Learning, Culture, and Social Media

Hofstede’S Cultural Dimensions Theory

According to the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede (1986), our archetypal roles of interaction are played in different ways in different cultures, interacting and carrying themselves over four main human institutions: family, school, job, and community. Hofstede describes them as “part and parcel of the culture” (p. 302) of a society (based on his 1980 definition of culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another”), which are transferred from one generation to the next. These roles are disconcerted in cross-cultural environments, particularly in learning situations where pairs may be born, raised and ‘programmed’ in different cultures before they are exposed to that environment. In his 1986 study, Hofstede describes such cross-cultural learning situations as ‘fundamentally problematic’, particularly in four main areas in terms of differences in social positions of instructors and learners, relevance of the curriculum (training content), profiles of cognitive abilities between populations from which instructors and learners are drawn, and expected patterns of instructor/learner and learner/learner interaction.