Supranational Culture: An Empirical Assessment of the Relative Predictive Power of Three Competing Models of National Culture in the Context of the Toynbee-Huntington Civilizational Hypothesis

摘要

Quantitative models of national culture now include those of Hofstede, the GLOBE project, and Minkov, each representing an important advance in the etic conceptualization of the common drivers of human values and practices in different countries. Of these models, that of Hofstede is in widest use, followed by the GLOBE project, and finally Minkov's recent model based on the World Values Survey. The question of which model explains a country's culture most accurately, however, remains open. One of the implicit desires of researchers is to identify an unambiguous taxonomy of cultural dimensions with reasonable parsimony. Toward this end, the present study compares the relative predictive power of these three models against a conception of civilizational groupings that originates in an empirically independent literature, in the form of the Toynbee-Huntington civilizational hypothesis. This hypothesis, based on Toynbee's theory of civilizations, treats civilizations, which usually consist of clusters of culturally similar countries, as the highest order of abstraction of human identity short of that of the human race as a whole. Insofar as the competing models of cultural dimensions accurately predict the civilization-level membership of specific nations, the civilizational hypothesis validates the theoretical conception of cultural dimensions as a substantive representation of human culture, demonstrating that the search for a stable taxonomy of cultural dimensions is indeed worthwhile. Conversely, cultural dimensions provide an empirical basis for refining the identification of civilizational boundaries in terms of country membership, while contributing further insight to determine how civilizations emerge and change over time. Empirical findings affirm the superiority of Hofstede's model over the others, while the GLOBE and Minkov interpretations offer insights that may help understand the Hofstedean dimensions more deeply. The study concludes with a summary statistical comparison among the models and discusses implications for future research into both the civilizational model and cultural dimensions.