Hofstede’s limitation by Sir (manjit)

Hofstede’s methodology in building his framework has its limitations. 

 When gathering data, he used a pre-existing collections of employee attitude

surveys from IBM subsidiaries located in 66 countries in between 1967 and 1973
(McSweeney, 2002). Positive implications were that due to the surveys being
taken from a single company and industry, the difficulty in attributing culture
differences either to national or organisational culture was minimized. However,
due to the data being based on a single company and industry it could have
encapsulated IBM’s unique culture instead

 Hofstede’s framework also fails to recognise countries that go through cultural

change as the data used was severely outdated (Peng & Meyer, 2011). Hence,
countries such as Vietnam that had transition economies or went through political
changes would not be able to be measured with such frameworks. Shenkar
(2012) also agrees that Hofstede’s reliance on a single company data and a set
of dimensions made its reliability disputable

 Another assumption of his framework was corporate homogeneity: that there was
a low variance in corporate culture within IBM and its subsidiaries, and thus
national culture is measured with this belief. However, as is observed in
corporations all over the world, corporate culture can actually change the
supposed programmed beliefs concerning national culture especially in
international mergers (Shenkar, 2012). 

 Furthermore, there have been developments on the topic of intra-country cultural

diversity, which concerns the notion that there are potentially many different
cultures within one country. Researcher Gelfand and 44 co-authors had
published a study about the concept of tight-loose cultures. It is considered that
tight cultures believe in the enforcement of social norms, having an intolerance
for those who defy the status quo. Loose cultures have a less strict enforcement
of norms, where the people are less restricted and are allowed to have ‘unique’
and diverse values regarding their behaviour (Beugelsdijk et al., 2017)