Need to be Careful with Dodgy Internet Websites

It seems that one of the websites that I thought was quite a legitimate website, turns out to be a fraud. The website www.geert-hofstede.com was created by an international business student in the USA without the permission of Geert Hofstede himself. Dr Hofstede sort legal action to stop this website and basically found out that it was a 59 unemployed person that was behind this. Now the domain name has not been renewed. I was using this website to show graphs between two countries scores on the Hofstede dimensions. This is just a timely reminder that you can't always trust what you read on the web, so I will need to critically analyse any material that I get from the web in order to validate the originality and authenticity of the content.

Other than that I am going quite well with writing up Chapters 1 and 2, which I want to have the draft out by tonight. These chapters covers Cross Cultural Research (Definitions, Data Collection and Validation Methods) and Hofstede's five dimensions.

I found out about another survey called the GLOBE it was conducted in the 1990's and based on Hofstede's 5 dimensions they carried out a project and from their results they expanded to 18 dimensions of culture. Now it would be good to include this in my paper, however, I can't get access to the book and their results. Furthermore, with the Hofstede 5 dimensions that is enough for the purposes of my report since it is a general overview and this study derives from these original dimensions.

Another interesting fact I discovered was that Hofstede was originally a Mechanical Engineer. He worked as an engineer (and manager) for 10 years before doing a doctorate in Social Science and researching cross cultural issues. He stated in one interview that it was due to his engineering background that he was able to measure culture, as before him no social scientist was able to quantify differences in culture, many had come up with theories but none had any empircal evidence. Hofstede was also lucky in the fact that he had access to the IBM values and attitudes database and IBM let him analyse the data so that he was able to come up with his dimensions paradigm. Since Hofstede many studies have been carried out and there hasn't been one to date that contradicts the results Hofstede obtained in the 1980's. Of course he has critics, however, upon reading his data the evidence speaks for itself. The IBM data used matched samples of people, so that the main difference between respondents was their nationality.