Culture

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Culture provides subjective insights and relative laws; it allows for the interpretation of actions and events. In explaining culture Hofstede uses the analogy of computers and programming and says that "Culture is ... the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another" (Hofstede, 1997, p. 5). As such, it is a set of shared and enduring meanings, values, and beliefs that characterize national, ethnic, or other groups, and orient their behaviour (Faure and Rubin, 1993).

Culture is a world of symbols constructed by people; it is a structure of meanings, beliefs and values that condition human behaviour allowing for its interpretation and purposefulness. The key issue for our discussion is whether there is an underlying universal basis in which different cultures are rooted, and whether there are general cross-cultural laws and archetypes of culture. There have been two opposite perspectives on culture and its laws.

  1. Holistic perspective posits that there is neither a universal culture nor universal laws. The set of symbols unique for a given culture cannot be detached and interpreted as an instance of a culture-free biological and economic basis.

  2. Reductionist perspective views culture as a symbolic discourse. Culture is a language and other symbols that can be interpreted as language; there are universal laws on the creation of the sets, schemas and networks for symbol manipulation.

The holistic and particular perspective distinguishes between deep culture and surface culture. Deep culture includes beliefs, ideas, language, rules, knowledge, procedures and norms. It manifests itself in symbols, artefacts and objects ranging from art to organizational structures to products and services, all of which are elements of the surface culture. The meaning of the symbols and artefacts is defined by the deep culture and so any separation of the surface causes a loss of the intended meaning. As a result the understanding of the values that underlie any particular cultural manifestation is necessary for the interpretation of this manifestation within the culture that it was created by. Similarly, if we want to create manifestation for a "foreign" culture we need to understand its underlying values.

The reductionist and generalizing perspective is rooted in the empiricist and utilitarian American sociology and anthropology (Kuper 1999). Initially, it was oriented towards discovering general laws of language and structures. Limited progress turned the proponents' attention towards lower level constructs, including brain models, knowledge schemata and neural networks. There is no need to differentiate between deep and surface culture because there is an assumed meta-set of symbols and universal laws which can be used to construct a culture.



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Advanced Topics in Global Information Management (Vol. 3)
Trust in Knowledge Management and Systems in Organizations
ISBN: 1591402204
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 207

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