Characteristics Of Culture PDF

Characteristics of Culture Leonardo D. Buyan Jr. | COCR 301e: Creative Cultural Content Development 1. Culture is manifested at different layers of depth. According to Schein (1990), there are three distinguishable fundamental levels at which culture manif...

Characteristics of Culture Leonardo D. Buyan Jr. | COCR 301e: Creative Cultural Content Development 1. Culture is manifested at different layers of depth. According to Schein (1990), there are three distinguishable fundamental levels at which culture manifests itself: (a) observable artifacts, (b) values, and (c) basic underlying assumptions. 1. Culture is manifested at different layers of depth. At the level of the visible artifacts in the organizational setting, for instance, one sees and observes the following: the physical layout, the dress code, the manner in which people address each other, the smell and feel of the place, its emotional intensity, and other phenomena, to the more permanent archival manifestations such as company records, products, statements of philosophy, and annual reports. At this level, what can be stated is that data are easy to obtain but hard to interpret. We can only describe what the place looks like or how the people are interacting, but it is impossible for us to discern the underlying logic as to why the place looks like that or why a group of people behaves the way it does. To have an analysis of why people behave the way they do, we have to look into the values that govern organizational behavior by interviewing key members of the organization or by interpreting the content of artifacts such as documents and charters. However, in the identification of such values, people would ideally say the reason for their behavior yet the underlying reasons remain concealed or unconscious. 1. Culture is manifested at different layers of depth. Understanding culture means delving into underlying assumptions which are typically unconscious but which actually determine how group members perceive, think, and feel. According to Schein (1990), “Such assumptions are themselves learned responses that originated as espoused values. But, as a value leads to a behavior, and as that behavior begins to solve the problem which prompted it in the first place, the value gradually is transformed into an underlying assumption about how things really are. As the assumption is increasingly taken for granted, it drops out of awareness.” 2. Culture affects behavior and interpretation of behavior. Hofstede (1991) claims that although certain aspects of a culture are physically observable, their meaning is still unknown to the observer since the cultural meaning lies precisely and only in the way these practices are interpreted by the insiders.  According to Hofstede (1994), culture should be distinguished from personality and human nature since it is learned and derived from one’s social environment. Culture is different from personality because personality, although inherited or learned, is specific to an individual. On the other hand, although human nature is inherited, it is universal and does not discriminate or see differences between groups. 3. Culture can be differentiated from both universal human nature and unique individual personality. 4. Culture influences biological processes. There is a deep misconnection that radicalizes the difference between culture and human nature (in need of biological processes). However, it can be noted that the great majority of our conscious behavior is acquired through learning and interacting with other members of our culture – even those responses whom we think are a manifestation of purely biological needs (e.g. eating, coughing, defecating) are frequently influenced by our cultures. For example, all people share the need for food to survive. Unless you have been living in a rock, our culture determines what we eat, how often, we eat, how much we eat, with whom we eat, and according to what set of rules are regulated.  Ferraro (1998) claims that an idea, a thing, or a behavior can also be considered cultural if it shared by some sort of social 5. Culture is group or society. Association to a social group could be based on the following (Hofstede 1991): 1. a national level according to one’s country (or countries for associated with 2. people who migrated during their lifetime); a regional and/or ethnic and/or religious and/or linguistic social groups. affiliation, as most nations are composed of culturally different regions and/or ethnic and/or religious and/or language groups; 3. a gender level, according to whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy; 4. a generation level, which separates grandparents from parents from children; 5. a role category, e.g. parent, son/daughter, teacher, student; 6. a social class level, associated with educational opportunities and with a person’s occupation or profession; 7. for those who are employed, an organizational or corporate level according to the way employees have been socialized by their work organization. 5. Culture is For Avruch (1998), everyone is simultaneously a member of several different cultural groups and thus could be said to have a multicultural associated with membership. Consider the examples below: 1. By kinship into families or clans social groups. 