Culture Matters
I've come to the conclusion that culture matters. But what is human/social culture? Is it your values, or how you act out your values? After all, your values determine how you treat everything around you - your work life, social life, love life, etc.
I've travelled to many different places; Europe, Brazil, Jamaica, Montreal. One of the first things that struck me is how culture determines how people interact with each other. Think of the spacing between people on the street to what is shared in a family home, to how business and research relationships are formed. The culture of a region, ethnic group or any other determinant strongly defines how people behave, and consequently, how they think. So the way in which one gets a job in the UK is different from how one gets a job in North America. Or the jobs available in Jamaica are vastly different from what is available in Brazil.
So why am I going through all this anyways? What's the point? As North Americans, we tend not to consider cultures outside of North America as particularly valuable. I rarely read newspaper articles about the insights gained while someone spend some time in an Israeli Kibbutz. Or news is rarely about working conditions in free trade zones in Mexico and the rest of South America. I would venture to say that we put little social value on our own model of working. Discussion of management models are confined to specialist business periodicals. "Fortune" magazine and most businesss periodicals are focused solely on management models that maximize business efficiency, not the ideal balance between a worker's job time and free time. Nor do I see articles about the social and intellectual advantages of a well-educated population. So here I am writing about it. I am very interested to know what comprises culture or any set of beliefs and how we can go about changing them for better human interaction.
As my examples show, I'm thinking mainly about working cultures. How we as people get things done. What is the individual's best tempo, distribution of resources, training, etc? But as I mentioned, culture comes about from an inherent set of values. A person's belief or non-belief of a set of values determines where he or she can work or study, and with whom he or she works or studies. So a professor or lecturer on social contract theory and the value of local economies probably has different values from a CFO of a finance company, who seeks to optimize cost, revenue and capital streams against any pertinent business needs. They don't necessarily have different values, but probably. These values will tend to make for different cultures and modes of working from each other. So a professor's office hours and power relationship with his colleagues will probably be different from a CFO's working hours and power relationship with his colleagues (not necessarily, but probably). So your values are strong determinants for with whom and how you will work. And if the economy is local enough, culture probably has a strong determinant in what economic opportunities are available to you as well.
So does culture matter? Do you want to work in a Mexican free-trade zone, in an Israeli kibbutz? as a lecturer or a CFO? When you first went to University, or had your first job, did the experience change your values? In each one of these places, culture matters.
Posted by Timothy Washington on 2005.05.13| Original post
#archive #frye #thebox