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.

Culture related research in international business focusses on cultural relativism, that is, on cultural differences between countries. It examines the implications of national culture differences and how to overcome the differences for doing business across national borders. These discussions are either framed within the emic- versus etic- debate, or under the rubric of the national culture dimensions. Our paper addresses the equally important but largely ignored question of cultural universalism in international business, that is, how nations are culturally similar. Using the GLOBE national culture dimensions data, we find significant similarities among the GLOBE nations. Our paper contributes to the cultural relativism versus universalism debate, and extends IB theory with a “universal culture” approach that we believe can enhance understanding and cooperation among international business managers. Overall, our findings have important implications for IB scholars and practitioners.