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11-11-2018

Transmission, Inheritance, Emulation 28 (Part Two) INTERLUDE

XIV: Aikido and Organizations:

A Necessary Evil, or Essential Software' of the Dojo?



PART TWO

Geert Hofstede's Dimensions of National Cultures'

Applied to Aikido Organizations



0 Some Preliminary Notes

NOTE: 1. When I recently glanced back over this series of columns, it came as a major shock for me to realize that I published the first TIE column in 2007, over ten years ago, and that a whole year has passed since Part One of this essay appeared. Added to which, I have only just passed the half-way point. Various events in my own life, including some crippling health issues, have made it more difficult to keep to a strict publication schedule, but an additional reason for this is that most of the columns are not really intended to form a continuous series. The length of the columns themselves also calls for some explanation to those unaccustomed to seeing long scholarly essays published online. I originally intended these TIE columns to form a very discursiveand also very definitely criticalhistory of aikido, which presented a vaguely chronological narrative and dealt, in turn, with Morihei Ueshiba, his son Kisshomaru, the present Doshu and his son Mitsuteru. However, as I produced successive columns, I found that I needed to interrupt the more strictly chronological narrative with a series of essays of varying length (which I have called Interludes) in which a particular topic was discussed in greater detail than would be appropriate in a continuous narrative. Consequently, these columns form a kind of halfway house between collections of archived material, such as Christopher Li is producing in his series of translations and interviews, and formally published books on aikido. As such, they are really inconclusive scholarly research papers, rather than finished articles.



NOTE: 2. The Interludes largely keep within the chronological bounds of the general narrative, but I have made two major exceptions. First, I devoted several earlier columns to a discussion of Ellis Amdur's important book, Hidden in Plain Sight, and will do so again very soon, now that the new edition has been published. Secondly, in 2016 I retired after 30-odd years as General Secretary and then Chairman of the International Aikido Federation (IAF). As I indicated in Part One, this was not really a planned retirement and as a result I decided to change the order of the columns and bring forward some parts of the series dealing with aikido and organizations, which I had planned to produce much later. My long experience with different aikido organizations led me to consider the dynamics and problems of aikido organizations themselves and the ways in they can help or hinder the development of the individual in the dojo. Very relevant here are the immediate circumstances of the dojo, which the student encounters from the very beginning: the relationship with the teacher and other senior members of the dojo, and also with the umbrella organization of which the dojo is usually a member. In my caseand I suspect that this is not unusual, I moved around quite often, sometimes to different countries, and also practiced in many different dojos, so I had to become accustomed each time to a different organizational culture. I do not think this aspect of aikido and aikido training has been examined before and so the length of this essay is due in great part to the need to give some general background and to establish a meaningful context for the analysis of the cultural' and organizational aspects of a typical dojo. The result is that these two groups of columns have interrupted the general chronological flow outlined above. I have also modified the title of this particular essay, in order to call attention to the issues more clearly.



NOTE: 3. As I was writing this installment, a friend and colleague of mine mentioned that in the near future she would be meeting Geert Hofstede (now aged 90), who is my main target in what follows, and offered to show him an earlier version of this essay. I would like to express my gratitude in advance to Prof. Hofstede, both for his books, which I have long used in my university classes in comparative culture and organizations, and for any comments or advice that he might like to give mewhich will be reflected in Part Three.



NOTE: 4. In this essay I employ Japanese terms quite frequently and I need to establish a convention for dealing with these terms. The Japanese kana and the Chinese-derived characters or kanji / 漢字), enclosed in square brackets [], usually follow the first mention of the term and after this the terms are used as normal English words, printed in italics if the word is not in common aikido usage. I have adapted the transcription in English of Japanese terms to fit the conventions of English spelling and pronunciation. An explanation of the meaning usually follows in the main text. These explanations are really aimed at those who are relatively familiar with aikido, but who are supplementing their aikido training with a study of Japanese reading and writing. Some of these terms were explained in Part One of this essay and the explanations given in this essay should be seen as a more detailed elaboration of these original definitions.



NOTE: 5. I gladly acknowledge an enormous debt owed to other researchers, especially the late Stanley Pranin and Josh Gold, Stan's successor at Aikido Journal, and to Ellis Amdur and Christopher Li; and last but certainly not least, to Jun Akiyama for being such a patient and considerate editor.



I Other Essential Preliminaries

If a person wants to practice a martial art like aikido, she or he will usually go to a place called a dojo and this almost invariably involves becoming a member of a club or larger organization, over and above the dojo. Because aikido is an art, which therefore requires a good measure of skill to practice well, it is usually learned from someone who already possesses such skill or is in a more advanced state of learning than the beginner. The person usually finds that the teacher who runs the club has some measure of the required skill, but the teacher is also positioned in some form of vertical lineage that is usually signified by a rank, in aikido usually a dan (段). The skills possessed and taught have been learned directly at the hands of others who have gone beforeand so on in a long line of transmission, until we reach the founder of the art himself or one of his closest students.



The fact of this lineage, and the ranking system that it indirectly acknowledges, is usually exhibited to the world at large in the form of: (1) the diploma or qualification issued, which is elegantly written in Japanese; (2) the clothing worn, especially the presence of a hakama [袴 / はかま = divided skirt or pantaloons, usually black, navy blue, or white]; and (3) evidence of recognition of the lineage, which is usually membership of an aikido organization of some sort. It is actually this third phenomenon that is the main subject of this essay, but more specifically, the essay discusses the general organizational culture' that is generated by the combination of three essential factors: (1) the art of aikido itself, considered essentially as many individuals who are practicing a Japanese martial art, but not necessarily in Japan; (2) the location of the art, in a dojo with one or more teachers or coaches, and opponents or partners; and (3) the organizations to which the individual practitioner, dojo, or club, is affiliated.



My own experience of aikido training has generally followed the pattern sketched in the preceding paragraphs, but with one qualification: the experience began with training in the very minimalist of organizationsa small group of six students at university, gathered around a Japanese graduate student who wanted to continue training, the group simply put together in order to obtain funding from the university for essential equipment like tatami mats. There were no officers, but one of the students acted as the link with the university sports association of which the group had to become a member. This experience continues many years later in somewhat similar circumstancesteaching and training in two single dojos, which are completely unconnected with any organization over and above recognition by a lineage / transmission authentication organization,' which in my own case is the Aikikai Foundation in Tokyo, Japan.



My experience of training and lineage suggests to me that the subject is both difficult and controversial, for it is the origin of most aikido politics' and disputes, but it might also be of some general interest, in view of the obvious importance attached to organizations in the martial arts. An eminent aikido shihan named Hiroshi Tada once commented to me that aikido was essentially an individual, solitary activity: progress depends entirely on the individualand not merely on training with a partner or opponent, though this is also essential for the training to take place. On the other hand, aikido is a type of bujutsu [ぶじゅつ /武術 = martial art / skill] and as such envisions potentially fraught encounters with real or potential opponents. Consequently, this solitary activity on the part of the individual is invariably expended in a group, the other members of which are usually called opponents or partners, and the group almost always has the formal structure of a dojo which is embedded within an organization, with affiliation to, or links with, other organizations. In this second part of the essay, I will discuss a number of very general issues affecting culture and organizations in general, as seen through the eyes of a very famous researcher. In the third part of this essay, I will focus more on my own experience of aikido and organizations in more detail and relate these general issues to two main aikido organizations, which are the Aikikai Foundation [Zaidan Hojin Aikikai / 財団法人合気会] and its supposedly democratic offshoot, the International Aikido Federation (IAF).



Culture and Cultures

There are some differences between Japan and the rest of the world in the organization of aikido and these differences reflect the undoubted fact that the martial art is fundamentally rooted in and built on the cultural conventions of Japanese national culture.' This term is considered here as denoting both a distinct and recognizable abstract entity and also the particular way in which this entity manifests itself in postwar Japan. Japanese national culture' is certainly believed to exist in Japan and this belief actually underlies many general postwar initiatives here for cultural exchange' between Japan and other countries. Hiroshima, especially, has become a postwar focal point for such initiatives and an accepted second name for Hiroshima is International City of Peace (and) Culture' [Kokusai Heiwa Bunka Toshi: 国際平和文化都市]. I have participated in such cultural exchanges and they usually start with a demonstration of activities believed to typify Japanese national' culture, such as the tea ceremony or traditional' drama, such as kabuki or noh. As a professor at Hiroshima University, I was officially requested to teach a course in a newly created graduate school, aimed at Japanese company employees, and the course was devoted to studies in comparative culture. It was in this course that I used the works of Geert Hofstede as the main texts, since Hofstede was one of the more prominent exponents of national culture' as manifested in organizations. In addition, since Hofstede constantly used the term, in this essay I have usually put national' and national culture' in quotes and assume that it has the meaning given to it by Hofstede.



