Final Proposal Submitted

I have submitted the final proposal on Monday and now I have continued my reading. I am reading Hofstedes Cultures Consequence book, which is very detailed account of his research methods and dimensions of culture that he has identified. I have found some very interesting points so far in my reading, in particular in relation to the fifth dimension that was later added. Originally Hofstede identified four dimensions of culture through his IBM studies. Now the researchers who devised the questionnaire were all Westerners so it had a Western bias. In current cross cultural research it is a must to have people from distinct cultures collaborate together to devise the questionnaire, however, Hofstede was a pioneer in this field and it wasn't thought of at the time to do that. This does not invalidate the results of his IBM survey, since several other prominent surveys done in recent years have supported Hofstede's original dimensions. In 1980s when his book came out it was widely criticesed and acclaimed. Through this criticism it was decided to do a Chinese Value Survey, so devise a questionnaire by Eastern scholars. This survey validated three out of the four Hofstede dimensions, it did not identify Uncertainty Avoidance as a dimension. It did identify a fifth dimension based on Confucian Dynamism or otherwise known as short-term orientation versus long-term orientation. This was not identified by the Western survey just as Uncertainty Avoidance was not identified by the Chinese survey so this shows that cultural bias of the questionner can influence the results. It may be asked are there more dimensions? Hofstedes reply is that potentially there are, however, they must be proved to be statistically uncorrelated to the other dimensions already identified. Interestingly we use dimensions as a construct to simplify complex concepts, so we don't want to have too many otherwise it won't be simple any more! One famous scholar, Miller (1956) in an essay argued that the magical number seven plus or minus two, represents a limit to the human capacity for processing information (Hofstede 2001, 71).

I will continue reading and also familiarising myself with the program Latex so that I can produce professionally looking documents.