Masculinity-Femininity refers to a culture group's dominant values in regard to the job. Masculine cultures have segregated roles for men and women, consider big as beautiful, and have a need to perform and show off. In feminine cultures, on the other hand, the dominant values are for members to play more androgynous roles, consider small as beautiful, and care for the quality of life and the environment rather than for money.
The dimensions on which the U.S. and Japan are maximally differentiated in Hofstede 's empirical study of fifty countries are individualism-collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance. Of the fifty countries studied by Hofstede [1980], the U.S. ranked highest (50th) in the individualism dimension with a score of 91, whereas Japan had a score of 46, and ranked 28th, indicating that Japan is more collectivistic and the U.S. is more individualistic. In the uncertainty avoidance dimension, Japan's index score was 92, ranking 44th, while the index score for U.S. was 46, ranking 11th, indicating that Japan had a much higher need to avoid uncertainty than the U.S. While there are differences between the two countries in the other two dimensions of power distance and masculinity-femininity as well, the contrasts are most striking on individualism-collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance. Hence, as a start ing point, it will be useful to explore the impact of these two empirically established cultural dimensions on the differential practices between the
U.S. and Japan with regard to the six aspects of the budgetary processes just discussed.