A major problem arises, however, when this general Japanese belief in national' culture as a specific, distinct and recognizable abstract entity is extended to include countries other than Japan and, by another extension, to include all other countriesall possessing and manifesting their respective national' cultures. (This is the reason for the single quotes around national culture,' above.). This assumption is easily made and is also in a broad sense politically' charged, since the other side of the coin is the belief that if a country does not have a distinct national culture, the lack indicates some sort of failure of nationhood. This general political' aspect is especially true in regard to Japan and a Japanese art like aikido. Most variations of the art do not have competitive championships and tournaments and in addition some manifestations of aikido emphasize the so-called spiritual' dimensions of training, and this aspect is sometimes emphasized over and against the purely practical value of the art as an effective means of subduing an opponent. This is the reason why I have placed particular emphasis on the culture of postwar Japan, since the overseas expansion of the art of aikido is very firmly rooted in the period from the mid-1950s onwards, as Japan was developing a distinct postwar peace' culture, dedicated to peaceful cultural exchanges' and which was quite different from the warmongering culture that was flourishing when the art of aikido was first created. I hope to make clear the general dimensions of this problem as we proceed, but first, some more precisions about language are necessary.



A Sextet of Pairs

One example of the language difficulty concerns a whole set of Japanese paired concepts, which are given below. Some important concepts were already considered in Part One of this essay and those given below should be seen as further elaborations on a common theme.



Tatemae / Honne: tatemae [たてまえ / 建前]: honne [ほんね / 本音];

Omote / Ura: omote [おもて / 表]: / ura [うら / 裏];

Uchi / Soto: uchi [うち / 内]: soto [そと / 外];

Tate / Yoko: tate [たて / 縦]: yoko [よこ / 横];

Sempai / Kohai: senpai [せんぱい / 先輩] ; kouhai [こうはい / 後輩]; and

Kyu / Dan: kyuu [きゅう / 級]: dan [だん / 段]

The first five pairs are often used to explain Japanese' culture to non-Japanese and I first learned these concepts when I started aikido and, more especially, when I came to live in Japan. I will often make use of these concepts in what follows, but I should emphasize that I use them exclusively in the context of living in Japan. A second, major, issue for this essay is whether these concepts can be found in other national' cultures and to see the issues involved here, we need to give a brief cultural' explanation of each pair.



1. Tatemae / Honne

The first pair, tatemae / honne, stand for the official' / unofficial' aspects of a Japanese cultural and organizational practice. The professors' meeting [kyoujukai = きょうじゅかい / 教授会] in a Japanese national university is a good example. There are usually two layers of such meetings. The main kyojukai is a meeting of all the members of a particular faculty under the direction of the dean of the faculty, supported by officials seconded to the faculty by the central government. The meeting is conducted in an atmosphere of extreme politeness, but largely consists of necessary rubber stamping of decisions made by other bodies, mainly academic and administrative committees. This polite professors' meeting is the tatemae aspect; the actualand usually more controversial and argumentative decision-making by the department heads and officials seconded from the education ministry is the honne aspect.



However, in my own faculty there was another body, called the jinji-kyojukai [じんじきょうじゅかい / 人事教授会], which deals with setting policy within the faculty, including promotions, and which is certainly not a rubber stamp. Only full professors are entitled to participate in the jinji-kyojukai and when promotions are on the agenda, the credentials of the candidate, academic and otherwise, are set out in scrupulously elegant Japanese by the professor proposing the promotion, who explains how the selection has been made and then extols the candidate's academic and other, more personal, virtues. (I have occasionally performed this task myself.) Promotions are decided by a secret ballot and very occasionally the request for promotion is actually voted down, with grave consequences for the face' of both candidate and proposer. I have occasionally witnessed quite bitter arguments at these meetings and this is also an important honne aspect of such meetings.



One might think of tatemae -- honne as two opposing modes of social interaction, but the honne aspect, certainly as regards interactions among university faculty, would rarely be encountered outside the closed meetings outlined above. Of course, faculty meetings and promotions take place in universities outside Japan, but the issue here is whether a distinction crystallized in Japanese by two specific terms is sufficiently well-defined as to be recognized as such outside the context of Japanese culture and the Japanese language. I have strong doubts about this.



2. Omote / Ura

The second pair, omote / ura, are commonly encountered in the typical aikido dojo, as the names for the ways in which the techniques, or waza, can be executed. Until I came to Japan and embarked on the serious study of Japanese, I never realized that the omote / ura pair are in fact used much more widely and have a wider range of meaning and connotation than as semi-technical terms in aikido. In fact, my first teacher never used these terms, preferring instead the more physical' terms of irimi [いりみ / 入り身 = body moving forward, as a unit] and tenkan [てんかん / 転換 = turning, while moving in a backward or forward direction]. The omote / ura pair are the counterpart of tatemae / honne, in official / unofficial activities, but relate more to personal relationships. Omote basically means in front, to one's face'and what one would do or say to a person face to face, while ura means behind, behind one's back'and so is the opposite of omote. Then there is the extension of the concept, found in such expressions as losing face' / saving face', and the fact that such expressions are in common use suggests to me that the omote / ura pair of concepts are in no way exclusive to Japanese culture.



However, the wider dimensions of these paired concepts are not obvious at first sight and I gradually became aware of these through hints dropped by Japanese teachers and friends on a number of occasions. The concepts are also multi-layered, in the sense that it is possible to think of a particular exhibition of omote / ura as itself having an omote or ura aspect. I was made aware of this fact by having a ringside seat in a serious personal dispute, but as a foreigner I was not expected to understand the depths or dimensions of the dispute. The efforts made by Japanese friends to explain these depths and dimensions themselves constituted an omote aspect of something that would have remained deeply hidden, though very well understood by all the parties in the dispute. Again, though personal disputes are universal, I have my doubts about whether the extent and depth of this pair of concepts are replicated outside Japan, though I suppose that some version of such a distinction is to be expected in any society that is highly influenced by the concept of face' and of maintaining or losing this, and also of the negative undertones of the concept: an attitude of pushiness'of always putting oneself first.



There is also a variation of one side of the omote / ura pair and this is gaining attention in the run up to the 2020 Olympic Games, to be held in Tokyo. Adding the negative nashi to omote gives omotenashi [おもてなし] and this is the name of the distinctive attitude of quiet hospitality that the Japanese organizers of the Olympics hope will be in evidence during the Games. One web page gave the following meaning: To Japanese, "omotenashi" means not just hospitality in the usual sense, but "something more akin to an elevated politeness that makes customers feel valued and respected." Thus, the absence of omote is not necessarily ura, which can be seen as a positive opposite, but this new term, which is not found in the usual Japanese monolingual dictionaries. Omotenashi is not a term I have (yet) encountered in the Japanese aikido dojo.



3. Uchi / Soto

The third pair, uchi / soto, are also tied to the physical aspects of relationships, but, like omote / ura, yield interesting extensions to the physical' base meanings, which are, respectively, inside' and outside'. These concepts are relational concepts, since one is always inside' or outside' something else, like a building and, by extension, the people, such as family and similar groups, who inhabit the building.



In aikido, the paired concepts are also sometimes used to describe movements. For example, there are several ways of executing a waza called kaiten-nage from a one-handed grip. One way is uchi-mawari [内回り], moving outside the line of attack and under the gripping arm; the counterpart is soto-mawari [外回り], moving outside the line of attack, but not under the gripping arm. Nevertheless, the paired concepts are used in Japanese outside the narrow confines of the physical activity in a dojo and are also multi-layered, in the sense that the boundaries specified or assumed by the concepts are extremely flexible.



The Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi has made a name for himself by offering a somewhat tendentious analysis of these paired concepts and his paradoxical working assumption is that these concepts are both uniquely' Japanese and also replicated to some degree in other national' cultures. Doi did this in two works: Amae no Kozo [『「甘え」の構造』]; and Omote to Ura [『表と裏』], which were translated into English as, respectively, The Anatomy of Dependence (1973) and the Anatomy of Self (1986). Readers should decide for themselves the value of Doi's analysis, but I myself consider the two as a good example of modern Nihonjinron (the meaning of which is explained below).



4. Tate / Yoko

The fourth pair, tate / yoko, are sometimes used to describe Japanese social relationships in general. The distinction was popularized in a book called Japanese Society, written by the Japanese anthropologist Chie Nakane, whose early research concerned the formation of kinship groups in rural Japan. Nakane offers a penetrating analysis of Japanese social groups, and her analysis depicts the kind of large organization typified by a Japanese company or university, and also by an organization like the Aikikai in Japan. This organization is intrinsically vertical in structure, in that it embodies what is called the iemoto system [ie-moto / いえもと / 家元: family source], wherein power is held by successive generations of the founding family. Thus, the present Doshu, Moriteru Ueshiba, is the grandson of the Founder of the art and as such stands at the top of the vertical structure of aikido practitioners who recognize Morihei Ueshiba as the source of their aikido and who accept his direct descendants who head the Aikikai as the controlling organization in aikido.



5. Sempai / Kohai

The vertical structure of these groups can be illustrated by the fifth pair of terms, which is a specific example that can be seen in some Japanese organizations that emphasize a particular date of entry. I discussed this pair in Part One of this essay, but really as a pair (and omitting the third member). However, I wish to emphasize here that in Japan the trio is very closely connected with organizations and especially with the date of entry to such organizations. Consequently, it is not a general title on the same level as Sensei' or in the same category as the other groups of terms discussed in this section.



