Culture Matters: National Value Cultures, Sources, and Consequences

Abstract

This chapter presents my theory of seven cultural value orientations and applies it to understanding relations of culture to significant societal phenomena. The first section of the chapter explicates my conception of culture, a conception of the normative value system that underlies social practices and institutions. Next, this section describes how the cultural value orientations can be measured. It then presents a validation of the content of the seven value orientations and the structure of relations among them, based on an analysis of data across 75 countries. Brief comparisons of these value orientations with two other dimensional approaches to culture are followed by an analysis that justifies treating countries as cultural units.