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This chapter presents my theory of seven cultural value orientations and applies it to understanding relations of culture to significant societal phenomena. The first section of the chapter explicates my conception of culture, a conception of the normative value system that underlies social practices and institutions. Next, this section describes how the cultural value orientations can be measured. It then presents a validation of the content of the seven value orientations and the structure of relations among them, based on an analysis of data across 75 countries. Brief comparisons of these value orientations with two other dimensional approaches to culture are followed by an analysis that justifies treating countries as cultural units.

The middle section of the chapter uses the seven validated cultural orientations to generate a worldwide graphic mapping of national cultures that reveals eight world cultural regions. The map permits comparison of national cultures with one another on each orientation. To illustrate the meaningfulness of the cultural map, I discuss the distinctive cultural profiles of each world cultural region. The final third of the chapter proposes reciprocal, causal influences between culture, measured by the value orientations, and several social structural variables: the socioeconomic level of countries, their level of political democracy, the competitiveness of their market systems, and their average family size. It also presents empirical analyses to assess these causal influences. Finally, this section analyzes how distance between countries on cultural value orientations affects the flow of investment around the world.