Why do different groups of people behave in different ways when dealing with the common challenges of human life? The answer often lies in their cultural attitudes, values, and consequent behaviours. The study of human culture has been deemed a key contribution to understanding human life for many centuries. Explanations and descriptions of cultural characteristics abound, but in the field of business, none have been more influential and warmly embraced than those developed by Geert Hofstede and the GLOBE group. These models of national culture, which characterise Japanese, Americans, French, and may other nationalities in terms of common characteristics such as collectivism, masculinity, and power distance, are most widely cited and applied in business research, teaching, and recommendations for practice.

But this seminal work needs a careful reality check. The authors of this book point out a range of problems associated with the Hofstede and GLOBE national culture measures which bring into question their accuracy and usefulness in meeting the expectations of management culture researchers and students. This book explains in detail why the measures developed by Hofstede and GLOBE are of dubious validity and why they should be viewed with caution by those looking for answers to the complex questions of culture.

Sunil Venaik is Associate Professor of International Business at the University of Queensland Business School. He is recognised as one of the top one percent of international business researchers worldwide in the last 50 years, based on his research publications in the Journal of International Business Studies. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and the Australian Graduate School of Management.

Paul Brewer is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. He worked for 15 years as an academic and prior to that he was employed by the Australian Trade Commission, including as an Australian Trade Commissioner. He has lived and worked in Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and the Pacific. He has a BEc (ANU), MBA (UQ), and a PhD in management from the University of Queensland.

David Midgley is Emeritus Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France. His principal areas of research are innovation, strategy, and international business. David is a graduate of the Universities of Salford and Bradford in the UK and has held positions at the Australian Graduate School of Management, the University of California, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University.