Increasingly, Hofstede's depiction of enduring national culture or cultural differences is being challenged.

One of the most sustained and thorough critiques is put forward by Holden in his work on cross-cultural management. He likens Hofstede's method of cataloguing culture to the periodic tables of chemistry and considers the sweeping acceptance of his cultural dimension model as "intellectually numbing" (p. 34). Also, he deplores the fact that it seems to be generally ignored that the data were gathered over 30 years ago and therefore apply to a world which no longer exists. Apart from changes in the political environment (e.g. the end of the Cold War and the decline of communism), values in the work place have seen many changes as well. Organisations worldwide, he argues, now emphasise cooperation and knowledge-sharing, encourage empowerment and localisation. Above all, however, he criticises Hofstede's essentialist concept of culture which has long been abandoned by the field of anthropology where it originated. What sets him apart from most other critics, however, is that Holden develops his own, alternative concept of culture which will be discussed in more detail below.

McSweeney who also has a management background, delivers an uncompromising critique, claiming that Hofstede's work relies on fundamentally flawed assumptions, such as 'every micro-location is typical of the national'. Mc Sweeney argues that the generalisations about national level culture from an analysis of small sub-national populations necessarily rely on the unproven, and unprovable, supposition that within each nation there is a uniform national culture and on the mere assertion that micro-local data from a section of IBM employees was representative of that supposed national uniformity. McSweeney also criticises Hofstede's notion of uniform worldwide occupational cultures and a uniform worldwide IBM organisational culture. She, like others (e.g. Limaye and Victor 1995), questions whether dimensions of national culture can really be identified by a questionnaire, and in particular by one which was originally not even designed for that purpose. Researchers such as Schwartz (1994) who asked different questions have come up with quite different descriptions of specific national cultures. Even if we assume, McSweeney argues, that the answers to a narrow set of questions administered in and mostly about the workplace are 'manifestations' of a determining national culture, it requires a leap of faith to believe that Hofstede actually successfully identified those cultures.

Myers and Tan criticise Hofstede's approach from an information systems angle. Although they agree that an understanding of cultural differences is important for the successful deployment of information technology, they consider the concept of 'national culture' too simplistic. Instead, they propose that information system researchers should adopt a more dynamic view of culture, one that sees it as contested, temporal and emergent.