The Origins and Intentions of this Handbook

Abstract

Differences in typical management practices and policy orientations are originated from cross-cultural knowledge management that is a quite difficult phenomenon to interpret, though very significant.

Appendix The Nature of Culture…

von Herder Johann Gottfreid (1776), Yet Another Philosophy of History, in Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, p 188 [1976: London: Hogarth Press]

How much depth there is in the character of a single people, which, no matter how often observed (and gazed at with curiosity and wonder), nevertheless escapes the word which attempts to capture it, and, even with the word to catch it, is seldom so recognizable as to be universally understood and felt. […] Words, pale shadow-play! An entire living picture of ways of life, of habits, wants, characteristics of land and sky, must be added, or provided in advance; one must start by feeling sympathy with a nation if one is to feel a single one of its inclinations or acts, or all of them together.

Coleridge ST (1830), On the Constitution of Church and State, pp. 42–43 [1976: Princeton]

Civilization should be grounded in cultivation, “in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity. We must be men in order to be citizens.”

Raymond Williams (1921–1988, Cultural Studies): “Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture” Originally published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions , 1958

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. … The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.

During S. (ed.) (1993), The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge

As the old working class communal life fragmented, the cultural studies which followed Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” developed in two main ways. The old notion of culture as a whole way of life became increasingly difficult to sustain: attention moved from locally produced and often long-standing cultural forms… to culture as organised from afar – both by the state through its educational system and by what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called ‘the culture industry’, that is, highly developed music, film and broadcasting businesses. Much more importantly, however, the logic by which culture was set apart from politics… was overturned (Pg. 4 - Introduction).

Since Tylor’s founding definition of 1871, the term has designated a rather vague ‘complex whole’ including everything that is learned group behaviour, from body techniques to symbolic orders. There have been recurring attempts to define culture more precisely… or… to distinguish it from ‘social structure’. But the inclusive use persists. For there are times when we still need to be able to speak holistically of Japanese or Trobriand or Moroccan culture in the confidence that we are designating something real and differentially coherent. It is increasingly clear, however, that the concrete activity of representing a culture, subculture, or indeed any coherent domain of collective activity is always strategic and selective. The world’s societies are too systematically interconnected to permit any easy isolation of separate or independently functioning systems. The increased pace of historical change, the common recurrence of stress in the systems under study, forces a new self-consciousness about the way cultural wholes and boundaries are constructed and translated (Pg. 61 - Clifford, J., “On Collecting Art and Culture”).

Culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept as the above definition demonstrates. Refracted through centuries of usage, the word has acquired a number of quite different, often contradictory, meanings. Even as a scientific term, it refers to both a process…, and a product. More specifically, since the end of the eighteenth century, it has been used by English intellectuals and literary figures to focus critical attention on a whole range of controversial issues. The ‘quality of life’, the effects in human terms of mechanization, the division of labour and the creation of mass society have all been discussed within the larger confines of what Raymond Williams has called the “Culture and Society” debate. It was through this tradition of dissent and criticism that the dream of the “organic society” – of society as an integrated, meaningful whole – was largely kept alive. The dream had two basic trajectories. One led back to the past and to the feudal ideal of hierarchically ordered community. Here, culture assumed an almost sacred function. Its ‘harmonious perfection’ was posited against the Wasteland of contemporary life. The other trajectory, less heavily supported, led towards the future, to a socialist Utopia where the distinction between labour and leisure was to be annulled (Pg. 358 – Hebdige, D., “From Culture to Hegemony”).

Hall S. (Ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices. Milton Keynes: The Open University

‘Culture’ is one of the most difficult concepts in the human and social sciences and there are many different ways of defining it. In more traditional definitions of the term, culture is said to embody the ‘best that has been thought and said’ in a society. It is the sum of the great ideas, as represented in the classic works of literature, painting, music and philosophy – the ‘high culture’ of an era. Belonging to the same frame of reference, but more ‘modern’ in its associations, is the use of ‘culture’ to refer to the widely distributed forms of popular music, publishing, art, design and literature, or the activities of leisure time and entertainment which make up the everyday lives of the majority of ‘ordinary people’ – what is called the ‘mass culture’ or the ‘popular culture’ of an age. High culture versus popular culture was, for many years, the classic way of framing the debate about culture – the terms carrying a powerfully evaluative charge… In recent years, and in a more ‘social science’ context, the word ‘culture’ is used to refer to whatever is distinctive about the ‘way of life’ of a people, community, nation or social group. This has come to be known as the anthropological definition. Alternatively, the world can be used to describe the ‘shared values’ of a group or of a society – which is like the anthropological definition, only with a more sociological emphasis.

