Abstract

HIDALGO CAMPOS, Pedro; MANZUR MOBAREC, Enrique; OLAVARRIETA SOTO, Sergio  and  FARIAS NAZEL, Pablo César. Quantifying cultural distances between countries: a Latin American analysis. Cuad. Adm. [online]. 2007, vol.20, n.33, pp.253-272. ISSN 0120-3592.

Some years ago, the GLOBE Project measured nine cultural dimensions in ten Latin American Countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela. In spite of its valuable contribution, the GLOBE Project did not provide an aggregated measure for the cultural distances between countries, which would enable directly inspecting the cultural distances between countries. To overcome that limitation, this paper uses the methodology proposed by Kogut and Singh (1988) for quantifying cultural distances. Consecutively, multi-di-mensional escalation (MDE) is used to graphically represent (i. e., in maps) the cultural distances calculated between the ten countries. Then, for the purpose of interpreting the axes of the maps obtained using the MDEs, a linear regression is made using the methodology suggested by Fernández et al. (2003) for each one of the nine cultural dimensions. Finally, based on the limitations of the study, some future lines of research are proposed.

Keywords : Cultural distances; National culture; cultural dimensions; Latin America; multi-dimensional escalation.

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