Chapter 3 Outline

We open this chapter with a general discussion of what culture is. Then we focus on how differences in social structure, religion, language, and education influence the culture of a country. The implications for business practice will be highlighted throughout the chapter and summarized in a section at the end.

What Is Culture?

Scholars have never been able to agree on a simple definition of culture. In the 1870s, the anthropologist Edward Tylor defined culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.² Since then hundreds of other definitions have been offered. Geert Hofstede, an expert on cross-cultural differences and management, defined culture as the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another . . . Culture, in this sense, includes systems of values; and values are among the building blocks of culture.³ Another definition of culture comes from sociologists Zvi Namenwirth and Robert Weber who see culture as a system of ideas and argue that these ideas constitute a design for living.⁴

Here we follow both Hofstede and Namenwirth and Weber by viewing culture as a system of values and norms that are shared among a group of people and that when taken together constitute a design for living. By values we mean abstract ideas about what a group believes to be good, right, and desirable. Put differently, values are shared assumptions about how things ought to be.⁵ By norms we mean the social rules and guidelines that prescribe appropriate behavior in particular situations. We shall use the term society to refer to a group of people who share a common set of values and norms. While a society may be equivalent to a country, some countries harbor several "societies" (i.e., they support multiple cultures) and some societies embrace more than one country.

Values and Norms

Values form the bedrock of a culture. They provide the context within which a society's norms are established and justified. They may include a society's attitudes toward such concepts as individual freedom, democracy, truth, justice, honesty, loyalty, social obligations, collective responsibility, the role of women, love, sex, marriage, and so on. Values are not just abstract concepts; they are invested with considerable emotional significance. People argue, fight, and even die over values such as freedom. Values also often are reflected in the political and economic systems of a society. As we saw in Chapter 2, democratic free market capitalism is a reflection of a philosophical value system that emphasizes individual freedom.

Norms are the social rules that govern people's actions toward one another. Norms can be subdivided further into two major categories: folkways and mores. Folkways are the routine conventions of everyday life. Generally, folkways are actions of little moral significance. Rather, folkways are social conventions concerning things such as the appropriate dress code in a particular situation, good social manners, eating with the correct utensils, neighborly behavior, and the like. While folkways define the way people are expected to behave, violation of folkways is not normally a serious matter. People who violate folkways may be thought of as eccentric or ill-mannered, but they are not usually considered to be evil or bad. In many countries, foreigners may initially be excused for violating folkways.

A good example of folkways concerns attitudes toward time in different countries. People are very time conscious in the United States. Americans tend to arrive a few minutes early for business appointments. When invited for dinner to someone's home, it is considered polite to arrive on time or just a few minutes late. The concept of time can be very different in other countries. It is not necessarily a breach of etiquette to arrive a little late for a business appointment; it might even be considered more impolite to arrive early. As for dinner invitations, arriving on time for a dinner engagement can be very bad manners. In Britain, for example, when someone says, "Come for dinner at 7:00 pm," what he means is "come for dinner at 7:30 to 8:00 pm." The guest who arrives at 7:00 pm is likely to find an unprepared and embarrassed host. Similarly, when an Argentinean says, "Come for dinner anytime after 8:00 pm," what she means is don't come at 8:00 pm--it's far too early!

Mores are norms that are seen as central to the functioning of a society and to its social life. They have much greater significance than folkways. Accordingly, violating mores can bring serious retribution. Mores include such factors as indictments against theft, adultery, incest, and cannibalism. In many societies, certain mores have been enacted into law. Thus, all advanced societies have laws against theft, incest, and cannibalism. However, there are also many differences between cultures as to what is perceived as mores. In America, for example, drinking alcohol is widely accepted, whereas in Saudi Arabia the consumption of alcohol is viewed as violating important social mores and is punishable by imprisonment (as some Western citizens working in Saudi Arabia have found out).

Culture, Society, and the Nation-State

We have defined a society as a group of people that share a common set of values and norms; that is, people who are bound together by a common culture. However, there is not a strict one-to-one correspondence between a society and a nation-state. Nation-states are political creations. They may contain a single culture or several cultures. While the French nation can be thought of as the political embodiment of French culture, the nation of Canada has at least three cultures--an Anglo culture, a French-speaking "Quebecois" culture, and a native American culture. Similarly in many African nations there are important cultural differences between tribal groups, a fact that was driven home in the early 1990s when the nation of Rwanda dissolved into a bloody civil war between two tribes, the Tutsis and Hutus. Africa is not alone in this regard. India is composed of many distinct cultural groups. During the Gulf War, the prevailing view presented to Western audiences was that Iraq was a homogenous Arab nation. But the chaos that followed the war revealed several different societies within Iraq, each with its own culture. The Kurds in the North do not view themselves as Arabs at all and have their own distinct history and traditions. Then there are two Arab societies, the Shiites in the South and the Sunnis who populate the middle of the country and who rule Iraq (the terms Shiites and Sunnis refer to different sects within the religion of Islam). Among the southern Sunnis is another distinct society of 500,000 "Marsh Arabs" who live at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, pursuing a way of life that dates back 5,000 years.⁶

At the other end of the scale, we can speak of cultures that embrace several nations. Several scholars, for example, argue that we can speak of an Islamic society or culture that is shared by the citizens of many different nations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. As you will recall from the last chapter, this view of expansive cultures that embrace several nations underpins Samuel Huntington's view of a world that is fragmented into different civilizations including Western, Islamic, and Sinic (Chinese) civilizations.⁷

To complicate things further, it is also possible to talk about culture at different levels. It is reasonable to talk about "American society" and "American culture," but there are several societies within America, each with its own culture. One can talk about Afro-American culture, Cajun culture, Chinese-American culture, Hispanic culture,

Figure 3.1

The Determinants of Culture

Indian culture, Irish-American culture, and Southern culture. The point is that the relationship between culture and country is often ambiguous. One cannot always characterize a country as having a single homogenous culture, and even when one can, one must also often recognize that the national culture is a mosaic of subcultures.

The Determinants of Culture

The values and norms of a culture do not emerge fully formed. They are the evolutionary product of a number of factors at work in a society. These factors include the prevailing political and economic philosophy, the social structure of a society, and the dominant religion, language, and education (see Figure 3.1). We discussed political and economic philosophy at length in Chapter 2. Such philosophy clearly influences the value systems of a society. For example, the values found in the former Soviet Union toward freedom, justice, and individual achievement were clearly different from the values found in the United States, precisely because each society operated according to a different political and economic philosophy. Below we will discuss the influence of social structure, religion, language, and education. Remember that the chain of causation runs both ways. While factors such as social structure and religion clearly influence the values and norms of a society, it is also true that the values and norms of a society can influence social structure and religion.