A Tendency, Not a Truth: How Cultural Tropes Work, and How Outsiders Get Them Wrong

Two sayings, from two countries that could hardly be less alike, do almost exactly the same work.

In the Netherlands, people reach for "we are Calvinist". They use it to explain why they keep things sober and understated, why they distrust show and prize thrift, why the standing national instruction is doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg, just act normal, that is odd enough already. Many of the people who say it have not set foot in a church in decades. Reformed practice has largely receded to a shrinking minority, yet the label does more work than ever.

In Japan, people reach for okyakusama wa kamisama desu, "the customer is god". They use it to explain a service standard that tends to run high and consistent, and, stretched, to justify a shopper's right to be obeyed. Most who say it take it for ancient service scripture. It is nothing of the sort. It is a 1961 stage catchphrase, and the story of how it got misremembered is worth its own read.

Put those two side by side and they look unrelated. One is Protestant, northern European, and secular now; the other is a pop-culture line from a Japanese enka singer. But they run the same machine. Both are cultural tropes: a real tendency that a culture has named, and having named it, learned to perform. Understanding that machine is the difference between reading a culture well and stereotyping it. This piece is about how it works, from the inside, where it is normal and often useful, and from the outside, where it quietly turns into something that misleads you, offends your counterpart, and aims your strategy in the wrong direction.

What a cultural trope actually is

Start with the order of events, because it is the thing most people get backwards. The value comes first. The name comes second.

A culture develops tendencies for material, historical, and social reasons: ways of working, of buying, of treating a guest, of handling disagreement. Those tendencies exist tacitly, lived rather than stated, long before anyone puts a word to them. At some point someone does put a word to them: a label (Calvinist), a proverb (doe maar gewoon), a slogan (the customer is god). The name is not the value. The name is a handle for the value.

What the handle does is make the tacit explicit. Once a tendency has a name, the people who carry it can point to it, teach it, and narrate it as who we are. A trope, then, is a named cultural generalisation. It is not automatically false, that is the part insiders and outsiders both miss, because it usually points at something real. What makes it a trope is not that it is wrong. It is that it has been compressed into a portable name that can now travel, be performed, and be misused.

How a trope works from the inside

Naming a value does not leave the value untouched. It reinforces it. There is a solid body of scholarship on exactly this feedback, worth knowing because it is what makes the mechanism more than a tidy metaphor.

The philosopher Ian Hacking called it the looping effect of human kinds (1995): once people are classified and named, they become aware of the classification and adjust toward it, so the category loops back on the very people it describes. Name a group, and the group starts to live up to the name.

Max Weber supplies the second half, persistence. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), his argument was that the religious ethic could fade while its secular descendant, the "spirit", outlived it: the discipline and industriousness survive the belief that first produced them. That is precisely the Dutch-Calvinist case. The theology has largely gone quiet; the named disposition it left behind gets invoked as busily as ever, sustained now not by faith but by repetition of the name.

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger add the third piece in The Invention of Tradition (1983): practices that feel timeless are often surprisingly recent, and codifying something as ancient tradition is itself part of how it gets reinforced and performed. A trope gains authority by claiming to be old.

Japan has a whole genre for this: nihonjinron, the large literature on Japanese uniqueness. Critics of that genre, Peter Dale in The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (1986) and the anthropologist Harumi Befu in Hegemony of Homogeneity (2001), read it as this naming machine at national scale, taking real or supposed traits and polishing them into a story of what makes the Japanese essentially Japanese. Omotenashi, the idea of Japanese hospitality as a singular national essence, is a recent and heavily marketed entry in that genre, not an eternal given.

Here is the counterintuitive consequence. You might expect that as markets globalise and everyone drinks the same coffee and streams the same shows, cultures would converge. Marieke de Mooij's work on exactly this question finds the opposite at the level that matters: convergence is macro, not micro. Markets and product categories converge; the values underneath, why and how people actually buy and behave, stay put, and Japanese values in particular have held stable against decades of Western predictions that they would Americanise. The naming loop is part of why. Each culture names and burnishes its own frame, so the more self-aware everyone becomes about who they are, the more each polishes its own distinctiveness. The machine tends to produce divergence, not convergence. People live up to their own reinforced stereotypes.

None of this is pathological. A culture naming and performing its values is ordinary and often good: it is how a service standard gets transmitted, how a sense of proportion gets taught to the next generation. The loop only becomes a problem when it changes hands.

