Values

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Values

• Ype H. Poortinga (Prof Em)
• Tilburg University, Netherlands
• University of Leuven, Belgium

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A bit of background
Up to the 1970s the study of culture was mainly a
matter of ethnographers who described separate
cultures, emphasizing the uniqueness of
each Even emerging comparative approaches tended
to focus on what made each culture unique an
example is the study of national character
(Germans are authoritarian, Italians excitable,
etc.) Please note that this legacy of
differences between cultures is still dominant in
ccp In 1980 Hofstede published Culture's
Consequences (2nd ed 2001) He distinguished
cultures ( countries) in terms of 4 dimensions,
providing a map of the cultural world, in a
sense reminiscent of the meridians and latitudes
of geography This book has become the most cited
source from ccp in the social sciences,
including international business studies
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Hofstede's value dimensions

• Hofstede (1980) postulated four cultural
  dimensions of values on the basis of differences
  in mean item scores between countries, found in a
  survey study of more than 50 subsidiaries of IBM
• Well over 100,000 employees completed a
  questionnaire with well over 100
• items of which 63 pertained to values and 24 were
  ultimately analysed
• Power distance (PD) the extent to which there is
  inequality
• between supervisors and subordinates in an
  organization
• 2. Uncertainty avoidance (UA) the lack of
  tolerance for ambiguity, and the need for formal
  rules
• 3. Individualism (IND) a concern for oneself as
  opposed to concern for one's collectivity
• 4. Masculinity (MA) the extent of emphasis on
  work goals (earnings, advancement) and
  assertiveness, as opposed to interpersonal goals
  (friendly atmosphere, getting along with the
  boss) and nurturance

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Individualism-collectivism
Notably Triandis contributed to the further
development of individualism, now known as
Individualism-Collectivism Most often it is
conceptualised as a single dimension "Concern
for oneself versus concern for the group(s) to
which one belongs" Sometimes the two forms of
concern are seen as two independent dimensions
One conception distinguishes four dimensions -
Horizontal Individualism (e.g., "I'd rather
depend on myself than on others"), - Vertical
Individualism (e.g., "It is important that I do
my job better than others"), - Horizontal
Collectivism (e.g., "If a coworker gets a prize,
I would feel proud), and - Vertical Collectivism
(e.g., "It is important that I respect the
decisions made by my group")
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Comments and concerns
Hofstede (1980, p. 19) defined values as "broad
tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs
over others" He emphasized that he found
cultural dimensions they could not be
replicated at the individual level Triandis and
colleagues even use separate terms at the
individual level (allocentric and idiocentric
persons) Note the literature often speaks about
individual Chinese as collectivists and Americans
as individualists There are several problems
with these dimensions, e.g., - Can there be value
dimensions at the culture-level in data
aggregated from individual scores, if such
dimensions are not found at the individual
level? - The strongest correlates of IND (and
PD) are GNP and related variables (r up to .80)
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- For most Ind-Coll questionnaires socially
desirable answers will lead to a high score on
Coll also the Lie scale of the Eysenck
Personality Questionnaire shows high
correlations with Individualism Ind-Coll
differences have also been associated also with
other response sets, such as acquiescence
agreeing rather than disagreeing with
statements and extremity set - Differences are
small and often go against expectations the
largest meta-analysis today (Oyserman et al,
2002) concludes "European Americans were not
more individualistic than African Americans, or
Latinos, and not less collectivistic than
Japanese or Koreans. Among Asians, only Chinese
showed large effects, being both less
individualistic and more collectivistic"
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The Schwartz Value Scale

• In the tradition of Rokeach, Schwartz developed a
  value scale with 57 items, e.g.,
• - social recognition (respect, approval by
  others)
• - national security (protection of my nation from
  enemies)
• honest (genuine, sincere)
• In a large data set with samples of teachers and
  student from gt 40 countries he found 44 items
  consistently predicting one of 10
• value types arranged more or less in a circle
• These types reflect two individual-level
  dimensions, Self-
• enhancement vs Self-Transcendence and
  Conservatism vs
• Openness to change, which later were changed to
  Person-
• focused vs Social-focused and protection vs
  growth
• (see Figs 1 and 2 in the paper by Fontaine et
  al., included in your readings)

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When aggregating the individual-level data to
country level means Schwartz found 7 value types
ordered along three dimensions at country level
Conservatism vs Autonomy Hierarchy vs
Egalitarianism and Mastery vs Harmony The
Fontaine et al. paper in your readings is one of
several attempts to explain cross-cultural
differences in values found in the Schwartz data
set It first analyses which part of structural
(i.e., correlational) differences between
countries should be attributed to sampling
fluctuations Only thereafter it searches for
patterns in the remaining variance (that is
presumably due to "true" cross-cultural
differences in values) NB The paper reports Multi
Dimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis MDS is based
on distances between data points, rather than
correlations, but gives similar results as
factor analysis
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Conclusions and questions
The structure of values appears to be pretty
similar across cultures The size of
cross-cultural differences in value scores
appears to be rather small (see Poortinga Van
Hemert in your readings) For the Schwartz value
country differences range from 6 (for
stimulation) to 16 (for conformity) of the
total variance Is research misrepresenting the
difference in salience of values, or are people
using more or less the same values to justify
their actions, even if these are highly diverse?