…the ‘cultural turn’ in the social and human sciences… has tended to emphasize the importance of meaning to the definition of culture. Culture… is not so much a set of things… as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings – the ‘giving and taking of meaning’ – between the members of a society or group. To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express their ideas, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other. Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and ‘making sense’ of the world, in a broadly similar way.

Sardar Z. and van Loon, B. (eds.) (1997), Cultural Studies for Beginners, Cambridge: Icon Books

One of the older definitions of culture was given by the British anthropologist, Sir E. B. Tylor, in the opening lines of his book Primitive Cultures (1871): “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”.

Foundations: Pragmatic

Franz Boas (1911), The mind of primitive man, New York, p 149

Culture may be defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relations to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself. It also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of the groups. The mere enumerations of these various aspects of life, however, does not constitute culture. It is more, for its elements are not independent, they have a structure.

Foundations: Weberian

Weber Max (1905), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p 181 [T. Parsons, trans. 1958: Charles Scribner’s Sons]

“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”

n.b. recent translations revise this significantly to read something like “steel carapace.” In contrast to iron, steel is of course a man-made product, indeed the preeminent emblem of the industrial revolution and, at the time Weber was writing, probably symbolically analogous to the internet today. A cyborg-like carapace or shell is at once less incarcerating than a cage, and yet emphasizes the historical mutability of human nature. Nevertheless, the “iron cage,” in Talcott Parsons’ rendering, is the formulation which has worked the most influence in the English-speaking world.

Foundations: Structuralist

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1949), The elementary structure of kinship, Tr. by J. Bell and J. von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press1969 [1949]

Man is a biological being as well as a social individual. Among the responses which he gives to external stimuli, some are the full product of his nature, and others of his condition… But it is not always easy to distinguish between the two… Culture is neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply superposed over life. In a way, culture substitutes itself to life, in another way culture uses and transforms life to realise a synthesis of a higher order.

At various anthropological fringes:

Tylor Edward Burnett (1871), Primitive Culture, John Murray, London, vol. I, p. 1

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

John Dewey (1916), Democracy and Education, An introduction to the philosophy of education (1966 edn.), New York: Free Press p 123

Social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely and fully in shared and common activities. This is impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot share in intercourse with others without learning--without getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one’s perception of meanings.

Radcliff-Brown Alfred (1940), On Social Structure in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, p. 190 [1952: London: Cohen and West]

We do not observe a ‘culture,’ since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction.

Schneider David (1976), Notes toward a Theory of Culture, in Meaning in Anthropology, Edited by Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, 197–220. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press

Culture contrasts with norms in that norms are oriented toward patterns for action, whereas culture constitutes a body of definitions, premises, statements, postulates, presumptions, propositions, and perceptions about the nature of the universe and man’s place in it. Where norms tell the actor how to play the scene, culture tells the actor how the scene is set and what it all means.

Developments: Symbolic

Clifford Geertz (1966), Religion as a cultural system in his The interpretation of cultures . New York: Basic Books.1973 [1966]

[the culture concept] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life… (p.89)

[…]The point is sometimes put in the form of an argument that cultural patterns are “models,” that they are sets of symbols whose relations to one another “model” relations among entities, processes … The term “model” has, however, two senses – and “of” sense and a “for” sense… Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves (p. 93).

Contrast with a later statement expressing the fundamental problem with “meaning” theories of culture:

What do we claim when we claim that we understand the semiotic means by which, in this case, persons are defined to one another? That we know words or that we know minds? (1976: 225)