A cultural trope is a real tendency that has been given a portable name. Naming it makes it performable, and performing it makes it stronger.

On how tropes reinforce themselves

How the same trope turns on you from the outside

Everything above describes an insider using a name for their own culture. Now hand that same name to an outsider, and watch what changes.

An insider says "we are Calvinist" as loose, self-aware shorthand, knowing the caveats, knowing the exceptions in their own family, knowing it is half a joke. An outsider who hears "the Japanese believe the customer is god" has none of that context. The outsider is prone to take the named tendency as a fixed, timeless, in-the-DNA essence, and then to apply it as a rule about every individual they meet. That move, from a real average to a fixed essence that supposedly defines each person, is the exact move Edward Said named in Orientalism (1978): the outside observer, speaking from a position of external authority, flattens a diverse and changing people into a single unchanging type, then mistakes his own construction for their reality.

This is where a useful trope becomes a damaging stereotype, and it does three kinds of harm at once. It misleads you, because a fixed essence predicts individuals badly, and you will meet the Japanese engineer who is blunter than you are and the Dutch manager who works until midnight. It offends your counterpart, because being addressed as a walking national type, however admiring the type, is a small insult; you have told them you cannot see the person for the label. And it mis-aims your strategy: build a market-entry plan on "the customer is god" as mystical essence and you will chase a ritual instead of meeting a real, concrete, and, as it happens, actively contested service standard.

That contest is the tell. We took the customer-is-god phrase apart in a companion piece: its real 1961 origin, the way Japan itself has stretched and now argues over it, the family of the man who coined it publicly correcting the retail reading. Read it and you will watch a trope caught in the act of being misremembered by the very culture that owns it. If insiders are still negotiating what their own named value means, an outsider treating it as settled ancient essence is not reading the culture; he is reading his own projection. See The Customer Is God: The Real Phrase Japan Itself Misremembers for the worked example.

The honest alternative: a scale, an average, and a paradox

The fix is not to throw up your hands and pretend cultural differences do not exist. They do. There is usually real truth in the tendency, which is what makes the trope sticky in the first place, and a European company that airily insists everyone is the same underneath will make expensive mistakes of its own. The fix is to change what kind of thing you think a cultural tendency is.

A cultural tendency is a scale, not a switch. It is an average, not an essence. It is a distribution with wide overlap between any two countries, not a wall between them. It is always relative, a lean in one direction compared with some other culture, never an absolute fact about the person in front of you. Geert Hofstede, whose dimensions are the most-used cultural scales in business, said this himself and built the warning into his own work: the scores describe societies in the statistical aggregate, and using them to predict an individual is the ecological fallacy, the error of reading a group average as if it governed each member. GLOBE, the large research programme that followed him, carries the same warning. The scale is a population central tendency. A person is not a population.

The empirical record is blunter still. David Matsumoto, a Japanese-American psychologist, spent years testing the most famous cultural generalisation about Japan, that Japanese people hold an interdependent self while Westerners hold an independent one, and found it repeatedly failing at the individual level. In his 1999 assessment of the theory he gathered studies in which American and Japanese participants did not differ on self-construal at all, in which Americans actually scored higher on interdependence than Japanese, and in which, across four national groups, Japanese scored the lowest on the interdependent self. The stereotype is not merely imprecise. On the very trait it is surest about, it sometimes points the wrong way.

Then there is the subtlety that "it is only an average" does not capture, and it may be the strongest caution of all: a trope is also partial. Cultures are internally paradoxical. They hold contradictory tendencies at the same time, so any single trope catches one axis and quietly misses the opposite one the same culture also runs. This is not a footnote to the cross-cultural literature; it is the title of the field's standard text. Marieke de Mooij's book is called Global Marketing and Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes, and the paradox is the point. The true tendency coexists with its opposite.

It is easiest to show on my own culture, which is the safest place to point. The Dutch invoke Calvinist to mean hardworking and sober, and that is a fair tendency. Yet the Dutch also, on average, go home early and guard their free time fiercely: the Netherlands has among the lowest average annual working hours in the OECD and the highest rate of part-time work of any OECD country. The short Dutch working week is a real, measured thing. Hardworking-Calvinist and leisure-first, held at once. That work-life balance is not a betrayal of the Calvinist trope so much as a second, equally Dutch trait standing right beside it, invisible to anyone holding only the first.

A second one. On Hofstede's individualism scale the Netherlands sits very high, around 80, and the Dutch act on it; they will travel to the far side of the world alone without a second thought, arguably more readily than their Japanese counterparts. And yet in leisure the same people show a striking taste for conformity: the summer caravan towed to the same kind of campsite in the same handful of countries, the familiar beer, and the affectionate joke, true enough to sting a little, that they bring their own potatoes rather than trust the local ones. Individualist and conformist, at the same time, in the same person. Pick either half as the essence of the Dutch and you are half wrong.

That is why you hold a trope loosely and never let one axis become the whole picture. The discipline you would want a visitor to apply to "the Dutch are Calvinist", that it is partial, paradoxical, an average, a lean and not a law, is exactly the discipline to apply to any trope about Japan. Used that way, a trope is genuinely useful: an informed, loosely-held prior, scoped to a cohort and a context and a comparison, and phrased accordingly. Not "the Japanese are indirect", but "on average, in a first business meeting, relative to Dutch directness, a Japanese counterpart may signal disagreement more indirectly, and this particular person may or may not". The second sentence is longer and less quotable. It is also true, and it leaves room for the human being actually sitting across the table.

What this is worth when you enter Japan

The most reliable cure for essentialising another culture is not a longer list of do's and don'ts. It is to notice that your own culture runs the identical loop. Once a European team sees that "we are Calvinist" is a named, half-performed, selectively flattering, internally contradictory average, pinned on people who left the theology behind generations ago, it can no longer treat "the Japanese worship the customer" as timeless, exotic, in-the-DNA essence. It is the same machine, running at home. The mirror is what disarms the stereotype, because it puts you inside the mechanism instead of above it.

So the working posture is simple to state and takes some discipline to hold. Meet the real average, because it is usually there, and the service bar in Japan really does tend to run high. Hold it loosely, as a prior about a population and not a verdict about a person. Keep the paradox in view, because the opposite tendency is in the room too. And never mistake a tendency for a truth. For a European company entering Japan, that posture is not academic nicety. It is precisely what separates a credible partner, who reads the market as it is, from a tourist reciting clichés, and a Japanese counterpart can usually tell the two apart inside the first meeting.

Read a culture through its tropes and you will always be slightly wrong about the person in front of you. Read the tropes as tendencies, averages, and paradoxes, hold them loosely, and check your own reflection first, and you will be right often enough to be trusted. In this market, being trusted is the whole game.

Sources

• The naming and looping mechanism. Ian Hacking, "The Looping Effects of Human Kinds", in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, eds. Sperber, Premack and Premack (Clarendon Press, 1995). Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), on the secular "spirit" outliving the religious ethic. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Nihonjinron, the Japanese-uniqueness genre. Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (1986). Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Trans Pacific Press, 2001).
• Divergence not convergence, and cultural paradoxes. Marieke de Mooij, Global Marketing and Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes (SAGE), on macro convergence without micro (values) convergence, and on value paradoxes at the centre of cross-cultural marketing.
• The outsider's essentialising gaze. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
• Averages, not individuals. Geert Hofstede's own caution that cultural-dimension scores describe societies and that applying them to an individual is the ecological fallacy; see also Paul Brewer and Sunil Venaik, "The Ecological Fallacy in National Culture Research", Organization Studies (2014). David Matsumoto, "Culture and Self: An Empirical Assessment of Markus and Kitayama's Theory of Independent and Interdependent Self-Construals", Asian Journal of Social Psychology 2 (1999), pp. 289 to 310.
• The Netherlands figures. OECD data on average annual hours worked and on part-time employment (the Netherlands among the lowest annual hours and highest part-time share in the OECD). Hofstede country scores (Netherlands individualism around 80).
• The worked example. The customer-is-god provenance is set out in the companion insight, linked above.

Related Resources

• The Customer Is God: The Real Phrase Japan Itself Misremembers, the worked example of a trope an outsider gets wrong
• The Culture Map vs Hofstede vs Trompenaars: Which Cross-Cultural Framework to Use When, the cultural scales referenced here and where each one misleads
• Honne and Tatemae: Reading What Japanese Partners Actually Mean, one Japanese tendency read as a lean and not a law
• Silent Churn: Why Japanese Customers Leave Without Telling You, a high-average tendency applied with its caveats
• Cross-Cultural Communication Training, Silkdrive's approach to holding cultural knowledge without hardening it into stereotype