comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

acceptable for study. This, of course, leads to operationalisation as the standard
for assessing concepts.
� Materialism - Favours variables for study that have a tangible existence rather
than higher order constructs; I can see the leader behaving and assess the
outcomes of the behaviour.
� Male Dominance – Years of male dominance favours particular topics, methods,
and populations for study.
� Objectivity – Assumption that we can identify and understand immutable
aspects of reality in a detached way, unbiased by human senses and knowledge.
� Nomothetic Laws: Search for generalized principles and laws that apply to
widespread and diverse situations and populations. After all, physical sciences
have laws and accurate predictability; why should not the social sciences?
However, this assumption may be overly optimistic given the fact that human
behaviour is an adaptive stimulus-cognitive or genetic process-response set of
events with an indeterminate set of independent, dependent variables of varying
valences, along with irrelevant variables.
� Rationality – Presumes a linear, cause-effect, logical, material understanding of
phenomena and prizes this approach in offering and accepting arguments and
data generation.
These assumptions are often in direct conflict with many of the assumptions of
psychologies from non-Western cultural and historical traditions because their
ontologies, epistemologies, and praxologies differ. Every culture has its own
psychology that emerges from its unique historical and ecological circumstances.
Efforts must be made to understand and to respect these differences rather than to deny
or force fit them to a predetermined template (see, e.g., Kim, Yang, and Hwang, 2006).
Having been born in and primarily lived and worked in the USA until August 1995, and
subsequently lived in China for 4 years and carrying out research there continually since
1997, and lived in European countries for 3 years, and New Zealand for 7 years, my
point of view is somewhat multicultural with an ethnocentric bias from the USA. The
SVS57 and SVS58 employed in this study are designed and tested since about 1990 to
be culture free. The LBDQXII was designed in the USA in the 1960s to assess USA
leaders. Since then, as noted in the literature review chapter, studies have been carried
out to translate and validate the LBDQXII across cultures. A major effort of the
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