Symbols refers to words, gestures, pictures, or objects that carry a particular meaning only recognized by those who share the culture.
Heroes
“Heroes” is a term used to indicate persons, ordinary or famous, real or imaginary, as long as they possess characteristics that are highly prized and worshiped in a culture.
artifacts (which includes items ranging from arrowheads to hydrogen bombs, magic charms to antibiotics to electric lights, and chariots to jet planes); concepts ( which include such beliefs or value systems as right or wrong, God and man, ethics, and the general meaning of life); behavior ( which refers to the actual practice of concepts or beliefs).
Characteristics of Culture
Coherent and Learned Transmitted from generation to generation
Subject to change
Characteristics
interrelated
Selective
Ethnocentric
Value Defined
From Intellectual Perspective
One’s principles or standards, one’s judgment of what is valuable or important in life.
Geert Hofstede
A broad tendency to prefer certain states of affairs over others.
How to find out about people’s values? people’
From people’s behavior From what people say about themselves From myths, tales of heroes, and rituals From folk tales, proverbs, sayings
Chapter 2
Understanding Cultures and Their Values
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to Define culture and cultural value Identify the ingredients and the characteristics of culture Appreciate the basic values of your own culture and the culture of others Understand how cultural differences in workworkrelated values shape behavior
Samovar and Porter
Culture is the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
Clyde Kluckhohn
A conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means and ends of action.
Rituals
Rituals are those collective activities that are considered socially essential within a culture.
Values
Values are social principles, goals, or standards accepted by persons in a culture.
Ingredients of Culture
artifacts Culture may be classified by three large categories of elements— elements— Almanet and Alwan (1982)
concepts
behavior
Elements of Culture
Edward Sapir
Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular way of thought.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts.
Value System
A value system represents what is expected or hoped for, required or forbidden. It is not a report of actual conduct but is the system of criteria by which conduct is judged and sanctions applied.
Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck’s Strodtbeck’ value orientation
Value orientation
Human nature
Relationship to nature
Sense of time
Activity
Social relationships
Value orientation Human nature evil
Culture is “the customs, civilizations, and achievements of a particular time or people”.
Edward Tylor
Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Taxonomies used to analyze values
Kluckholn & Strodetbeck Hofstede & Bond Trompenaars Shalom Schwartz Edward Hall Value Orientations Cultural Dimensions Value Dimensions Value inventory High- and low-context HighlowOrientation
Variations Mixed/neutral harmony present Being-andBeing-andbecoming group good mastery future doing individual
From Intellectual Perspective
Culture is “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively”.
From Anthropologic Perspective
Edward T. Hall
Culture is the total accumulation of beliefs, customs, values, behaviors, institutions and communication patterns that are shared, learned and passed down through the generations in an identifiable group of people.