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Culture and values

This page outlines the germinal work on variation of value orientations as proposed by anthropologists Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck in the early 60s and taken up again in the late 80s by various characters concerned with intercultural understanding and organisational culture. The basic conceptualisations were picked up again by the Human Resource Development gurus in the early 90s and given some severe twists by anthropologists.

Variations in Value Orientations

Based on Kluckhohn F R and Strodbeck F L (1961) Variations in Value Orientations; Row Petersen

People in different parts of the world have different cultures. These can be identified because of distinctive patterns of behaviour which are based upon different patterns of belief and these in turn are due to patterns of values.

Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) did some germinal work in drawing up a conceptual map which tried to include the complete range of values which it is possible for human beings to hold in relation to five key issues about which all human beings hold opinions. This map allows all individuals to be unique, but it is normal for people of the same culture to tend statistically towards a similarish pattern.

Most of the items on the table are self explanatory. The 'relational; orientation refers to people's relationship to other people. Where lineality predominates then family or tribal issues are determinants of action. Where individualism predominates then the individual self is the focus of action. Collaterality refers to situations where individuals submerge themselves in some freely chosen grouping.

Variations in Value Orientations

Based on Condon J C and Yousef F (1981) An Introduction to Intercultural Understanding; Bobbs-Merrill

The prevalent value orientations of an individual, and indeed of the culture to which she belongs, can act as a barrier to intercultural communication in that what passes for common sense in one culture might appear deviant in another. The following lists, which are based on those provided by Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, itemise the main aspects of culture about which values exist.

For each item on this first list a range of value orientations is possible. These are listed below.

Assumptions of Cultural Paradigms

Schein E H (1984) Coming to a new awareness of organisational culture; in Salaman G (1992) Human Resource Strategies; Sage/ The Open University

To analyze cultural paradigms, one needs a set of logical categories for studying assumptions. The following list derives from Schein who derived it from the work of Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck.

The Organization's relationship to its environment

Reflecting even more basic assumptions about the relationship of humanity to nature, one can assess whether the key members of the organization view the relationship as one of dominance, submission, harmonizing, finding an appropriate niche, and so on.

The nature of reality and truth

Here are the linguistic and behavioural rules that define what is real and what is not, what is a 'fact', how truth is ultimately to be determined, and whether truth is 'revealed' or 'discovered'; basic concepts of time as linear or cyclical, monochronic or polychronic; basic concepts such as space as limited or infinite and property as communal or individual; and so forth.

The nature of human nature

What does it mean to be 'human' and what attributes are considered intrinsic or ultimate? Is human nature good, evil or neutral? Are human beings perfectible or not? Which is better, Theory X or Theory Y?

The nature of human activity

What is the 'right' thing for human beings to do, on the basis of the above assumptions about reality, the environment, and human nature; to be active, passive, self-developmental, fatalistic, or what? What is work and what is play?

The nature of human relationships

What is considered to be the 'right' way for people to relate to each other, to distribute power and love? Is life cooperative or competitive; individualistic, group collaborative, or communal; based on traditional lineal authority, law, or charisma, or what?

The Organizational Culture Concept

Wright S (Ed) (1994) Anthropology of Organisations; Routledge

In organizational studies ‘the culture concept’ is used in four ways -

A ‘strong company culture’ is now generally thought to be an essential feature of any form of organization but the concept is dealt with differently in different companies.

In one model an organization’s ‘culture’ is converted from a mission statement into detailed practices, dividing each task into tiny details and specifying how each should be done. These are imposed on the workforce through training and detailed supervision. This strengthens the ‘Fordist’ management style of the modernization era whereby management was separate from the workforce which was divided according to clearly demarcated, repetitive tasks.

In other models a ‘culture’ of flexible organization has been introduced. The division between managers and workers has been revised, the role of middle management reduced, and the workforce organised in teams, with each member able to take on a full range of tasks. Instead of being adjuncts to a machine or to a predetermined sequence of paper movements, workers are ‘empowered’ to take initiatives and ensure operations are continually improved by communicating ideas directly to management.

Anthropologists see both these patterns of ‘organizational cultural thinking’ to be flawed in that they both fail to make the paradigm shift. The role of Anthropology is to problematize theory by testing it against closely observed practice. The key characteristics of the two sides of the divide are:

The power of meaning, or How good ideas close lazy minds

Wright S (1994) Anthropology of Organisations: Routledge

The non quoted text in the following is taken from Wright (1994). There follows a few snippets of ideas concerning the politics of establishing meaning from the anthropological perspective. These might be seen as useful to those acting in a reactive, advisory capacity during times of rapid social change.

The concept of culture I espouse ... is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man (sic) is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.