The date of entry gives rise to the particular vertical relationships exhibited in the sports clubs attached to Japanese high schools and universities. These terms are the relationships of sempai [先輩: senior]; kohai [後輩: junior]; and dohai [同輩: contemporary: same entry date], which exist in the aikido clubs attached to Japanese high schools and universities. Sempai enter the club before kohai and are supposed to guide the kohai in the traditions and conventions of the club. (Dohai enter the club at the same time, but compared with the other two, this term is very rarely used.) These relationships, first encountered in junior high school, are a prominent example of relationships in a vertically-structured social grouping, and in school and university clubs they serve an important function of being miniatures or role-plays' of very similar relationships that the students will encounter in Japanese government institutions or private companies after they graduate. I have also heard the term used by one Hombu shihan who trained at the Hombu Dojo in Tokyo (Y Yamada), when referring to and even addressing another shihan who entered before him (N Tamura).



However, in some dojos outside Japan, these terms are used as part of the formal organizational structure of the dojo, with sempai' occupying a teaching role directly below that of the sensei, who is the chief instructor of the dojo. I think it is safe to state that such a formal use of the term in a dojo hierarchy is unheard of in Japan. The terms are an essential part of the social fabric, but only in very specific situations and contexts such as a school or university club -- and it is a mistake, in my opinion, to extend and overgeneralize these terms.



6. Kyu / Dan

The final pair, kyu and dan, indicating one's grade or rank, denotes a common classification of skill and progress in aikido and does not need such detailed discussion. The kyu ranks start at the highest number, which in my own dojo is 10th kyu, and the number decreases as the student advances in skilland also in age and experiencedown to first kyu [ikkyu: 一級]. The dan rank starts at shodan (初段, meaning, beginning rank), which, with ikkyu, is really the pivot of the numbering system, since from shodan onwards the number increases. The rank is also marked by the colour of the belt worn. In my own dojo, children wear coloured belts until they reach 5th kyu. They then join the adult class and wear a white belt until they take their dan examination. Passing this allows the wearing of a black belt and also the hakama.



and Another Important Quartet

Finally, we need to consider a quartet of terms that is somewhat separate from the pairs considered above, but they will often be encountered in most organizations dedicated to the practice and teaching of aikido. Japan is a tate shakai (a vertically structured society: See 4, above) and to the extent that such a social structure is exhibited in a dojo organization, these terms will sometimes be used.



指導員 / 副指導員 / 師範 / 先生 Shidoin / Fukushidoin / Shihan / Sensei

Working from the top downwards, shihan is a term designating someone who has the rank of sixth dan or above in aikido and other martial arts. In Japan, there are no special rules designating who has the title and who does not, but if someone has been 6th dan for a number of years (I think it is six) and is also the owner and/or senior instructor in a dojo or dojo organization, he or she will be regarded as a shihan. The situation is somewhat complicated in Japan because there are other terms, like道場長 (dojo-cho: chief instructor); 本部長/支部長 (hombu-cho/shibu-cho: headquarters/branch organization head); 責任者 (sekininsha: person nominally responsible for the organization). These are all commonly used as titles, but if there is a large dojo, with many experienced yudansha, the chief instructor will be supported by these 6th dan holders and above, who are of shihan rank. Outside Japan, however, the situation is different. In the Aikikai, the shihan title is given specifically, with decisions and announcements made at the beginning of each year and a certificate awarded to each recipient. The result is that there is much more control over the shihan title outside Japan than here. The other two names are used far less often and usually only in large dojo organizations. Shidoin simply means teacher / instructor and fuku added to the term designates an assistant or deputy.



It should be emphasized that other organizations, such as schools and universities, employ a completely different set of terms to designate rank. The fourth term, however, is ubiquitous in Japan and is quite different from the others. Sensei combines the Japanese terms for life / living and prior / before and is an honorary term for anyone who commands a high level of respect or experience. It is given to politicians, lawyers and gangsters, and is also the common form of address for teachers in a classroom and also for a teacher in a dojo. However, it is not a specific category, like shihan, or even sempai (See 5, above), and so a dojo or organization that uses these three terms together, for example, sempai, shihan and senseias an ordered series of teaching positions, makes a big category mistake, for sensei is a general category that implicitly contains all the other terms.



Models of Culture

The Aikikai and its IAF offshoot are both organizations and as such make a very suitable subject for the general study of the comparative culture of organizations, but such a study of culture is best pursued with some awareness of the fundamental problems involved. The scope and depth of the problems can best be understood if we pose three sets of questions:



(1) What is a culture? When we claim to be comparing cultures, what exactly are we comparing?

(2) What is a valid comparison? How can we avoid comparing like with unlike? Are the accepted defining characteristics of a culture, especially a national' culture, sufficient for a valid comparison?

(3) Can the comparisons ever be objective, or even scientific? Are the subjective biases of the observer / comparer inevitable and, if not, how can they be avoided?



The problems underlying the above sets of questions have accompanied cross-cultural studies ever since the subject was created. Problems of comparing like with like go back at least as far as Plato, and the quest to be objective or scientific has an even longer history, plausibly beginning with ancient Greek science, with its apogee in Aristotle's studies in biology. The scientific method' evolved and was inevitably applied to the human' sciences like cultural anthropology. Pioneers like Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead patiently collected data, assuming the guise of impartial and disinterested observers, but their critics claim that they grossly underestimated the biases that came with the collecting and identifying of the data' and, as we shall see, these problems have not really been solved.



There is a certain context to the study of culture, which is suggested in the introduction to a paper by Lena Schmitz and Wiebke Weber, to be discussed in detail in Part Three of this essay. "In the 1960s, a new sub-discipline of general psychology became institutionalized, called cross-cultural psychology. Until today, researchers of this sub-discipline have been following the aim of comparing data from several cultures, in order to detect intercultural differences, usually by means of standardized questionnaires." (Lena Schmitz and Wiebke Weber, Interculture Journal, 2014, pp. 13-22.)

The new sub-discipline gave rise to many studies on comparative culture and these have been conveniently collected in a website entitled The Lewis Model, details of which follow: (When Cultures Collide, in 1996. All the models surveyed on the website claim to be based on extensive research, but a major question arises here, which has in fact been debated for many centuries, concerning the distinction to be drawn between scientific research and what might be called conceptual analysis.



Scientific research is presumed to be objective and purely governed by the collection and analysis of data, but this presumption itself rests on a particular conception of scientific method. It was the Greeks, especially the Presocratics and Aristotle, who pioneered this method, as evidenced by Aristotle's extensive works on biology, but Aristotle also researched the roots of this method and struggled to find the difference between beliefs, which additionally turned out to be true beliefs, and knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, the possession of which he further considered to be indispensable for teaching any subject. Aristotle investigated the ways of proceeding from true beliefs to scientific knowledge, but he was also responding to the arguments set out by his teacher and mentor Plato, especially in his work called Theaetetus, which concerned the nature of knowledge: what needed to be added to true' belief to warrant the new designation of knowledge. Plato's work was what we might call dialectical' analysis, as he himself saw it, but an essential part of Aristotle's method included surveying and analyzing opinions' held on a topic by the many and the wise'which was his shorthand term for expert scientific theoryand subjecting these opinions to rigorous scrutiny. (In fact, this is precisely what we shall be doing in this essay.) Aristotle wrote an early work called Topics, which is a handbook of argument schemata: accepted ways in which these opinions can be subjected to such scrutiny, but it forms the first part of the set of logical works known as the Organon. Aristotle regarded these logical works as preliminary to other, more strictly scientific, research which he undertook in biology. Collecting the opinions' of the many and the wise' and subjecting these to rigorous analysis is precisely the method employed by the researchers listed on the Lewis website, but the ambivalence between strictly scientific research and the conceptual or philosophical analysis that lay behind Aristotle's treatment can also be seen there.



There is another factor underlying the study of culture that is mentioned in the title of this essay, but which has not yet been discussed specifically. The three sets of questions deal with culture or culture, but this essay deals more specifically with culture and organizations and thus we can pose a fourth set of questions:



(4) Is there an aspect of culture, or cultures, that is specific to organizations? Do cultures require organizations? Are organizations themselves contained in the concept of culture, or does the study of organizations add something new to the general study of culture or cultures?



Organizational Culture: Geert Hofstede and his Critics

The entry in the Lewis Model website notes that, "Several dozen cross-cultural experts have proposed such dimensions" (of culture, but) "None has yet succeeded in capturing the whole field." The comment is certainly relevant to at least one of the four important researchers whose names are included in the list:



"Edward Hall, who classified groups as mono-chronic or poly-chronic, high or low context and past- or future-oriented;

Kluckholn, who saw 5 dimensions -- attitude to problems, time, Nature, nature of man, form of activity and reaction to compatriots;

Geert Hofstede's 4-D model looked at power distance, collectivism vs. individualism, femininity vs. masculinity and uncertainty avoidance. Later he added long-term vs. short-term orientation;

Trompenaars' dimensions came out as universalist vs. particularist, individualist vs. collectivist, specific vs. diffuse, achievement-oriented vs. ascriptive and neutral vs. emotional or affective."



