Cultural Clusters: Methodology & Findings (Review)
| Vipin Gupta | Paul J. Hanges | Peter Dorfman |
In the introduction of the paper, authors start their discussion by stating that clusters provide important information regarding societal variation.
Societal variation is a useful way to summarise intercultural similarities as well as intercultural differences. Cluster-based information can also assist in theory development. What’s more clustering of societies is beneficial from a managerial and practical point of view too.
Readers of this paper can understand different ways of clustering rather than social and psychological variables such as attitudes, values, and work goals. They will also have quickly reviewed many different literature of clustering. This paper can be seen as the additional information over Ronen and Shenkar’s 1985 paper.
Clustering of Societies
Scholars have used three major forces to group countries into similar clusters: geographic proximity, mass migrations/ethnic social capital and religious/linguistic commonality.
Besides these, social and psychological variables such as attitudes, values, and work goals have also been used to cluster countries.
As a result of their analysis, they proposed that the 61 GLOBE nations could be grouped into 10 distinct clusters. Discriminant analysis, using randomly split halves, was used to statistically test the empirical validity of the proposed clustering and yielded impressive results. To test the results, a cross-validation procedure was employed.
Some of the finding were that; Germanic cluster rely on more masculine, assertive, and individualistic approaches, which were futuristic, well-defined, result-oriented, and often harsh.
The Nordic cluster, which is culturally most similar to Germanic cluster, showed moderately strong practices of uncertainty avoidance, future orientation and institutional collectivism, as well as gender egalitarianism. It also had weaker practices of in-group collectivism, and performance orientation, assertiveness, and power distance.
The Latin European cluster was distinguished by weak practices of performance orientation, institutional collectivism, and humane orientation, indicating the affective autonomy orientation of Latin European societies.
Latin America was characterised by the practices of high power distance, and low performance orientation, uncertainty avoidance, future orientation, and institutional collectivism.
Anglo practices tended to be more performance-oriented, but weaker in in-group collectivism.
Before concluding, the authors also examined the extent to which individuals’ values “Should Be” and practices “As Is” in their societal culture are influenced by societal clusters.
