National Culture as Value Orientations: Consequences of Value Differences and Cultural Distance

This chapter presents my theory of seven cultural value orientations and applies it to understanding relations of culture to significant societal phenomena. The first section explicates my conception of culture - a conception of the normative value system that underlies social practices and institutions. I then derive seven value orientations that are useful for describing and comparing societies. Next, the chapter discusses the conceptual underpinnings for measuring the cultural value orientations. It then presents the survey methods developed for this purpose, and the empirical validation of the content of the value orientations and of the structure of relations among them. This is based on analyses of data across 77 national groups in 75 countries. Brief comparisons of these value orientations with two other dimensional approaches to culture are followed by an analysis that justifies treating countries as cultural units. The middle section of the chapter uses the seven validated cultural orientations to generate a worldwide graphic mapping of national cultures. This map permits comparison of national cultures with one another on each orientation. It reveals eight distinct world cultural regions that reflect the influence of geographic proximity, history, language, and other factors. To illustrate the meaningfulness of the cultural map, I discuss the distinctive cultural profiles of each world cultural region. The final third of the chapter examines associations between culture, measured by the value orientations, and a variety of variables of economic significance: the socioeconomic level of countries, their level of corruption, the social net they provide to citizens, their level of democracy, and the competitiveness of their market systems. It discusses the reciprocal causal processes that may account for these associations. Finally, the chapter analyzes how distance between countries on cultural value orientations affects the flow of investment around the world. The current approach differs from well-known theories of cultural dimensions (e.g. Inglehart and Baker, 2000; Hofstede, 2001) in deriving the constructs to measure culture from a priori theorizing and then testing the fit of these constructs to empirical data. Moreover, whereas other approaches seek orthogonal dimensions, I assume that correlated dimensions capture culture better because they can express the interdependence of cultural elements. My theory of culture specifies a coherent, integrated system of relations among the seven cultural orientations. These orientations form three correlated bipolar dimensions. Empirical measures of the seven orientations support the coherence of culture by revealing that the cultural profiles of societies rarely exhibit incompatible value emphases.