the world of culture-related theory, practice and policy