N.B. More about me can be found on www.gertjanhofstede.com,
a more informal personal site. Things that relate to my position at
Wageningen University, such as lists of publications and current
projects, can be found at www.ldi.wur.nl.
I was born in 1956 as the first child of Geert Hofstede and Maaike
van den Hoek. As a child I, and my little brothers, followed them
in Geerts career moves to IBM international and later to IMEDE
Lausanne. My teenage years in Lausanne gave me important first-hand
cross-cultural experience, and it forced me to master French - for
instance, to read the protest magazine Zéro de Conduite
published by high school students in the aftermath of student
revolutions in 1968. I then moved back to the Netherlands to study
population biology and graduated in 1983. At that time the "oil
crisis" was in full swing, and computers were just starting to
permeate the world of organizations, so that the only kind of job
available was as a computer programmer. I took one at Volmac
Toptraining, and soon afterwards switched back to academia as a
teacher in computer science, later information management. While
teaching I completed a PhD thesis in production planning that
appeared in 1992 (Modesty in Modelling). In the
mid-nineties I became involved in the rise of the World Wide Web
that brought human behaviour into centre stage in the world of
information and communication technologies. This prompted me to
start developing simulation games that made use of Geerts work. One
thing leading to another, I gradually developed into my father's
co-author. In my job I am involved in simulation gaming, in
studying trust and transparency in agri-food chains, and in
modelling culture in multi-agent simulations. Besides I lecture and
write widely about culture. You can find my publications here at Wageningen University's
site.
I am a biologist by education and it shows in my work. I like to
reflect not just on how things are but on how they got that way. I
consider culture to be a biological adaptation of our species.
Humans are cultural to the marrow - or more literally, to the
genes. Culture permeates all the social activities of
mankind. As a result the study of culture should not be seen as
only a specialism of one of the social sciences. Rather it can
flourish as an inter-discipline that can borrow insights from
evolutionary biology, ancient and modern history, and all the
social sciences. In somewhat swollen language we could say that a
new synthesis in the social sciences is needed, in which the
various fields are all seen as contributions to a single endeavour
- the study of Homo sapiens as a phenomenon in history. This is
necessary because we are in a whirlwind of evolution today, and we
need to face this. I would like to see universities give starter
courses on social sciences that take this very wide view before
specializing into disciplines.
In winter 2009-2010, my mind was taken up with the prehistory
of culture. It has resulted in a new chapter for the third edition
of Cultures and Organizations, that appeared May 2010. I am
satisfied of having a big picture of our prehistory now, and at the
same resigned that a great deal of our cultural prehistory will
never be elucidated beyond conjecture. Culture does not leave
fossils, but it leaves values, rituals and practices.
In relation to this I am struck by the impact of
our nature as a group animal on measures of in-group / out-group
behaviour, and the strong link with our feelings of morality. I am
much influenced here by Evolution for Everyone, David
Sloan Wilson's book in which he forcibly argues the importance of
group-level evolution in shaping human morality. We build 'moral
circles'. Whatever the culture, we are pre-programmed to
divide people into two groups. Those inside
the circle are granted moral rights and duties, and the
others are (implicitly) denied full morality. This is being
confirmed time and again in neurological and behavioural
experiments. Culture also affects these processes in that it has
unwritten rules for who can be considered a member of our in-group,
whether various overlapping in-groups can coexists, what
constitutes an offence against membership of the moral circle, what
punishments await offenders, and more.
I read like crazy but there is no keeping up with worldwide
production of good books and articles. I prefer books to Web
sources, for their greater coherence, and their distance from the
daily rat and fad races. When it comes to non-fiction I find I like
books by older people - they tend to have the best breadth and most
wisdom. Recently I enjoyed Darwin's The descent of
man - he was old, and bold, when he wrote that. Much more can
be found on www.gertjanhofstede.com.