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A. Dotan and P. Zaphiris
Cultures with tall hierarchical structure and considerable emotional distance between members of different levels are often nationalistic. This is also supported by the fact they are more likely to be a collectivist culture as Hofstede points out. The link between a culture’s power distance value and frequency of tags could indicate that Hofstede’s scores are indeed visible to certain extent on Flickr, and perhaps in other user content driven websites. As the following two figures illustrate, there is a strong correlation between a culture’s power distance index and the frequency of the capital city and country name in tags by users. If the frequency of the capital city and country name is seen as indicator of nationalistic orientation, that this could suggest that Hofstede’s power distance score can in fact explain these patterns. Table 4 shows the tags that are shared by users in at least three cultures. These findings provide an interesting universal perspective and emphasise similarities that transcend cultural background. Figure 2 Frequency of capital city in tags/power distance (correlation: 0.85) (see online version for colours)
Frequency of capital city
80% 70%
Iran
Peru
60% UK
50%
Taiwan
40% Israel
30% 20% 10% 0% 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Power Distance
Figure 3 Frequency of country name/power distance (correlation: 0.77) (see online version for colours) Frequency of country name
90% Iran
80% 70%
Peru Taiwan
60% Israel
50%
UK
40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 0
10
20
30
40
Power Distance
50
60
70