How many cultural dimensions do we need?
Event Title
International Interdisciplinary Conference: Advances in Comparative Culturology
Location
MBG06, Lam Woo Lecture Theatre, Patrick Lee Wan Keung Academic Building, Lingnan University
Start Date
15-5-2025 12:00 PM
End Date
15-5-2025 12:30 PM
Language
English
Description
The research on culture as a pattern of values, attitudes, beliefs, and norms that differentiates countries or other units from another has reached the point where the abundance of different cultural models, all offering various cultural dimensions, might be rather confusing than helping. However, it can be reasonable to assume that different models cover the same cultural elements while grouping those elements in different ways. Based on already published theoretical and empirical research and new analyses, this presentation will discuss how different cultural models align with each other and with objective indicators describing various social, economic, and political phenomena. After all, although most interesting for researchers as it is, culture is a research topic also because we are interested in how cultural differences explain differences in various other phenomena and why different societies differ in how successful they are in managing various societal challenges. The presentation searches for answers to the following questions. Are two cultural dimensions enough to capture modern cultural differences across the world? How much do we need to explain the differences between societies? Is there one default cultural model that we can rely on from now on? Or is this picture still more nuanced?
Document Type
Presentation
Recommended Citation
Kaasa, A. (2025, May 15). How many cultural dimensions do we need? Presented at the International Interdisciplinary Conference: Advances in Comparative Culturology, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
How many cultural dimensions do we need?
MBG06, Lam Woo Lecture Theatre, Patrick Lee Wan Keung Academic Building, Lingnan University
The research on culture as a pattern of values, attitudes, beliefs, and norms that differentiates countries or other units from another has reached the point where the abundance of different cultural models, all offering various cultural dimensions, might be rather confusing than helping. However, it can be reasonable to assume that different models cover the same cultural elements while grouping those elements in different ways. Based on already published theoretical and empirical research and new analyses, this presentation will discuss how different cultural models align with each other and with objective indicators describing various social, economic, and political phenomena. After all, although most interesting for researchers as it is, culture is a research topic also because we are interested in how cultural differences explain differences in various other phenomena and why different societies differ in how successful they are in managing various societal challenges. The presentation searches for answers to the following questions. Are two cultural dimensions enough to capture modern cultural differences across the world? How much do we need to explain the differences between societies? Is there one default cultural model that we can rely on from now on? Or is this picture still more nuanced?
Additional Information
Speaker
Anneli KAASA (Tartu University, Estonia)
Anneli Kaasa is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Economics at the School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu, Estonia. She holds a PhD in Economics from the same university. She is the Head of the Chair of Economic Theory and teaches courses about Higher Mathematics, Economic Theory, Cultural Context for Economics and Business, and Human Behaviour from the Perspective of Economic Theory. Her current research is mainly about cultural differences, conceptualising and measuring cultural dimensions, and relationship of culture with other societal and economic phenomena. She has also worked on trust and social capital and their role in societal development. She has published in various journals covering a wide spectrum of social sciences. Her interests include using various novel quantitative research methods in order to provide a fresh viewpoint on complex problems. Thise has led her to publish a series of articles in recent years in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and Cross Cultural Research. This series or theoretical and empirical analyses systematises both the conceptualization and the measurement of culture aligning together different older theoretical cultural models and more modern models with up-to-date data available.