The list includes the research on culture and organizations undertaken by the Dutch researcher, Geert Hofstede, and the fact that Hofstede specifically studied the culture of organizations is the main reason why I have chosen Hofstede as the focus of this essay, rather than the other researchers listed on Lewis's website. Hofstede has made a major attempt to "capture the whole field," and in addition to ardent admirers, he has attracted a number of critics. In Part Three of this essay I have devoted some space to a detailed discussion of two such criticisms, contained in papers produced, respectively, by Brendan McSweeney and by Lena Schmitz & Wiebke Weber (quoted earlier). Their criticisms generally coincide with my own view of Hofstede's studies of culture, which is that his theories, while quite popular and superficially attractive, should really be considered as an example of detailed conceptual analysis, originating in the empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and more recently following the early theories of Bertrand Russell and both the earlier and later theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This has been called the British Tradition' in philosophy (though Hofstede is Dutch) and was a staple of undergraduate courses taught at UK universities from the 1960s to the 1980swhen Hofstede was doing his research. I believe that quasi-philosophical conceptual analysis is a more appropriate description of Hofstede's method than strictly scientific analysis or research.



Geert Hofstede

Hofstede researched the national' cultural attitudes of employees in a single large international company and it is a reasonable hypothesis that such research might well be of some value in considering both the Aikikai and the IAF, as two other large international organizations with a worldwide spread, with each possessing a different structure. Both organizations fit Hofstede's model of national / international organizations, in so far as this model is defined at all.



Japan and the Aikikai thus constitute a plausible example of the national' cultures that Hofstede analyses in his book. However, it will be necessary to move the goalposts somewhat, away from the positions set out by Hofstede, and in a way that Hofstede probably never considered. Aikido is considered by the Aikikai as an expression of Japanese culture and here we come back to the first set of questions considered above: (1) What is a culture? When we claim to be comparing cultures, what exactly are we comparing?

Both Hofstede and the Aikikai appear to assume that the term culture' has the same cash value, so to speak, whenever and wherever it is used. With the Aikikai, this is simply taken for granted. Aikido has been spread worldwide mainly by Japanese teachers and it has been assumed without much question, first, that non-Japanese who study aikido are in fact indirectly studying Japanese culture, and, secondly, that during this process the non-Japanese cultures from which they start are simply assumed to be analogues of the Japanese base concept. With Hofstede, on the other hand, this assumption is made at the outset and is then argued to be based strictly on scientific evidence. Hofstede defines culture as an onion, with values' and assumes without any further argument that his research exhibits differing national' manifestations of the common termas he has defined it. He claims that his discussion of culture results from his scientific research, but his critics have argued that the definition is really used as a conceptual principle that actually guides and structures his research. We will return to this point quite often during this essay.



It should, of course, be emphasized here that the focus in this essay on Hofstede's research is not intended to imply that his research is a model of any kind. Both his research methods and his claimed results have been severely criticized, and so Hofstede's research is not presented here as any kind of standard to be followed; it is offered more as a substantial hook on which to hang a much wider discussion. The size of the company that Hofstede chose for his research, which was IBM, offers some parallels with the present IAF, which now has over fifty member organizations, and the contentand problemsof his research also offer some instructive parallels with any attempt to make a dispassionate analysis of the IAF and its aims, organizational structure, operations, and also the major problems that confront this organization.



There are some obvious differences, of course. Hofstede researched a large company, staffed by paid professionals, whereas the IAF is federation directed entirely by volunteersand this fact also brings its own problems. Like the Aikikai, some of the larger member federations have the resources to employ office staff, but the vast majority of member organizations are run by volunteers and this fact imposes certain constraints, both on the way in which the IAF is expected to operate and also on the way it actually does operatefor the two are not the same. Nevertheless, some instructive parallels can be drawn between what we might call (1) the organizational culture' of the international company studied by Hofstede, with all the various constraints affecting employed staff, and (2) the volunteer' organizational culture of the IAF, with the constraintsor their absenceaffecting the volunteers who work for the federation. Such a comparison would be highly suitable as a subject of a large-scale research study for something like a Ph.D.



The discussion of Hofstede's views affords a platform for examining some fundamental questions relating to crucial aspects of aikido training that have not, as far as I know, received much attention up to now. The questions concern the extent to which culture affects training'whether and how the cognate concepts of culture, national culture, and organizational culture all influence, affect, or even determine, how an individual aikido student or dojo group sees both the art itself and also progress in the art.



This essay therefore presents a critical examination of Geert Hofstede's research. The two original sources I have used are (1) Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations, which is the main report of his research, and (2) a shorter summary, without all the technical appendices, entitled, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, the latest edition of which was published in 2010. The main discussion is based on this shorter summary, since it is more generally accessible than the earlier work. In this Part Two of this essay, I examine each of Hofstede's cultural dimensions as applied to organizations in general and a fictional aikido in particular. In Part Three, to follow, Hofstede's discussion of organizational culture, which comes in the latter part of Culture's Consequences, is examined especially in the light of two highly critical reviews. The first examines Hofstede's whole methodology, while the second has a more specific focus on one of the cultural dimensions that Hofstede claims to have uncovered during his research. It is argued that both the overall methodology and also the examination of cultural dimensions are very seriously flawedto the extent that they lose any value as a scientific exercise.



II: Geert Hofstede's Research

In the preface to Culture's Consequences, Hofstede describes his target readers in the following terms: "Culture's Consequences is a scholarly book, written for social scientists, using scientific language. For practitioners and students, I recommend my short and popular text, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (1991), which has appeared in 16 languages and is more reader-friendly. However, anyone who wants to know the justification and validation of my message in empirical material, or plans to use it in research, needs to use the scholarly book." (Hofstede, Culture's Consequences, 2001, p. xvii.)

As a member of Hofstede's target readership, I used both texts in one of my my graduate seminars, but my Japanese students were rather harder to convince of the virtues of Hofstede's approach than the author might have assumed, so much so that his texts became more of exercise on how not to conduct cross-cultural research. A similar reaction was expressed by a different set of students, in a seminar conducted in a different research institute affiliated to the same university. The students were preparing for their own research projects and took one of my classes on how to write research papers. The students followed a model that is still considered the norm for research papers in the soft' sciences of social or cultural anthropology and applied linguistics and is actually recommended by the research institute. Basically, the model envisages a series of steps: (1) setting out the main dimensions of the research to be followed; (2) definitions of the terms used; (3) collection of primary and secondary data; (4) analysis of the data collected; (5) evaluation of the data; and (6) conclusions to be drawn from this evaluation, in relation to Step (1). My students usually could not resist the temptation to add a further step (7), in the form of general recommendations directed to the institution that funded them, on how the conclusions of the research could be applied to their specific circumstances. Personally, I believe that only in very rare cases is this step actually warranted by the data collected and evaluated. It is not that the process of research itself is necessarily compromised. Rather, the general recommendations tend to go well beyond the conclusions that are actually warranted by the evidence collected and analyzed.



In Hofstede's case, problems arise with each step. Hofstede follows the same basic model and, like some of my students and colleagues here, also happily falls into the temptation of offering general comments on the importance of "intercultural communication" as a means to "survival". He adds much more besides this, however, and these additions also add to the problems. The result is that Hofstede's discussions are not really examples of strict scientific research, but rather fall into the general category of semi-philosophical conceptual analyses of culture. I have called Hofstede's discussions semi-philosophical, because philosophical analysis can be as rigorous as hard' science, as a glance at Ludwig Wittgenstein's early writings will show. Hofstede's discussions are much less rigorous and are very much like the rather superficial discussions sometimes found about Japanese culture that are examples of Nihonjin-ron [にほんじんろん 日本人論 = Discussions, mainly by Japanese authors, about what it is to be Japanese].



This mention of Nihonjin-ron is of some importance, and for two reasons. First, the postwar Japanese preoccupation with Nihonjin-ron carries with it an assumption that there is a distinct culture that is essentially Japaneseand shared equally by all Japanese, and which is therefore a national culture. In fact, a recent book, entitled The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, illustrates the way in which the Japanese are alleged to regard their culture and a corollary here is that this culture is fully shared by all Japanese and, since it is acquired by birth, is also exclusive. Thus, Japan would be a prime example of a national' culture in the sense assumed by Hofstede, but this phenomenon of Nihonjin-ron, with its promotion of Japan as a postwar cultural beacon shining out over the rest of Asia, is quite separate from Hofstede's research.



Secondly, the Japanese preoccupation with Japanese culture is of great importance when one considers a martial art like aikido. As a fundamentally non-competitive spiritual' art, in which the Japanese cultural links are constantly emphasized, aikido does not exhibit any clear measure of quality or progress. In arts like sumo, judo, kendo and karate, a student's progress is marked by means of competitive matches, in which the student either wins or loses, or gains more points than the opponent in the opinion of the judges who oversee the matches. In aikido, the student moves up the kyu ranks, but in descending numerical order, and then obtains the coveted initial dan rank. Progress is measured by means of practical tests in which the applicant has to demonstrate knowledge of aikido, but the so-called spiritual aspects of the art are not really measured at all; progress is simply assumed to take place, to match the advance in the physical aspects displayed in the kyu and dan tests. In any case, the practical tests cease after fourth dan and so for the senior dan ranks further spiritual' progress is simply assumed to take place with the passage of time.



