comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

Stewart (2008: 1) argues “...the contours of a cultural community rarely coincide with a
political entity. Nor does the ideal of national unity account for internal diversity and
conflict. Identities within nations are fluid, even from minute to minute.” Stuart relates
an experience in France’s Loire Valley where he noticed in conversations with the local
population that a person’s identity would change during the course of a conversation.
“We French” would give way to “We Gauls,” “We Latins,” “We Bretons,” “We
Franks,” or “We Europeans” depending on the topic.
Hofstede (1998: 17-18) tells us, “The use of nations as units for comparing mental
programs is debatable. Most anthropologists shy away from nations as units for
studying culture. They are basically right, as nations can host many cultures in the
anthropological sense, and cultures can bridge more than one nation.” Hofstede points
out that if data are collected by field observation, the researcher can choose more
relevant units than nation. However, if data are collected from secondary sources, as is
much of the data employed by economists and financial researchers, the nation level, or
province, or city may be the only levels available. These political boundaries have little
to do with cultural boundaries. Hofstede justifies his use of nation level data by the facts
that most nations of significance in the world have been in existence for quite some
time, and have national institutions, TV, the education system, the military, that tend to
homogenise the values of the citizens. He goes on to propose that if data collected at the
nation level show significant correlations with cultural data from other sources, this
validates a national level of analysis. This last proposal makes a great leap of faith as to
the sampling skills of researchers collecting data across nations.
An analysis of the idea of nation by Anderson (1991) proposes that imagination plays a
role in any conception of nation, involving national leadership, identity, geographic
boundary, or ideology. Describing national cultures using averages of a set of measures
reflecting cultural value dimensions is unsound and often misleading in international
management research, and perhaps creates imaginary constructs.
In cross-cultural studies, it is easiest to construe the possible effects of proximal
environmental influences, such as families and peer groups, on the individual. Analyses
become more difficult when we consider influences such as region or nation. Smith
(2004b) argues that the distant influences on the individual are wholly or partially
mediated by the proximal influences. If we take a culture as an entity in which
183