Trompenaars compared Hofstede

I have started the section on Trompenaars and his seven dimensions of culture. Now he is very different to Hofstede since he is actually a management consultant and not a social scientist or anthropologist like Hofstede. So he uses the theory found in anthropology textbooks and applies it to practice. He acknowledges Hofstede's five dimensions, however, he does not adopt Hofstede's five dimensions. Instead he really adopts three dimensions from Parsons five relational orientations and from here devises seven dimensions. Thus his theory does not have the empirical backing that Hofstede has. He does have a database of 30000 manager responses to his questionnaire (which he does not publicly publish). However he does not statistically prove the dimensions like Hofstede has done. Trompenaars is more of the opinion that within each dimension a culture dances from one pole to the other in a cyclical motion. Thus unlike Hofstede being placed on a continuum between the two poles and each pole being the preferred characteristic, Trompenaars does not give quantitative scores for each country in each dimension. Trompenaars only has some graphs of respondents questions in each dimension. In this way his analysis does not prove empirically that each of these dimensions are statistically independent from each other, moreover, he provides a theoretical model that is yet to be tested. This could also be due to the fact that Hofstede was an engineer turned social scientist, thus he prefers using numbers and empirical proof, whereas Trompenaars is from an economic background and thus does not see the need for empirical proof. I am still researching this area, however, it seems that Trompenaars is more adapting the theory into practice, without validating the viability of the theory first. Whereas Hofstede has in my opinion proved his five dimensions to be statistically independent.

Another issue I am debating is the relevance of Triandis in this paper. Triandis has written several chapters about individualism and collectivism, however, I am starting to realise he is more interested in psychology, that is at the individual level not at the societal level, which is anthropology. Thus I am not too sure if I will still include the chapter on him, because I don't think it will add any value. Furthermore having investigated into two different dimensional models that could be a good enough basis to move onto the next section of the project which is intercultural communication and then case study between Western and Eastern cultures.