The lack of competition in aikido, coupled with the organization of the art into national federations, is one aspect which clouds the straightforward application of Hofstede's research to aikido. On the other hand, to the extent that Hofstede's research is considered a philosophical exercise, rather than scientific analysis, his research can illuminate aikido organizations in many respects, but in ways that Hofstede himself might never have considered.



The Earlier Core Research: Culture's Consequences

Hofstede sets out to answer the questions posed above in the following manner. The central core of Hofstede's research, as set out in Culture's Consequences, consists of responses to two questionnaires that were distributed to IBM employees working in 72 countries. These responses, comprising a total of 116,000 questionnaires in 20 languages, were supplemented by further questionnaires that were unconnected with the IBM material. On the basis of "theoretical reasoning and statistical analysis," Hofstede postulated a number of "main dimensions on which country cultures differ." In the Summary of Culture's Consequences, Hofstede briefly summarizes four of these dimensions: "Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. The basic problem involved is the degree of human inequality that underlies the functioning of each particular society.

Uncertainty avoidance is the extent to which a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. The basic problem involved is the degree to which a society tries to control the uncontrollable.

Individualism, on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism, is the degree to which individuals are supposed to look after themselves or remain integrated into groups, usually around the family. Positioning itself between these poles is a very basic problem all societies face.

Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of emotional roles between the genders, which is another fundamental for any society to which a range of solutions are found; it opposes "tough" masculine to tender "feminine" societies.

These were the dimensions listed on the Lewis model website, but Hofstede adds another dimension, which he regards as completely unrelated to the IBM survey. This is Long-term versus short-term orientation refers to the extent to which a culture programs its members to accept delayed gratification of their material, social and emotional needs." (Hofstede, ibid., pp. xix-xx; bold type added.)

Later, we will discuss this orientation in detail and the survey on which it is based, but Hofstede's own explanation seems unusual for a scientific monograph: "This chapter (sc. Chapter 7) adds a fifth dimension of national cultures that is independent of the four identified in the IBM studies and covered in the preceding chapters. The new dimension, long- versus short-term orientation, was found in the answers of student samples from 23 countries around 1985 to the Chinese Value Survey (CVS), an instrument developed by Michael Harris Bond in Hong Kong from values suggested by Chinese scholars. The fact that this dimension was not found in the IBM data can be attributed to the Western minds of the designers of the IBM questionnaire and other values lists used in international research so far. The CVS was composed from a values inventory suggested by Eastern minds, which only partly covered the themes judged important in the West. In fact, the long-/short-term orientation dimension appears to be based on items reminiscent of the teachings of Confucius, on both of its poles. It opposes long-term to short-term aspects of Confucian thinking: persistence and thrift to personal stability and respect for tradition." (Culture's Consequences, p. 351, Bold type mine.)

Hofstede gives the explanation in his summary to the chapter, but in the main body of the chapter he accepts and laments the existence of such biases. However, he sees no contradiction between accepting the western' and eastern' biases of those who compose questionnaires concerning national cultures to begin with, and also accepting the results of such questionnaires as strictly' scientific, with the findings based solely on the evidence furnished by the questionnaires and untarnished by any other, extraneous, factors.



The heart of Culture's Consequences, therefore, consists of the five chapters that expound these cultural dimensions, which are intended to provide a valid and reliable basis from which to make scientific comparisons between national' cultures. These chapters are preceded and followed by chapters that define culture and cultures, defend the methodology adopted, relate the cultural dimensions to organizations and intercultural communication, and suggest lines of further research using the dimensional model' that Hofstede has created. The book reads like a lengthy doctoral dissertation and therefore needs the sustained and constructive criticism that should accompany the oral defence of such dissertations. Hofstede does include some criticisms of his method and results, but he also believes that he has adequately responded to these criticisms. Hofstede's research attracted both wide acclaim and also severe criticism, the latter especially from academic colleagues also expert in the field of social anthropology and related disciplines.



The Popular' Summary: Cultures and Organizations

The 595 densely-written pages of Culture's Consequences in its black cover present a rather forbidding prospect to the general reader, especially one who has not entered Hofstede's web of discourse' and is not familiar with the subtle devices he uses to persuade his readers. In 1991 Hofstede published another book, intended for "an intelligent lay readership," which presented the conclusions of the earlier book, but in a more palatable form. The shorter book was co-authored with Hofstede's son, Gert Jan Hofstede, and the result had the title of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. In the latest paperback edition that I possess, there is a subtitle: Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival.



According to Hofstede: "The theme of cultural differences is, of course, not only nor even primarily of interest to social scientists or to international business students. It pertains to anyone who meets people from outside his or her own narrow circle, and in the modern world this means virtually everybody. The new book addressed itself to any interested reader. It avoided social scientific jargon where possible and explained it where necessary." (Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, p. x.)

The third edition of Geert Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations appeared in 2010. Another co-author was added, a researcher from Bulgaria named Michael Minkov, who used data analyzed from a large survey, entitled the World Values Survey. The World Values Survey ( "When Geert started his research in the 1970s, the IBM employee survey data comprised the largest cross-national collection of comparative value statements anywhere in the world. If he had to start again now, he would do it from the World Values Survey." (Op. cit., p. 44.)

Michael Minkov was a student of Hofstede's and in his own books he has surveyed some of the vast amount of work on cross-cultural studies produced since Hofstede wrote the earlier Culture's Consequences. I have not been able to survey all this material and some of it may indeed respond to the criticisms levelled at Hofstede's research by others working in the field of cultures and organizations. This should be borne in mind during the discussion of the criticisms, both in what follows and in the third part of this essay. I do not want to belittle or diminish the immense contribution that Hofstede has made to the study of comparative culture.



One important detail, however, stands out. Hofstede's core research as recorded in Culture's Consequences lists four dimensions that were strictly based on the results of his IBM survey, plus another dimension based on the Chinese Values Survey. However, the summary of the research intended for the general reader and presented in the latest edition of Cultures and Organizations adds yet another dimension, based on the results of research on yet another survey, this time called the World Values Survey, and carried out by Michael Minkov. Hofstede has no problem at all with regarding the new dimensions as complementary to the general mix of those he has already uncovered'. We have mentioned this discrepancy above, but the general flexibility of Hofstede's methodology, especially with regard to deciding which data conform with his research and which do not, should be borne in mind during the subsequent critical discussion.



Culture and Cultures

In the first two chapters of Culture's Consequences (Second Edition, 2001), Geert Hofstede offers a detailed and sustained exposition, first, of his definition of culture and national cultures and, secondly, of his methods of data collection, analysis and validation. In the two editions of Cultures and Organizations, the presentation is somewhat different. Instead of a justification of his methodology, Hofstede presents a general exposition of how studying cultural differences leads to the cultural dimensions discussed in the rest of the book. Hofstede tackles the second set of questions posed earlier: (2) What is a valid comparison? How can we avoid comparing like with unlike? Are the accepted defining characteristics of a culture, especially a national' culture, sufficient for a valid comparison?

Mental Software and Programming

Hofstede defines culture in general and different national cultures by means of a metaphor from computer science: culture is mental programming. "Using the analogy of the way computers are programmed, this book will call such patterns of thinking, feeling and acting mental programs, or, as per the book's subtitle, software of the mind. This does not mean, of course, that people are programmed the way computers are. A person's behavior is only partially predetermined by his or her mental programs: he or she has a basic ability to deviate from them and react in ways that are new, creative, destructive, or unexpected. The software that this book is about only indicates what reactions are likely and understandable, given one's past." (Cultures and Organizations, Third Edition, 2010, p.5. NOTE: All the quotations in this summary of Hofstede's research are taken from this edition and can be found in the first two chapters: Pages 3 to 49.)

A very relevant question here is why, despite all the caveats he makes in the passage quoted, Hofstede has chosen the metaphor to begin with. Though superficially quite common and plausible, the metaphor is still a metaphor. In fact, it merits critical examination as a metaphor, which Hofstede does not do. Hofstede offers no justification for it, but simply announces that this is the way he will define the term. This will be a major problem later, when Hofstede later argues that his theoretical statements are the results of rational' scientific analysis of the data furnished by the responses to his questionnaires. In another sense, the metaphor is another variation of that expounded by the French philosophe, Julien Offray La Mettrie, in his classic work, Man as Machine (1747) and later illustrated by the work of the British mathematician Alan Turing and his Turing Machine.' The computer and its operation form a very common core metaphor for describing the mind/body continuum, or different segments of this, and has generated a vast amount of critical literature, the mere fact of which suggests problems of interpretation, if not of actual coherence. However, the metaphor is attractive only to the extent that the base elements of the metaphorthe ground and the argumentare not examined too critically. Hofstede simply assumes without any argument that the body/mind continuum operates by means of mental' software in the same way that a computer works by means of physical' software.



Hofstede starts off with a person's learned patterns of thinking, feeling and acting, which are learned throughout a person's lifetime, and then notes that culture is the customary label for this. The label operates at a much more basic level than the common meaning of culture as "civilization" or "refinement of the mind", as expressed in literature and poetry, and includes "the ordinary and menial things in life: greeting, eating, showing, or not showing feelings, keeping a certain physical distance from others, making love and maintaining bodily hygiene." (Ibid.)

