Interview with Professor Geert Hofstede
January 2007

Professor Hofstede, you were a pioneer of intercultural management research – originally, you came from the technical field. What was your motivation to start research in the field of the social sciences, management, and subsequently, intercultural management, at that time?

It happens to many people that they start one particular career, and after some time they realize that their interest is somewhere else. As a young man I had various experiences – even as a sailor. After I completed my engineering degree I disguised myself for half a year as a factory worker – the idea being that if I was supposed to become a manager I better knew what it was to be treated as a worker. Then I worked in technical and management jobs in Dutch industry. After some years I decided this was not what I wanted to spend my entire life on, but as we had got married and our family was growing it wasn’t too easy to change. After about ten years I managed to get part of a scholarship to do a PhD in a different field: social psychology. I continued to work part-time at my textile company, while working towards my PhD at Groningen University. After graduation I was hired by IBM Europe as a personnel psychologist. My area was not only Europe itself but also Africa and the Western part of Asia, and I travelled a lot. Among other things, we set up a system of attitude surveys among IBM employees. I also spoke to many people and observed the way they worked and interacted, and was struck by the differences between countries within this one monolithic corporation. After six years I was eligible for a sabbatical, and I used it to explore the material my colleagues and I had collected. I proposed to IBM to make a research project out of it, but my boss decided he wanted to give it to a university instead. So I left IBM and joined that university.

So it was not that you started off with the intercultural research in mind, it was rather one step after the other?

Yes, life is always happening this way – I don’t know anybody who made a plan and really followed it – things happen and afterwards make sense out of it.

If you had to start everything from scratch, would you do anything differently?

No, I don’t think so – you know, there are some things I don’t like too much and others I liked more, but you can’t get one without the other. I’m happy with the way it went. I think I got a decent deal from life so far.

Probably you experienced in your career limited resources to carry out research, be it in terms of time or financial means – If you had unlimited resources to apply your research, what would be the top 3 things you would do?

I think if I had unlimited resources it would kill my creativity. I never pursued a career in terms of financial success – I took risks leaving jobs, giving up job security and working on temporary contracts, sometimes not knowing what I would live from half a year from now. But I do wish there was a decent institute in Holland that continues my work – the places that continue it are all suffering from lack of funds – I would certainly give funds to institutes that are working on intercultural comparative research.

In a world where “global village” has become a buzz word and many claim that realities are becoming more similar, do you think that intercultural competence is becoming less important?

It’s becoming more important, because people are getting more and more in contact with each other and discover that people who maybe look similar are different. People are very much shaped by the place where they grew up, you find that in my books also, all the major programs of life we pick up in the first ten years, before puberty. After that, we switch over to a different way of learning but our values have already been set. The place where we grew up influences the way we function. People around the world may buy in the same kind of shops, but consumer behaviour in different countries is still vastly different. The shops may look the same they don’t cater to the same needs of people.

The next SIETAR Europa Congress will take place in Bulgaria, in the CEE region. Do you think that there are cultural clusters that can be identified that are specific to CEE countries as opposed to Western Europe?

No, not as such. Both within Western Europe and within Eastern Europe, there are big differences. For example, Slovenia is a completely different country from Slovakia.

Your book “Software of the Mind” has been translated into Bulgarian. Have you ever been to Bulgaria? What do you find special about Bulgaria and the Bulgarians?

We travelled in Bulgaria twice in the 1970s and we developed a special sympathy for the country. In 2001 the Nov Bulgarski University at Sofia made me a Doctor Honoris Causa which I appreciated greatly.

How would you characterize the Bulgarians?

Bulgaria has always been a rich agricultural country. Bulgarians are basically agricultural people, with a sense of moderation. They don’t like to go to extremes.

Let us turn to a question about your work. Many citations of your works refer to the first four dimensions. The fifth dimension is often not mentioned. Why do you think is this so?

The first four dimensions have been around since the 1980s – the fifth came ten years later, and the research about it is only now accumulating. It was based on a study designed by Asian minds – people with Western minds, like myself, had overlooked it. They still tend to overlook it, like this American expatriate manager in Brazil who recently objected to including the subject of “thrift” in a questionnaire - a key issue in the fifth dimension. The 2005 edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind contains an extensive chapter summarizing recent research about the fifth dimension, and it proves very important. For example it played a crucial role in the start of the war in Iraq – Americans and British come from short-term oriented cultures that do not tend to worry too much about what comes next. They did not get much support from continental Europe: most European cultures are not so short-time oriented and the Europeans realized the possible consequences. The English language needs four words for “the day after tomorrow”. All other European languages I know have a single word for it: “übermorgen”, “après-demain”, “overmorgen”, “dopodomani”, “poslezaftra”.

You focused on quantitative methods in your works – what do you think about qualitative methods?

They are at least as important. In my books you see that I use many qualitative examples. Working for an international organization, moving around in all those countries and meeting all those people, one sees the different realities of their work; but I tried to explain, understand and predict the differences using the quantitative measures I had available. A lot of the consequences of culture are quantifiable – like inequality, conflict, gender ratios in politics, private and public spending patterns, corruption perceptions, Quantifying also allows you to show what culture does not relate to. For example, many differences between countries relate primarily to economic development. Whatever one can explain from differences in economic development, one doesn’t need to explain from culture.

What do you think would be the biggest issues for the future of intercultural studies?

Tolerance, I think. Avoiding the intolerance of fundamentalisms. Not only religious fundamentalisms: Protestant, Catholic, Sunni, Shiite, Jewish but also political fundamentalism like the market dogmas of the International Monetary Fund. At the present time the Chinese may be the least fundamentalist of all of us.

This is actually an important issue for our congress and we hope to have discussions on that.

Yes, I have experienced that, specifically in Bulgaria, there are people who are very concerned about those things.

Professor Hofstede, thank you very much for the interview.