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3) Too Western-oriented
This criticism is aimed at the design of the research criteria and its applica-
tion, its political and social orientation, and the narrowness of the population 
which provided the basis for the data collection. Although the total number 
of questionnaires analysed was large, the number of respondents from many 
of the countries was relatively limited. As a result, in some cases research 
conclusions have been based on statistically insignificant samples. In addi-
tion, although the results are mainly comparable, they do not represent the 
whole society or nation, but only one professional group.
The research criteria were set up and designed by Westerners. They were 
therefore biased towards Western values and may give insufficient recogni-
tion to alternative belief systems that might be based on other factors. In 
addition, the sample was mainly limited to middle- ranking employees, the 
majority of whom were male and mainly from the marketing and service 
divisions. However, the criticism of being too
Western- biased has been 
reduced by the data obtained from the CVS.
4) Political orientation
By focusing on one successful multinational capitalist company, Hofstede 
could not effectively take account of the cultural values of socialist societies 
or of the developing world. However, to counter this, Hofstede says that a 
society’s belief system goes beyond politics and he has attempted to deal 
with the developing world and emerging economies by his introduction of 
the LTO dimension as a follow- up to Bond’s CVS.

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44 Cross-Cultural Communication
5) Too few dimensions
It can be argued that more indicators are needed to adequately character-
ize and contrast cultures. Hofstede agrees with this in principle, and to 
some extent the work of Lewis, Mole and Trompenaars helps to fill this 
gap. More recent research by Hofstede in cooperation with Michael Bond 
has produced the fifth dimension (LTO/STO), while his work with Michael 
Minkov and research colleagues has resulted in the formulation of the sixth 
dimension (IVR).