Hofstede distinguishes three levels of this mental programming, of which the lowest level is human nature itself, common to everyone and inherited; the middle level is culture, which is specific to a group or category and is learned; and, finally, the top level is personality, which is both inherited and learned, but is quite specific to each individual. Again, this classification is philosophically quite reasonable, but it is not really the result of the scientific analysis of the results of his questionnaires; one could argue instead that it is a set of reasoned principles that is used to structure the research to begin with and then to analyze the results.



Culture as an Onion

The second metaphor used by Hofstede to define culture is that of the layers of an onion. Quietly shifting the ground of his argument from culture itself to cultural differences, he chooses four basic terms to describe the manifestations of culture. Three of these are practices, of which the closest to the surface of the onion are symbols, such as language, pictures, dress, hairstyles, flags, status symbols, all of which are recognized as such only by those who share the particular culture. The middle layer of the onion are heroes, persons alive or dead, real or imaginary, who serve as role models. The deepest layer of the onion are rituals, which Hofstede calls "collective activities that are technically superfluous to reach desired ends, but that, within a culture, are considered socially essential." Examples are greetings, business meetings, general meetings of organizations, discourse, meaning the way language is used in text and conversation.



Hofstede's onion metaphor, like the mental' software metaphor, is quite attractive as a description of how culture' is supposed to operate and one can easily see its relevance to aikido. A Hofstedean researcher of aikido would have a field day in analyzing how the three layers of his cultural onion are manifested in a typical dojo or organization. Practices, heroes and symbols all figure very prominently in the aikido dojo and in aikido organizations. However, I think it is extremely difficult for Hofstede to argue that his definitions are the result of any scientific analysis of his research or have been arrived at by means of the research itself. In fact, they constitute a given', for they are assumed to be correct to begin with, and as such become fundamental working assumptions that actually guide and structure his research.



but an Onion with Values

According to Hofstede, at the core of the onion are values, which is the fourth basic term and which he calls "feelings with an added arrow attached indicating a plus and a minus side." He lists a set of pairings about which the feelings operate: Evil versus good

Dirty versus clean

Dangerous versus safe

Forbidden versus permitted

Decent versus indecent

Moral versus immoral

Ugly versus beautiful

Unnatural versus natural

Abnormal versus normal

Paradoxical versus logical

Irrational versus rational

The list, which is assumed to be complete, is offered without any qualification or comment as to which sides are plus' and which are minus' and the possible ranking of the pairs, so one might conclude that there is no ranking at all and that all the values have the same importance. The only discussion that Hofstede offers concerns the age at which a person comes to acquire the core values in the above list. This timespan, which is also open to question, is supposed to begin immediately after birth and continue until a person reaches the age of 20, in other words, until the person reaches maturity as an adult. After reaching such maturity, "the person gradually switches to a different, conscious way of learning, focusing primarily on new practices." The reason why Hofstede does this is to enable him to distinguish more clearly between the different layers of the onion, and to leave the core, the values listed above, as already formed within the specified timescale.



Apart from the initial explanations about studying the job attitudes' and employee values' of the IBM employees, we are given no indication of how Hofstede has arrived at the list of core values, or how it relates to his 116,000 questionnaires. Clearly, the list could be used to frame the questions that one might ask in a questionnaire, but this also entails that the list has not been arrived at as a result of the responses to these questions. One can see that this problem is not really solved by means of an initial pilot survey, since all this will do is to confirm the conceptual dimensions of the questionnaire that have previously been established. One can also see intuitively that the list of core values might well apply to any culture which operates via what Hofstede / Bourdieu called practices', such as training in a martial arts dojo, for it is theoretically possible to place all the core values listed above in the context of aikido training and organizations, especially if aikido is conceived as a spiritual' (i.e., intrinsically value-laden) art, essentially performed with a partner, and ordered to the wellbeing' of the person who practices the art. I think the list is harder to apply, however, if the art is basically conceived as a set of tools focused on developing what its exponents call an aiki body,' with the main emphasis placed on solo training. In this case, many of the values of the onion metaphor lose much of their absolute relevance, since they are subordinated to the need for efficient training.



In Cultures and Organizations (p. 61), Hofstede adds a qualification, namely that, "institutions are the basic elements of society, such as the family, the school, and the community; organizations are the places where people work." The qualification is added to the discussion on power distance and, while the definition of institutions might be acceptable, the definition of organizations is far too restrictive, since it appears to rule out organizations dedicated to the pursuit of activities other than gainful employment. There are many such organizations and the political' intrigues that are found in their management are one reason why they are attractive to study.



and Values of National Cultures

Hofstede moves from culture as mental software / learned values & practices to specifically national cultures in one stepand this is where more serious issues arise. The issues are of some importance for aikido and the IAF, since the Aikikai places great important on national organizations and the IAF is a federation entirely composed of such national organizations. Hofstede's defence of his move is noteworthy in several important respects.



First, Hofstede notes that the invention' of nations is a recent phenomenon and was introduced worldwide only in the mid-twentieth century. He distinguishes between nations and societiesand then fudges the application of both to culture. "Strictly speaking, the concept of a common culture applies to societies, not to nations." (Op.cit., p. 21.)

Why, then, does he focus on nations and national differences? His answers are rather lame. "Nevertheless, many nations do form historically developed wholes, even if they consist of clearly defined different groups and even if they contain less integrated minorities." (Ibid.)

After noting the conflicting tendencies towards integration and for ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups to fight for recognition of a distinct identity, Hofstede gives his justification for focusing on national differences and this deserves a more critical examination, for it is highly relevant to aikido and the IAF. "In research on cultural differences, nationalitythe passport one holdsshould therefore be used with care. Yet it is often the only feasible criterion for classification. Rightly or wrongly, collective properties are ascribed to the citizens of certain countries: people refer to "typically American," "typically German," and "typically Japanese" behavior. Using nationality as a criterion is a matter of expediency, because it is immensely easier to obtain data for nations than for organic homogeneous societies. Nations as political bodies supply all kinds of statistics about their populations. Survey data (that is, the answers people give on paper-and-pencil questionnaires related to their culture) are also mostly connected through national networks. Where it is possible to separate by regional, linguistic groups, this is useful. (Ibid.)

Hofstede's justification seems to be that nationality offers the best opportunity to collect data, but he does not indicate the kind of care that should be taken. His research does indeed focus on cultural differences, but it is taken for granted that one has to compare like with like, and so the basis for comparison has to be units' with the same research value'. Hofstede continues with another, more important reason that is as much ideological' or political' as it is supposedly strictly' scientific: "A strong reason for collecting data at the level of nations is that one of the purposes of cross-cultural research is to promote cooperation among nations. the (more than two hundred) nations that exist today populate one single world, and we either survive or perish together. So, it makes sense to focus on cultural factors separating or uniting nations." (Op.cit., pp. 21-22.)

The sentiments expressed in the latter paragraph are fine indeed and are highly appropriate to an organization like the IAF, but I think they have no place in supposedly objective, scientific research and are more appropriate in a political manifesto or a peace declaration, of the sort that is presented every year in Hiroshima by the mayor.



I plan to discuss the development of aikido outside Japan later in this series of AikiWeb essays, but it is probably sufficient to state here that the division of the IAF into nations or countries seems to have been a matter of practicalities, rather than the result of any carefully thought out theses about different cultures, such as those pursued by Hofstede in his research. In some respects, it might have been better for Hofstede to focus on volunteer organizations like the IAF, rather than a commercial company like IBM. IBM is an American company (western' in Hofstede's terms), but the IAF is much more difficult to characterize as western' or eastern'. Clearly, aikido is a Japanese martial art, not a sport, but the art is practiced all over the world according to a model that it gradually losing its original Japanese character. The impetus for creating the IAF, however, originated in Europe, not in Japan, and by aikido practitioners who wanted to create an international federation that followed the model of sports, like judo, kendo and karate. The crucial differences between aikido and these Japanese sports were simply assumed not to constitute any major obstacles for an international federation like the IAF.



As I will explain in Part Three, I came to the IAF quite late in my aikido career, if one may use this term for a completely volunteer activity. After beginnings at the University of Sussex, I trained at a London dojo of the Aikikai of Great Britain, which was the name that K Chiba gave his original organization in the UK. After I returned from the USA, where I trained at the New England Aikikai, I resumed training at my university dojo, which I assumed was still affiliated to Chiba's Aikikai of Great Britain, only to find that the name of the whole organization had changed to British Aikido Federation (BAF). I understood later that this was the result of the creation of the IAF, which, crucially following the example of the sporting world, was organized on the basis of countries, and therefore of national' federations. (Eventually, the dojos of the BAF in Scotland formed their own federation, the Scottish Aikido Federation (ScAF), to match the existence of an Irish aikido federation. However, the choice of name simply matched the geographical realities noted at the time and had no connection whatever with the supposed existence or otherwise of a distinct national' culture that was assumed to correspond with the name and on to which aikido was supposedly graftedif we follow Hofstede's model.)



