comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

Von Krogh and Roos (1995) assert that positivistic research can be employed to
produce meaningful quantitative measures, but the nature of culture makes its
understanding through these research techniques difficult. The positivistic approach
emphasizes the importance of generalizations and universal laws. Cross-cultural
research based on this approach has established a large number of generalisations;
however, many of these generalizations are neither very general nor exact. Inspection
and evaluation of theories relating to culture need to seek those that provide us with
clear, exact, and reliable results. By definition the findings of such studies should be
viewed as highly embedded in social context of the research team and the society
studied. When we apply the theory removed from their original context, the results must
replicate in other cultures.
OPERATIONALISATION AS ONTOLOGY
Gruber (1993) focuses on systems for knowledge sharing and collective intelligence in
the area of ontology engineering and defines ontology in the context of artificial
intelligence. In information technology, an ontology system is the working model of
entities and interactions in some particular domain of knowledge or practices, such as
electronic commerce or the activity of planning. Gruber says ontology is the
specification of conceptualizations to help in sharing knowledge. In this usage, an
ontology system is a set of concepts, such as things, events, and relations that are
specified in some way, such as a specific natural language, in order to create an agreedupon
vocabulary for exchanging information. At the stage of development of the study
of culture and leadership, ontology must be directed to operational definitions. In study
after study, e.g., my own research (Littrell, 2002; Schneider and Littrell, 2003; Littrell
and Valentin, 2005; Littrell and Nkomo, 2005; and Littrell 2006a and 2006b), and the
GLOBE study (Chhokar et al., 2007) and Schwartz’s theory of values (1992 and 1994),
I see items operationalising dimensions moving from dimension to dimension across
cultures. Culture and leadership dimensions are of little value if the operationalisations
are not consistent across cultures. Hence, until dimensions can be operationalised by
measures that are invariant, focus on the items is important.
Since culture is complex researchers adopting a positivistic analytical approach try to
develop parsimonious models (e.g. Hofstede, 1980) utilizing as few variables as
possible for sufficient definition, with the variables being objective. Through
operationalisations, they attempt to reduce complex concepts such as a sufficiently
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