Unfortunately, this dialectical movement in the West was later overshadowed somehow by logical positivism in the name of modern science ( Popper, 2002). For example, in the history of Western philosophy dialectical thinking with paradox and change as its central concepts permeated the writings of a number of thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. Dialectical reasoning is not unknown to Western literature. This research has been pursued in the belief that Asian management research needs to participate in ‘global scholarly discourse’ and ‘make major contributions . . . by drawing on traditional Asian thought in developing new theories’ ( Meyer, 2006: 119) and that the Chinese management research community ‘may contribute to global management knowledge’ ( Tsui, 2009: 1). I posit that potential paradoxical values coexist in any culture and they give rise to, exist within, reinforce, and complement each other to shape the holistic, dynamic, and dialectical nature of culture. Based on the indigenous Chinese philosophy of Yin Yang, I conceptualize culture as possessing inherently paradoxical value orientations, thereby enabling it to embrace opposite traits of any given cultural dimension. Yin Yang captures the Chinese view of paradox as interdependent opposites compared with the Western view of paradox as exclusive opposites ( Chen, 2002). The Chinese have a long-standing reputation for being ‘dialectical thinkers’ ( Peng & Nisbett, 1999: 743) whose reasoning differs from the formal logic dominating the Western philosophical tradition (e.g., Graham, 1986 Needham, 1956). ‘Dialectical thinking is considered to consist of sophisticated approaches toward seeming contradictions and inconsistencies’ ( Peng & Nisbett, 1999: 742). Yin Yang is a unique Chinese duality thinking bearing some resemblance to the dialectical thinking in the West. Yin Yang involves ‘three tenets’ of duality: Yin Yang is an ancient Chinese philosophy and a holistic, dynamic, and dialectical world view ( Li, 2008). The purpose of this article is to propose a Yin Yang perspective, as an alternative to the Hofstede paradigm, to understand culture. The downside of Hofstede's bipolarized and static vision of culture is increasingly recognized in the age of globalization and the Internet when cultural learning takes place not just longitudinally from one's own ancestors within one's own cultural group but all-dimensionally from different nations, cultures, and peoples in an increasingly borderless and wireless workplace, marketplace, and cyberspace.
Nevertheless, Hofstede's cultural paradigm has received important critiques from methodological ( McSweeney, 2002), management ( Holden, 2002), and philosophical ( Fang, 2003, 2005–2006, 2010) perspectives. ‘Hofstede's masterful capacity to elaborate the complex phenomenon of culture in simple and measurable terms explains his enormous popularity’ ( Fang, 2010: 156). Although using different cultural dimensions, these later studies have essentially followed in Hofstede's philosophical tone.
Some later studies may be more scientifically designed ( Schwartz, 1992), practically oriented ( Trompenaars, 1994), and may have investigated more societies ( House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) than Hofstede's research, but their overall impact does not surpass Hofstede's. Hofstede's work has emphasized cultural differences across national borders and stimulated managers to show respect for different cultures, values, and management styles. Culture has been extensively studied in management literature during the past three decades in which Hofstede's (1980, 1991, 2001) dimensional theory of culture has been a dominant paradigm ( Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006).
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