A Local Example of a National' Culture

Before I retired as a professor at Hiroshima University, I spent ten years as the convenor of a group charged with making a policy blueprint for foreign residents of the city of Hiroshima. The group itself had been very carefully selected by the city government, through a process of both direct appointment and popular election, and I found out later, to my surprisegiven my penchant for driving powerful sports cars well above the speed limit, that I had been appointed, not elected, and that my appointment had been actively sponsored by the prefectural police department. Members of the group were chosen on the basis of nationality, not because of any deep cultural differences, but on the basis of the relative numbers of those possessing alien registration cards (the appropriate information having been obtained from the national government). There were approximately 15,000 foreign residents in the city and prefecture, respectively, and the larger the national representation, the greater the proportion of the members, whether elected or appointed. Thus, the members included four Korean residents (two from each division of the peninsula), two Chinese residents, two Brazilian residents, and one each from the Philippines, the US, and the UK, making eleven members in all. I was put in the chair on grounds both of seniority in age and of being a tenured professor at the leading university in the region.



The task of the group was to discuss general issues raised by the city government and make recommendations, but the task included making a survey of precisely the type used by Hofstede in his research. Since neither the group nor the city was capable of handling such a large and detailed survey, this task was entrusted to a specialist public-relations company. However, the group still had to devise appropriate survey questions, which effectively uncovered problems, concerning all the aspects of their lives, that were likely to be encountered by foreign residents. The members of the group spent much time devising these questions and biases might well have been there, as they were with Hofstede's IBM questionnaire, but the questions were devised largely on the basis of their own individual experiences in Japan, rather than as members of the relevant national' culture. In fact, questions of national' culture never surfaced during this stage. The group then planned the three stages of the survey: a pilot questionnaire (given to 100 residents); the main questionnaire (given to 3,000 residents); and follow-up open-ended interviews (given to 200 residents). Responses were received from about half of the random sample and the results were used by the city government to make policies. I believe the group became permanent and is still in existence.



Unlike Hofstede's research database, which was largely confined to employees of a single commercial enterprise, the database for this survey were simply foreign residents' and the only likely differences arising from the research was the length of time they had resided or intended to reside in Hiroshima. However, this was allowed for in the questions asked in the survey, which, incidentally, was issued in five languages, with the translations from the Japanese original overseen by bilingual foreign residents. Consequently, some of the problems that affected Hofstede's research were avoided. First, the respondents did not work for a single commercial company and there was therefore no possibility of interference by the company in the way that the employees answered the questions; secondly, the multilingual versions also removed the dominant influence of any one language, in this case, Japanese. Of course, Japanese was the original language and the questionnaires were translated, so there were language issues that we will need to consider later, namely, the linguistic imperialism' that governed the construction of the original survey and which might well have limited the strictly objective' value of the survey.



Although the group was composed of members of different nationalities, the uncovering of differences between national cultures' and the locating of each culture on a set of national' cultural dimensions was not the purpose of the exercise, though the sentiments about cross-cultural cooperation expressed in Hofstede's second paragraph, quoted above, were probably as important to members of the group as they were to Hofstede. In fact, the only assumption made about national culture' in the survey was the extent to which both the Japanese organizers and all the non-Japanese members of the groupthe latter seen as representatives of the foreign residentsaccepted the existence of a Japanese national' culture, in which they had become embedded, so to speak. The survey did not have to carry Hofstede's ideological baggage and as a result was closer than his research to the accepted model of objective' research in cultural anthropology. However, I believe that this model of objective' research is very much a Platonic ideal, in the sense that it is virtually impossible to attain in actual practiceas Plato himself actually believed.



The overriding aim of the survey was to draft a blueprint for a policy that would enable long-term foreign residents of Hiroshima to adapt to living in Japanin other words, to cope with the practical demands made by participation in a foreign' host culture. It is not difficult to detect the underlying assumptions, suggested above, that were made by the Hiroshima city government, namely, (1) the existence of Japanese culture' as a national' culture shared to the fullest extent by every native Japanese, and (2) the very pressing need for non-Japanese to adapt themselves to living in this culture in as smooth' and uncomplicated a way as possible.



The concept of a national culture, therefore, is certainly very much alive in Japan and is acceptedtaken for granted, almostby the population as a whole. The concept is also accepted by at least one non-Japanese, as can be seen from a recent observation on the Internet. "There's no white culture. There's German culture, Dutch culture, Irish culture, English culture, etc. Each of those nations have traditions and events that mark their culture. White people in America are made up of descendants of European (as well as Australian, New Zealand, South African, etc.) nations, and as descendants of those nations, will celebrate holidays marking such cultures, such as Mariä Lichtmess or Boxing Day. The shared White experience in America, inasmuch as it involved simply being White (not "from Alabama," or "from Illinois") - is built around the oppression of people that aren't white, i.e. making sure that the Latins and Blacks and Italians don't get too uppity and forget who their betters are. Apart from violence and other action against minorities, there is no "white" experience in America. When you say you want "White Power," you don't mean that you want your traditions to be respected. What tradition would that be? The tradition of sipping mint juleps on your back porch and shooting geese out of the sky? That's a southern tradition, not a white one, and your white friends in Albany or Boise, would not share that tradition. The only "White power" that you might share with other white men in Albany or Boise would be the tradition of terrorizing black people." (Retrieved on August 14, 2017, from a discussion on Facebook about the Charlottesville incident in the US.)

The (male) writer certainly accepts the existence of national cultures in Europe and would certainly accept the existence of a national culture in Japan, but he seems to have great difficulty in including the United States in the same category. He seems very clear that there is no "white culture" in the USeven under the presidency of Obama or Donald Trump, he but is far less clear about the possibility of a distinct American national culture (American' here signifying the United States and not the whole continent). One problem seems to be that he is uncertain whether his view of culture is defined in terms of a country, a nation (which he seems to prefer), or a language, or in terms of all three.



A Local Example of a National Aikido' Culture

As we go through the detailed critical review of Hofstede's analysis, it is important not to lose sight of the overall aim, which is to examine the rather complex cultural' context of aikido dojos and the organizations built up around them. This is probably best achieved by giving a concrete example and referring to this example in what follows. I consider a fictional aikido organization, located somewhere outside Japan. The central dojo is headed by a Japanese instructor of shihan rank (6th dan and above), who began training in the Aikikai Hombu headquarters when the Founder was alive, but who was never a designated uchi-deshi. Our fictional instructor moved from Japan to another country, married and established a family, and adopted this country as the home' country. Initially, the instructor made frequent visits back to Japan, but the frequency diminished as the dojo in this home' country became more established as a local centre of serious aikido training. The shihan's home' dojo is supplemented by a very small group of other dojos in the same country and even fewer in different countries, all technically run by the shihan and his senior students. All of these students are non-Japanesethey are nationals of the various countries in which the dojos are situatedand in fact the senior students play an increasingly prominent role in aikido training and teaching, since the shihan is quite advanced in years and has largely retired from teaching aikido and from active involvement in the organization. However, the way in which the shihan trained and also his own ideas about aikido have formed a kind of template for a certain way of training and this template was adopted by his own studentsto which they added varying degrees of critical awareness about the shihan's own relationship with the founder of aikido and his successors.



Adapting a name from a very famous author of fiction, we will call this equally fictional organization the Woebegone Aikido Association, and in the subsequent discussion on the various dimensions of national' cultures, we will keep referring back to this organization as a very practical example of an aikido organization exhibitingor not exhibitingthe marks of a national' culture as understood and expounded by Hofstede. In fact, The Woebegone Aikido Association is a strictly fictional example of a very large number of medium-sized aikido organizations gathered under the general aegis of the Aikikai and the member-organizations of the IAF.



A crucial element of these organizations is the training of what is very fundamentally a Japanese martial art or way, by students who (1) generally are not Japanese, but who (2) train under technical direction of a resident Japanese shihan. The shihan follows a traditional Japanese method of teaching and thus sees very little need for making any distinction between the martial art that he teaches and the national' culture in which he regards the art as embedded. Finally, since the students are not Japanese, they (3) need technical and other explanations in English, which the shihan is not very good at and which therefore acts as a spur to his teaching by showing, rather than teaching by means of tortuous verbal explanations. People can also see that this adds to the mystery' of the art, wherein the techniques, called wazaa term usually left untranslatedhave to be stolen.'



Since the various dojos affiliated to the Woebegone Aikido Association are situated in different countries, we can expect that all the issues concerning national cultures' discussed by Hofstede should be present here, but in the more intense form exhibited by the physical / mental training in a fundamentally Japanese art. (In my own dojos in Hiroshima, the situation is somewhat reversed, since the shihanmyselfis non-Japanese, but all except one of the dojo members are Japanese and any necessary explanations during training are given in Japanese.) Each cultural dimension' supposedly uncovered' by Hofstede in the IBM survey and other surveys and discussed in Cultures and Organizations can therefore be presumed to be present in the branch dojos of the Woebegone Aikido Organization and will be considered in the sections that follow, but in the context of the aikido dojos that make up the association. (For those who have read Garrison Keillor's novels on which the name is based, the Woebegone Aikido Association does not at all embody the assumed meaning of the modified name, being a flourishing aikido organization and one that is not at all laden with woe.)



