Week 1: The meaning of Culture

Retrieved from: http://www.cross-culture.de/pics/cultural_iceberg.jpg

In our first week of the course we made an approach to the concept of culture and the importance of managing it. The two points I want to highlight as the most relevant from this class are, first, that culture has no universal definition as it encompasses a diversity of components; and second, values and morality are relative, the scale of values for every person is highly influenced by the culture it belongs to.

Regarding the first point, culture is an abstract concept, we may understand what it refers to, but is difficult to express that in words. That explains the idea “Culture is what cultural scientists measure”, since culture involves language, behavior, values, artifacts, viewpoints, clothing, traditions, and too much more, a final definition will never be given I consider. The analogy of the Cultural Iceberg (Hall, 1976), supports the idea that what we usually identify as culture represents only 10% of what culture really is, the 90% left is the core of culture, so no definition would embrace the 100% of what culture means.

As a second point, it is very important how culture influences the relevance values have in people’s mind as well as the concepts of right and wrong as evidenced in the Abigail’s story exercise. It is that punctuality can be prior to service for Japanese, whereas Colombians may prefer helping someone even if that implies getting late to an appointment. These two points mentioned, gain high relevance when doing business in other countries, a good example is the custom of gift giving in China as explained by Steidlmeier (1999). Westerners usually identify gifts Chinese usually give as bribes and allege Chinese are very corrupt, what is not true. Steidlmeier argues “within Chinese culture there are, indeed, moral parameters to distinguish morally proper gift giving from bribery and corruption”and those parameters clearly differ from western parameters. All this is related with that 90% of Hall’s Cultural Iceberg.

Research Question

How does culture contribute to sustainability in business and society?

Sustainable development in the economic and environmental dimensions must be based on a value system that is sustainable as well. The value system we usually hear about in the media is the one which promotes an increasing consumption, what is clearly not sustainable (Hawkes, 2001). Then, how the value system is set in each target market is fundamental in order to grant long-term relationships with integrative deals, the most effective strategy may fail if it goes against people’s culture. In conclusion, culture manifest and preserve identity, values and beliefs that impact the business environment, becoming a prior variable to be taken into account when designing business strategies. As Hawkes (2001) states “A sustainable society depends upon a sustainable culture. If a society’s culture disintegrates, so will everything else”.

References

Hall, E. T. (1989). Beyond culture. Random House LLC.

Hawkes, J. (2001) The fourth pillar of sustainability: culture's essential role in public planning. Retrieved from: htttp://books.google.com.co [July 2014]

Steidlmeier, P. (1999) Gift Giving, Bribery and Corruption: Ethical Management of Business Relationships in China. Journal of Business Ethics. Vol. 20, No. 2M pp. 121-132. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25074125