National Culture

Conceptual Overview

The idea that each nation is marked by a certain vision of the world, a vision that influences both its political institutions and the organization of its social life, is quite ancient. It is a notion that we come across even in antiquity. It occupied a large place in the 18th century with Montesquieu and Herder, and with de Tocqueville in the 19th. It can be found again at the beginning of the 20th century with Weber. A wide variety of terms have been used to express this idea, such as the spirit of the people, national character, mores, or even habits of the heart.

The idea was taken up anew in the middle of the 20th century and extended to organizations, this time using the term culture, which had been borrowed from cultural anthropology. For example, Crozier analyzed the influence of French culture on the functioning of organizations in France, and Abegglen did the same in Japan. Hall's research dates from this same time frame. Although not centered on the functioning of organizations, it concerns them directly. For example, he contrasts cultures, such as the American culture where the role of the implicit is relatively reduced (low context) to others, such as Japan, where its place is much larger (high context). This difference affects issues of coordination within organizations.

A turning point was reached in the 1960s, when a conception of culture borrowed from social psychology was used. In this perspective, a culture is conceived as characterized by a set of attitudes. These are grasped by using attitude scales. These scales are constructed by using questionnaires that include a set of selected questions (of the type where respondents are asked the extent to which they agree with a proposition and are expected to indicate the range of their agreement through a response set that runs completely, a little, hardly at all, not at all). The comparison between cultures is carried out by administering the same questionnaire in several countries. An average score is calculated for each country and each attitude scale out of the sampling total. The score differences are supposed to provide an adequate representation of the differences between cultures.

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