Mere speculation on my part. Of course their definitions, the structure of the questionaires, their basic assumptions color the study, however it's important to stress that the positions on the cultural map are hardly static. The authors point out that any tendency towards rationality can be put into reverse. Their point is that it tends to correlate to economic conditions and their place in the human development sequence (agrarian/industrial/post-industrial).

Having said that, the data explains lots and nothing at all at the same time. For instance, I might have expected that the impulse to entrepreneurship to be exaggerated in self-expressive societies, but I happen to know that in the US, immigrant communities (whether from poorer Asian or Latin America countries) are exactly as entrepreneurial as better educated, richer, North Americans.

One of the things Inglehart and Welzel postulated was that the study might have value even if complex societal values constructs could be reduced to these two scales. Of course nuance is sacrificed. Any study acccurately reflecting the true complexities in the world would reult in a replica of the world, and be totally useless.

The value derived from a study like this, I think, tends to lie in areas where societies intersect and communication, with all the promise of the mixing as well as all the risk of misunderstanding, occurs.

Public diplomacy. International relations. Cross-cultural exchange.

Nowhere in the study do the researchers make judgements about the values they describe. I would go further than they, and speculate that the irrational faith in the "American ideal" is largely what keeps the polyglot of nationalities and regional identities from flying apart.

I credit the authors with finding a valuable line of inquiry - one that should be explored further.

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire

Romania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The dominant religious body is the Romanian Orthodox Church, an autocephalous church within the Eastern Orthodox communion; its members make up 86.7% of the population according to the 2002 census.

All sorts of semi-revealing factoids are out there, for example: a greater percentage of Iranian women attend university than American women.

The Iranian team was one of very few teams to have any girls in the team. In fact it was 3 male and 3 female students, which must have put them at the top of the female opportunity league just behind Denmark.

However, the boys and girls sat at separate tables several metres apart and studied separately, with the instructor going back and forth between the two tables.

I don't know what this says for Iranian society vis-a-vis American society

Why do those seem to keep popping up in social, political and economic studies?

Wait. Don't answer that. I'm not sure I want to know.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Before the year is out. New goal.

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire

How would you suggest to do a survey across countries? Is it impossible?

Now you've hit on a problem I can get my mind around! The simple linguistic challenge of asking identical questions, with identical cultural and emotional content across cultures is impossible. Due to the same factors they try to measure here.

It's analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Excellent point.

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire

Culture is often invisible to the person who is embedded in it, but controls and constrains their actions, and guides their beliefs.

Take the idea of an equality/efficiency tradeoff.  Where the idea is ingrained in the culture (US/UK) attitudes towards things like labor unions and other things that might bring about a more equal distribution of wealth are effected by this underlying idea in culture.

What you get when you do a survey that shows resistance to progressive taxation, etc, is what people believe, not why.  

And culture is at heart, the why factor.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

So shared meanings are defined by national boundaries and not by cultural/lingusitic ones?

So shared meanings are defined by national boundaries and not by cultural/lingusitic ones?  Is there not a very overt nationalism or at least nation state bias in this approach?

Not necessarily. That example relates to political concepts, which are intimately tied to the nation/state, but the in group/ out group can be put together entirely differently.

For example, a religious group group can have an understanding of salvation that cross national borders, but is incomprehensible to people who aren't members of that religious group.  For example, predestination versus good works.  

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg