Deconstructing World City Benchmarking Typologies for Cultural Consistencies

Introduction:

A recent report by Sydney Committee 'Benchmarking Sydney (2019)' includes Sydney among the typology of the world's cities in 2019 (P.9, City stimulus on The Business of Cities and JLL, 2019.) Sydney falls into the category of 'Established World Cities', and international benchmarking indicated a decline Sydney's measure for 'culture and diversity', 'visitor and destination appeal' between 2017-19, and yet an increase in 'image, brand and influence' from 2018-19, where Sydney scored 9 and then 10/10. ’Culture’ is identified as the fourth pillar of sustainable development which facilitates equitable, diverse, inclusive, and more effective interventions (CvejiД‡, 2015).

To this effect, this paper analyses shared/not shared cultural characteristics among those city typologies using dimensional data from Hofstede's 6-D model country comparison (Hofstede & Minkov, "Compare countries")In doing so it also aims to find if national cultural characteristics using the 6-D model translates to cities, and what might this tell us about underlying universal cultural characteristics of the benchmarked cities in particular. Can the data yield greater insights into differences between perceptions of cities and actual performance by looking at cultural similarities? Are there relationships between benchmarking clusters and the universal cultural dimensions?

Methodology: This study converts quantitative data obtained from the 'Compare Country' function on Hofstede's website across six cultural dimensions.

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This score along Hofstede's dimensions is then plugged against each city to see if there are consistencies across dimensions of national culture. The 6 cultural dimensions are valid across decades of cross-cultural research and have numerical scores available that differentiate among levels of national culture including at the city level.

Cities identified in 'Benchmarking Sydney 2019' included exemplars of various world city typologies. For example, Sydney is an Established World City', London is part of the Big 7', Beijing is a Powerhouse' city, Tel Aviv is an Innovator', Melbourne is a Lifestyle' city, Milan is an Influencer' city, Houston is a National Growth Engine', Jakarta is a Mega Hub', Kuala Lumpur is an Enterpriser' and Prague is a Hybrid' city. Cities from the clusters of world city typologies were identified according to the country of origin and put in table form. Where there was more than one city in a cluster the same country data would be used for both cities. In the case of China, an entire cluster 'Powerhouse' is made up of China data.

Scores were assigned to each city using the country comparison table' on Hofstede 6-D model for each of the six cultural dimensions including: Power Distance: the level of acceptance that power is unequally distributed in society. High power distance scores show high acceptance by subordinates in a social hierarchy.