According to Gee (2012), an ideology is a collection of principles or values that define an individual's character or group of people. The notion’s aspect is that the reasons for the dogma are not entirely epistemic. On the other hand, individualism refers to the social and political thinking that stresses the worth of individual moral values (Chui et al., 2010). It is critical to note that the philosophy is not practiced as defined but has differing understandings in theory and practice. Therefore, from the understanding of the definitions identified, it is sufficient to state that individualism is an ideology.
As previously stated, individualism has different understandings in theory and practice; the concept of individualism was a popular topic in the 20th century in numerous domains of social science. The ideology gained great influence after the 1980 study of Hofstede, who found that a portion of the differences between people from different regions could be clarified through four dimensions (Brewer & Venaik, 2011). Namely, femininity-masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and finally, collectivism-individualism (Brewer & Venaik, 2011).
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The study further continued through the 1990s through to the 21st century resulting in numerous attributes. However, a study by Minkov et al. (2017) summarized the numerous attributes developed over the decades into three essential core features. The first is autonomy, which refers to an individual’s capacity to make independent decisions (Minkov et al., 2017). Secondly, the maturity of self-responsibility stresses the ability of an individual to accede accountability for themselves. Finally, individuality also identified as uniqueness (Minkov et al., 2017). It emphasizes the ability of an individual to appreciate their distinctiveness from others.
Overall, individualism is an ideology with ideas that focus on the individual and their influence on their surroundings. It has a deep history, which further supports the proposition concerning philosophy.
References
Brewer, P., & Venaik, S. (2011). Individualism–Collectivism in Hofstede and GLOBE. Journal Of International Business Studies , 42 (3), 436-445. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2010.62
Chui, A., Titman, S., & Wei, K. (2010). Individualism and Momentum around the World. The Journal Of Finance , 65 (1), 361-392. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2009.01532.x
Gee, J. (2012). Social linguistics and literacies . Routledge.
Minkov, M., Dutt, P., Schachner, M., Morales, O., Sanchez, C., & Jandosova, J. et al. (2017). A revision of Hofstede’s individualism-collectivism dimension. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management , 24 (3), 386-404. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccsm-11-2016-0197
