Social mammals
You and I are
social mammals. Very intensely social, in fact. That shows in the uses to
which we put new technologies: communicate, organize, trade. It shows in
everything we do. Even the most autocratic boss is a group animal. Social
drives for dominance and for being related are essential for us.
The unwritten rules of our
social groups are what I call culture. Culture is biological. It has
co-evolved with human nature and with human psychology for millions of years. Competition between groups has honed our collaborative
capacity. Culture transmits itself through the
generations despite huge societal changes. The formal rules of our
institutions cannot work as intended without relations. And relations follow the unwritten rules of culture.
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Appeared May 2010: Cultures and Organizations 3rd ed,
with the usual content but also new material, among which are the notion
of 'moral circle' by me, a sixth dimension indulgence-restraint by Misho
Minkov and a chapter on evolution of cultures by me. Read more at
www.geerthofstede.com. |
Hidden rules
The tricky thing about culture is that it is
never conspicuous. You don't see it, it is not written down, you are
never explicitly taught it. But it is there! And we are all very good at
it. It helps us know how to greet, eat, negotiate and do all the other
social things we do, without having to reinvent the wheel all the time.
Culture is social glue that makes us behave in the way we do
automatically, without thinking.
Culture (along with a host of other
things) also co-determines much of what happens in
our lives and our jobs, and that is what I can tell you about. Leadership,
trust, transparency, management, humour, rights, religion, you name it; culture plays a
big role.
So cross-cultural misunderstandings are just as
invisible to most of us as culture itself. And then it is easy to
conclude that 'they' are stupid or immoral, instead of acknowledging
that they are just acting
properly but according to different unwritten rules.
And history has not ended. Cultural evolution is happening all around us every day.
It is much faster than genetic evolution - which is also happening
faster than ever. See chapter 12 of the new Cultures & Organizations,
3rd edition, for more. |
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This 8-minute
movie animation
'Father and Daughter' by Michael Dudok de Wit gives a sad and beautiful
glimpse of last-century Dutch life (If you do not get to the film, search
for 'father and daughter', or look on YouTube). Can you think of
unwritten rules about showing emotions, and how big one's ego should be,
that are apparent in this film? |
This site
This site is my chatty counterpart to
www.geerthofstede.com, the
serious site on culture maintained by Geert and me. For general background on
culture, go there.
Or go to my
site at Wageningen University
to see what I do with my professional friends, for instance in the area
of trust, or collaborative analysis of food production networks, or
modelling of human behaviour in agent-based simulations. As of fall
2010 I have two starting European projects in this area, one PhD
(project eCute, culture in virtual characters, filled) and one PostDoc (project
Semira, norm emergence, starting January 2011). |
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