NATIONAL CULTURE DIMENSIONS: HELP OR HINDRANCE?
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The Hofstede and GLOBE national culture dimensions are commonly used by management and marketing researchers and practitioners to understand cultural differences between countries. However, there are fundamental problems in using these dimensions to learn about cross-cultural marketing. Firstly, there is a lack of face validity in many of the items used to determine the culture scores. Second, national culture scores for similar dimensions across the two models for common countries are either unrelated or negatively related, seriously undermining the credibility of the dimension scores in representing the culture phenomena that they claim to represent. Lastly, the national culture scores for dissimilar dimensions are often more strongly related than with the similar dimensions, hence using these scores to infer the broader characteristics of societies, individuals and organizations is invalid and the managerial prescriptions based on such research are misleading. Taken together these flaws must seriously question the integrity and usefulness of the Hofstede and GLOBE national dimensions in international marketing research. We discuss the origins of these problems and advocate a more critical perspective on these taken-for-granted culture models. We conclude with some suggestions on cross-cultural marketing that are both theoretically meaningful and practically useful.