ERASMUS+ PROGRAMME, KEY ACTION 2

CAPACITY BUILDING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Furthering International Relations Capacities and Intercultural Engagement to

Nurture Campus Diversity and to Support Internationalisation at Home
(FRIENDS)

Unit 4: Cultural taxonomies. A critical approach to cultural taxonomies

Part 3

Prof. Michael Minkov

TRANSCRIPT

Effective autonomy refers to the freedom to live your life as you wish and to focus on
pleasure. At any time, whenever you can do something pleasurable, you can do it. As opposed
to embeddedness in which there rules for pleasure. There are times when pleasure is
allowed, types of pleasure that are allowed and others that are not allowed. All this is
regulated much more strictly. For example, when it is time for fasting, if it is the month of
Ramadan, everybody's expected to fast and nobody is allowed to eat in public.
There is also one interesting dimension called mastery versus harmony. However, I'm not
going to discuss it because it is less well-known, less studied. So we can go on to the next
topic. Very briefly, I would like to measure the cultural model of Project Globe without much
detail. This is an important project run in the 90s. The idea of the project was to improve
Hofstede as a model of culture. Even back then, there were many controversies associated
with this model.
Some believed in it. Others were dissatisfied with it and thought that the model should be
improved. Project Globe was designed as a tool that would improve Hofstede as a model of
national culture. They studied middle managers from 61 countries in the 1990s. They had
about 18000 respondents. So quite a big sample. Not enormous, not as big as Hofstede`s or
Schwartz's or the samples of the World Values Survey, but still quite respectable. However,
their research methods were quite controversial, and as a result, there were many debates
in the literature as to what exactly they had done.
But there is no doubt the Project Globe also discovered major differences between the rich
and developing nations, and they're quite similar to the differences described by Hofstede

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views
only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein. 1
and Schwartz and Inglehart. In all these studies, it turns out that the Western nations are
more individualist, which means the individual is more independent of the group. At the
same time, individual rights are more likely to be respected as opposed to the developing
poorest parts of the world where people live in so-called in-groups, tribes, extended families.
And they're not independent of those in-groups.
They sometimes have to suppress their wishes and their desires, and they have to do what
the in-group requires them to do. So there is consensus in terms of these findings.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views
only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein. 2