2. By language, race, or creed into ethnic groups 3. By socio-economic characteristics into social classes 4. By geographical region into political interest groups 5. By occupation or institutional memberships into unions, bureaucracies, industries, political parties, and militaries Implication: no population can be utterly recognized as having a single culture 6. Culture is Culture as an individual construct both an Matsumoto (1996): While the norms of any culture individual should be relevant to all the people within that culture, it is also true that those norms will be relevant in different degrees for different people; Our failure in the past to recognize the existence of individual differences in constructs and construct and a concepts of culture has undoubtedly aided in the formation and maintenance of stereotypes social construct. Culture as a social construct  Avruch (1998) noted that 7. Culture is always culture is a “fuzzy” concept because it is impossible for both socially and group members to in a way come up with the identical psychologically sets of attitudes, beliefs and so on – what they show distributed in a group, are only “family resemblances”. As a result, and so the delineation it is never possible to come up with an absolute set of of a culture’s features cultural features that can will always be fuzzy. encompass the culture of everyone. 8. Culture has both universal (etic) and distinctive (emic) elements. CULTURE IN A UNIVERSAL CULTURE IN A DISTINCTIVE (ETIC) LENS (EMIC) ELEMENTS An etic view of a culture is the perspective of an outsider An emic view of culture is ultimately a perspective focus on the looking in. For example, if an American anthropologist went to intrinsic cultural distinctions that are meaningful to the members of a Africa to study a nomadic tribe, his/her resulting case study given society, often considered to be an ‘insider’s’ perspective. While would be from an etic standpoint if he/she did not integrate this perspective stems from the concept of immersion in a specific culture, the emic participant isn’t always a member of that culture or themselves into the culture they were observing. Some society. Studies done from an emic perspective often include more anthropologists may take this approach to avoid altering the detailed and culturally rich information than studies done from an etic culture that they are studying by direct interaction. The etic point of view. Because the observer places themselves within the perspective is data gathering by outsiders that yield questions culture of intended study, they are able to go further in-depth on the posed by outsiders. One problem that anthropologists may run in details of practices and beliefs of a society that may otherwise have to is that people tend to act differently when they are being been ignored. However, the emic perspective has its downfalls. observed. It is especially hard for an outsider to gain access to Studies done from an emic perspective can create bias on the part of certain private rituals, which may be important for the participant, especially if said individual is a member of the culture understanding a culture. they are studying, thereby failing to keep in mind how their practices are perceived by others and possibly causing valuable information to be left out. The emic perspective serves the purpose of providing descriptive in-depth reports about how insiders of a culture understand their rituals. 9. Culture is learned. Lustig and Koester (1999) argued that culture is learned from the process of interaction with other people. For example, babies and toddlers learn how to react and act depending on what adults do, and in most cases, adults perform such acts differently depending on their cultural upbringing.  According to Ferraro (1998), change occurs as a result of both internal and external forces which is a manifestation of cultural innovation (that is the introduction of new thoughts, norms, or material items). In the context of the Philippines, this is how popular culture emerged out of folk and national cultures in the past as it needed to re- define itself to fit into the cultural waves of today. 10. Culture is subject to gradual change.  Cultures should be viewed as integrated wholes whose parts are not just random assortments but are interrelated from one another. If we can view cultures as integrated systems, we can begin to see how particular cultural traits fit into the integrated whole, and consequently how they tend to make sense within that context. 11. The various parts of a culture are all, to some degree, interrelated. 12. Culture is a descriptive, not an evaluative concept. As a descriptive concept, it is important to note that culture is not something exclusive to certain members as a relates to the whole of a society. More importantly, our notion of culture is not value-laden which means that we are always in no position to judge whether a culture is some sort of advanced or backward – what we can only do from our perspective is to describe manifestations of culture that we see. Inadequate Conceptions of Culture 1. Culture is homogenous. This statement already assumes that a (local) culture is free from paradoxes and contradictions and therefore any culture provides clear and unambiguous behavioral “instructions” to individuals, and it can be easily and straightforwardly learned by an individual if the community permits. 2. Culture is a thing. Once culture is relegated only as a “thing”, it presumes that culture can exist almost independently of human actors and devoid of individual agency. 3. Culture is uniformly distributed among members of a group. This idea invalidates the fact that community members have different levels of cognitive, affective, and behavioral acceptance to cultural manifestations. It dismisses, therefore, the possibility of intracultural variation among community members.  It is wrong to privilege what we can call tribal culture, ethnic culture or national culture over 4. An individual cultures connected that to are very different sorts of groups, possesses but structures, or institutions. It is important to note that culture always comes in the plural and that each a single culture. person possesses and controls several cultures in the same way. 5. Culture is custom. This idea holds that culture is superficial or only a manifestation of surface- level etiquette – what you see is what you get.  6. Culture is timeless. This idea accounts for the traditionality of culture which makes it incapable of change or variation.