One might argue here that I am not comparing like with like and we will need to discuss this issue in some detail later. Hofstede surveyed the employees of an American company with branches throughout the world and the only similarity between IBM and the Woebegone Aikido Association is the international spread of the two organizations. This objection fails, however, because of the assumptions that Hofstede makesand has to makeabout the IBM survey. He regards the surveyand the other surveys done by his associates, as wholly applicable to national cultures' and this entails that all the members of each national culture' will exhibit all the dimensions revealed by the surveys to a greater or lesser degreeand will exhibit the dimensions regardless of whether they work for IBM or are members of the Woebegone Aikido Association. The argument for the universal nature of the cultural dimensions is an essential element in Hofstede's oft-repeated claims that he is following proper scientific procedures and that the cultural dimensions are revealed' by the survey results.

NOTE: 6. Discussing existing aikido organizations is a very delicate undertaking, especially if there are elements in the discussion that can be regarded as critical of any existing organization, and so I wish to stress here that the Woebegone Aikido Organization is strictly fictional and that any discovered similarity with existing aikido organizations affiliated to the Aikikai is both unintentional and purely coincidental. The fictional Woebegone Aikido Organization is really a literary metaphor devised to illuminate the structural issues relating to aikido organizations in general, but especially as these are studied through the lenses afforded by the research of Geert Hofstede and Michael Minkov.



The Evidence of Language

Before we discuss in detail Hofstede's views on the general dimensions of national cultures, it is worth making a few comments about an important aspect of culture that seems curiously lacking in his analysis. In his essay entitled, "The Evidence of Language," and published in the first volume of the Cambridge Ancient History, W F Albright gives a brief introductory sketch of the connection that he sees between language and culture: "While it is difficult to establish a close relationship between language form and the racial or cultural characteristics of its speakers, an intimate relationship does exist between culture and language content. The study of language content needs no special justification, since the written records of antiquity are our most valuable source of information concerning the peoples and civilizations which form the object of historical investigation. But language as a formal structure, like the tools and institutions of a society, represents a kind of transmitted organism and as such falls into the category of data which can be ordered in typologically related sequences. Thus, for the historian, who is interested primarily in tracing continuities, the study of the history and development of a language, apart from its use as a vehicle for oral and written traditions, provides useful and sometimes unique evidence of otherwise undiscernible ethnic and cultural affiliations." (W F Albright, "The Evidence of Language," in Cambridge Ancient History, Volume I, Part 1: Prolegomena and Prehistory, p. 122.)

Hofstede is supposed to be conducting a strictly scientific analysis of culture and organizations, based on the questionnaires he gave to the many IBM employees in the various countries where the company operates, and in Culture's Consequences, he discusses the issues mentioned by Albright and, to his credit, he uses many of the same sources. That language presents something of an issue for Hofstede is clear from the brief section in Culture's Consequences entitled "Language and Translation." One or two brief extracts will suffice to underline the point I am making here: "Language is both the vehicle of most of cross-cultural research and part of its object. Culture, as I use the word in this book, includes language. Language is the most clearly recognizable part of culture and the part that has lent itself to systematic study and theory building "



"Language is not a neutral vehicle. Our thinking is affected by the categories and words available in our language..." (Hofstede, Culture's Consequences, p. 21.)

Hofstede then gives a very brief summary of his understanding of what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, namely, that observers are not led by the same picture of the universe, unless their language backgrounds are similar or can in some way be calibrated.' (Ibid.)



This is of some relevance for Hofstede's own research, since he had to use translation and back-translation to test the accuracy of the responses he received to his IBM questionnaires. He draws his conclusions at the end of the relevant section in Culture's Consequences: "Finally, translation errors are randomized when the number of languages used is increased. One bad translation may invalidate a two-country study, but it is unlikely that systematic translation errors will affect the conclusions of a 53-country, 20-language study such as the one described in this book. Language, in this case, becomes variable in the analysis and not just a source of bias." (Op. cit., p. 23.)

Hofstede's logic is hard to fathom here. On the one hand, one can easily see that the conclusions of a two-country study could be invalidated by a bad translation (such as occasionally happens when Japanese texts about aikido are translated into English), but Hofstede sees some sort of self-correcting mechanism at work when the erroneous translations of a study are extended to twenty languages in over 50 countries. The only way in which such a self-correcting mechanism might work is if all the translations of a 20-language study were made at the same time, but by different expertsall bilingual in the base and target language, and all proficient in the complex of skills required for translation. One of the major issues in aikido is the very variable quality of the translations encountered, including those made from both the published writings and also the various oral pronouncements of Morihei Ueshiba.



To his credit, Hofstede does consider language in some detail in Cultures and Organizations, which is a later and extended summary of Culture's Consequences, but an issue for me here is why he did not consider language itself and language differences as one of the central cultural dimensions discussed in the book. He does indeed regard language as a part of culture, for it is listed among the symbols, along with dress, hairstyles and flags, that form a crucial part of his onion metaphor, discussed earlier. However, language for Hofstede seem to lack the crucial role it has for someone like Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose studies on language included theories about the role of language in discourse. Hofstede clearly regards language as important, but he has little of substance to report on the roles it actually plays in forming the culture dimensions discussed in his two books. The relevance of this issue was made clear to me from a conversation with a close friend and aikido colleague, with whom I often discussed Hofstede when I was using his texts in my university seminars. My friend, who is Dutch, commented that Hofstede's overall approach in his research was "very Dutch" and his comment was intended to cover not only the explicitly cultural' parts of the research, but also the general language aspectsimplicit and explicit, and including the language in which the works were originally written. In this respect, my treatment of Hofstede's research is different from my research on the history and evolution of aikido. Whereas I can speak and read Japanese and can therefore read the writings of Morihei Ueshiba in the original language, my total inability in the Dutch language means that I have to approach Hofstede via English translations and my operating assumption has to be that these translations are accurate enough to be reliable. I will return to the language issue when considering Hofstede's cultural dimensions one by one, below, and discuss it further in Part Three of this essay.



Hofstede's General Dimensions of National' Cultures

Hofstede argues that his concept of cultural' dimensions is a direct consequence of his research' and it is very clear that this concept affords him an effective platform from which to survey cultural differences and he provides ample statistical evidence (invariably based on his survey) to support his conclusions. A very relevant question here, however, is how Hofstede arrived at his notion of cultural dimensions and to what extent this notion actually guided the structuring of his research. Another, related, question concerns the apparent flexibility of the number of cultural dimensions, which appears to increase in number with the appearance of each new edition of his philosophical' summary, Cultures and Organizations. This is not a major question if it is accepted that Hofstede's cultural dimensions are not really the result of scientific objective researchsupposedly objective and relying very strictly on the evidence and nothing else, but more an example of conceptual analysis, of the sort practiced by postwar linguistic philosophers and students of comparative culture. In any case, the first step is to expand the brief description given by Hofstede himself, above, with a more detailed analysis of each cultural' dimension. We can then take a very critical look at the whole structure of these dimensions and the alleged role that they play in Hofstede's own mental software.'



Hofstede's Dimensions: 1. Power Distance

In his earlier description of power difference Hofstede begins with the degree of acceptance of the unequal distribution of power in a society, and then moves to the degree of acceptance of the social inequality that is assumed to be a consequence of this unequal power distribution. In his later treatment of the subject, he reverses the order of presentation and uses the pecking order' in animals as a springboard for a general discussion of inequality in human societies, which he traces back at least as far as Plato.



Inequality is exhibited in five broad areas: (1) physical and mental characteristics (from birth); (2) social status and prestige; (3) wealth; (4) power; (5) laws, rights and rules. Hofstede notes that inequality in these areas does not need to go together and gives a number of examples. Champion athletes, for example, might well have special physical and mental endowments from birth, enhanced by intensive training, but this difference from the rest of the population does not necessarily give them wealth or political power (though it often does in practice). Hofstede does not give the example of hereditary heads of martial arts like the Morihei Ueshiba and his successors, after the Japanese model of iemoto, but this most certainly has to be included as an example of power distance. Such families resemble royal families in the sense that they exhibit a similar inequality, but in more respects than that of athletes. Nevertheless, proficiency in the martial art of which they are the heads does not come from the mere fact of birth in a particular family, but also has to be acquired through hard training: they cannot simply look and act in a regal' fashion, but really have to act the part they are expected to play.



The Power Distance Index (PDI)

Inequality and power distance are simply assumed to be a given' in any social structure and the major issue for Hofstede is how different national' cultures deal with this. The result is the Power Distance Index (PDI), which is based on the answers given to three questions in the IBM questionnaire. Hofstede spends much space justifying his method, analysis and validation, but the fact remains that his whole analysisof a national culture, in relation to power distancerests solely on guided answers to just three questions in Hofstede's massive questionnaire, which relate to the management of a particular commercial company or of a department within the company. The three questions ask whether employees are afraid' of managers, how they relate to their perceived manager' and how they relate to their preferred manager.' The answers, also, are organized in a particular way, namely, as typologies. This allows Hofstede to present the answers as points on a spectrum, ranging from complet