Geertz C (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures; Basic Books

In the sense that control of discoursal practices is integral to the reproduction of inequalities in class and gender relations, discourses are materially founded but not determined. It requires constant discoursal effort continually to reassert the status of a discourse as ‘true’, objective, neutral or normal and to displace other emergent discourses, labelling them as abnormal, disordering or political. As Asad says, an authoritative discourse ‘seeks continually to preempt the space of radically opposed utterances and so prevent them from being uttered’. Yet he adds,

Even when action is authorised, it is a discourse that such action establishes its authority. The action is read as being authorised, but the reading and the action are not identical - that is why it is always logically possible to have an alternative reading.

Asad T (1979) Anthropology and the analysis of Ideology; Man (N.S.) 14: 607-27

It is this political process, a contest to assert definite interpretations which produce material outcomes, that is the key to anthropological understandings of culture, of relevance to organizational studies.

Towards an Understanding of Culture

A standard, if now rather anachronistic 'structural' and 'deterministic', definition of 'culture' from the Anthropological point of view runs as follows:

culture, in anthropology, the way of life of a human society, transmitted from one generation to the next by learning (of language and other symbolic media) and by experience. Cultural universals include social organization, religion, structure, economic organization, and material culture (tools, weapons, clothing). The spread of culture traits (customs, ideas, attitudes) among groups by direct or indirect contact is called diffusion. The general stages in cultural evolution are nomadic food gathering (as in the Old and Middle STONE AGE); settled food producing (New Stone Age); and urban dwelling.

Cultural anthropology developed in the USA under the influence of Tylor and Boas. It became a very broad subject, concerned with culture, but often broken down into specialist areas: linguistics, culture and personality studies, primitive art etc. By contrast anthropologists in Britain concentrated on social systems and drew on the work of Durkheim and Weber to establish the independent discipline of social anthropology.

 Clyde Kluckhohn (1949)  Mirror of Man came up with the following list of definitions:

Clifford Geertz (1973) in his The Interpretation of Cultures found widespread support for his interpretive theory of culture which introduces a form of anthropology very different from that of the structural-functionalists or the Marxists.

The cool-dude; an intercultural comparison

Contemporary Javanese culture is a tapestry woven with strong Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim threads. In the course of its long evolution from its native roots, influences from India have been lapping on its shores. It has nonetheless managed a unique synthesis and remains distinctive. Geertz (1973) conducted field work amongst the Javanese and reports in The Interpretation of Culture (1973) that:

For [most] Javanese the flow of subjective experience, taken in all its phenomenological immediacy, presents a microcosm of the universe generally; in the depths of the fluid interior world of thought-and-emotion they see reflected ultimate reality itself. P134

This inward-looking process/product is labelled as rasa and it includes both subjective 'feeling' (the 'ethos' component) and objective 'meaning' (the 'world view' component). This singularization of what in the West are thought to be two distinct entities might give food for thought to those engaged in the Talking Therapies.

Because fundamentally 'feeling' and 'meaning' are one, and therefore the ultimate religious experience taken subjectively is also the ultimate religious truth taken objectively, an empirical analysis of inward perception yields at the same time a metaphysical analysis of outward reality. P135

Echoes here with the work of the psychologists of perception and with the deconstructionist theoreticians of neo-phenomenology.

The individual's proximate aim is, thus, emotional quiescence, for passion is crude feeling, fit for children, animals, madmen, primitives and foreigners. But his ultimate aim, which this quiescence makes possible, is gnosis - the direct comprehension of the ultimate rasa. P135

 

Javanese religion … is consequently mystical: God is found by means of spiritual discipline, in the depths of the self as pure rasa. And Javanese ethics (and aesthetics) are, correspondingly, affect-centred without being hedonistic: emotional equanimity, a certain flatness of affect, a strange inner stillness, is the prized psychological state, the mark of the truly noble character. One must attempt to get beyond the emotions of everyday life to the genuine feeling-meaning which lies within us all. P136

In the West there is some respect for the unflappable, cool-dude but he is a hero because of his control of his 'self' rather than because he has transcended it. A burst of 'righteous indignation' would be seen as a heroic interlude rather than as a sad pathology.

Geertz analyses the story lines in the wajang or shadow puppet theatre and describes how they show that with a true perception of the ultimate rasa comes the ability to combine compassion, the will to action and a sense of justice into a truly moral outlook which brings an emotional detachment and an inner peace in the midst of the world of flux, yet permits and demands a struggle for order and justice within such a world.

Geertz' wider, professional concern is to banish considerations of ethical behaviour based not on observation of such activities but rather on logical but ungrounded, armchair speculation.

The process is not that of replacing moral philosophy by descriptive ethics, but of providing moral philosophy with an empirical base and a conceptual framework which is somewhat more advanced over that available to Aristotle, Spinoza or G E Moore. The role of such a special science as anthropology in the analysis of values is not to replace philosophical investigation, but to make it relevant. P141