Culture: the Heartware of the Soul and the Software of the Mind
Deborah Swallow | August 17th, 2009 in : General, about cross-culture, cultural diversity, culture shock & stuff
What is Culture?
1. Culture is the heartware of a nation/race/culture; its soul and what makes it tick
2. Culture reflects widely shared assumptions and beliefs about life
3. Culture is so embedded that most people do not and cannot analyse it
4. Culture is what is ‘normal’ around here
5. Culture is learned from our superiors and role models
What is normal?
Stereotyping can be misleading. However, a national group does have common traits which we recognise when they are together. Individuals in that group will have fewer or more of them. For example, some groups are more restrained than others who are more outgoing.
Why is cross-cultural awareness important?
Each cultural world operates according to its own internal dynamics, its own principles, and its own laws, influencing how we think as human beings. Becoming aware that other cultures are different, we begin to recognise and understand the “silent language” and “conditioned behaviour” existing beyond people’s conscious awareness. We become sensitive to other meanings.
Where is Cross-Culture?
Cross-culture is widely accepted in the international context of trade and diplomacy, but it can also to be found on your doorstep. The staff you employ may come from different regions, or walks of life, and have different aspirations. You may even employ foreigners. Customers, too, are very diverse, having preferences and expectations all of their own.
What are the cross-cultural differences?
Culture is how we communicate to the world. There are some common threads that run through all cultures and can be divided into three parts: how we communicate through words, material things, and behaviour.
- Words are the medium of business, politics and diplomacy: Written and spoken
- Material things are normally indicators of status and power.
- Behaviour creates feedback on how others feel about us: social conditioning and learned responses.
“The Software of the Mind”
- Perceptions, values, and belief systems are not the same thing and are different for everyoneAbove all, they affect each other and constantly interact; a dynamic relationship
- Everything, including perceptions of reality, is relative and contextual
- Reality is less important than one’s perception of reality
- It is not the stimulus that produces specific human reactions but rather how the stimulus is perceived
- People act or react on the basis of the way in which they perceive the external world
Tags: beliefs, cross cultural awareness, cross-cultural communication, cross-cultural differences, cultural beliefs, culture, heartware, osftware of the mind, perceptions, ross culture, values
Hello, I'm Deborah Swallow and, for the last fifteen years, I've worked in over thirty countries addressing the complexities of people working internationally across multiple cultures, so individuals and organisations alike can gain an authentic competitive edge and win in international markets. 
I absolutely love this blog!
If culture is how we communicate to the world am I doing culture when I ask for a cup of coffee? In your view of culture how could a similar reified force like personality fit in?
Where does culture exist? What does it look like? How is a culture bounded?
How do you intend to directly access the mind? Have you proven the relationship between utterances and cognitions?
How can you study conditioned behaviour if it exists beyond your concious awareness? Surely it would also be beyond the awareness of scientists? Or do you maintain that scientists are somehow specially privileged to understand how people behave in ways that people cannot? (ie that people are cultural dopes unaware of their own behaviour caught up in a tide of culture?)
It is a widely shared assumption that if I jump up in the air I will fall down. Is that part of my culture, or universal? What about universals, they are pretty widely shared assumptions. You seem to be intimating that only one culture can operate at a time? What about people from two countries?
Can things other than ethnicity or races have culture? Say sports? Or genders? Can these operate at the same time as other cultures?
Can culture stop happenning?
Pardon my seemingly de-constructionist questions but you appear to have constructed a model of the world where people are not responsible for actually doing their own behaviour, instead we are possessed by some internal force of culture to act. And that researchers have some special priveldge to read these minds where people do not.
My position is drawn from Harold Garfinkels work, similar in many ways to Goffmans. I might reccomend these to you.
Hi Edward,
How wonderful to get a really interesting comment that challenges perceptions.
I’ve quickly looked up the work of Harold Garfinkel and see that he emphasises the indexicality of language and the difficulties this creates for the production of objective accounts of social phenomena. This means that such accounts are reflexive to the settings in which they are produced (they depend upon that setting for their meaning). Which is where interculturalists stand.
I believe that what interculturalists, psychologitsts and social anthropologists are trying to express is the fact that we learn culture as children before we have words and long before we are able to conceptualise, so we tend to DO culture before we understand WHY we do it. Also, culture is seen to be beyond the ‘conscious awareness’ of the majority of people because they do not have the conceptual frameworks to think about how they behave.
For example, until I started to study theories of culture I did not realise that the UK is one of the most individualistic nations in the world (USA is number one) which is one of the reasons why we are such an entrepreneurial society. We can contrast this aspect with France, for example, to begin to understand why one country has developed in one way and another country differently. Of course, our history has played its part in shaping our culture along with religion during the reformation – which goes a long way to explain the differences between Northern European approaches to business/work and Southern Europe. In terms of individualism, the Japanese and Arabs regard our approach as immature – not having grown up enough to understand the greater good.
Of course, we all have a choice as to how we choose to behave. We are all responsible for our own behaviour. Unfortunately, not many of us are either thoughtful enough or brave enough to question societal norms – we just tend to go with the flow without realising that, more often than not, ‘the flow’ is a learned behaviour not a choice.
Thanks so much for your comment – I look forward to hearing from you again.
Warm regards from a very sunny day (at last) in South East England
Debby
Edward – I forgot to mention that some people describe culture as being ‘like the water fish swim in’ – they don’t know whether they swim in fresh water or salt water – they just know when it’s not right.
Edward
You have summed up, in my view, one side of the major discussions currently going through the field at the moment, and my own leanings are probably closer to your view than many others.
One of the main issues is that contructionist/post modernists and trainers/practictioners have not yet engaged in meaningful discussions to see if there is any common ground.
If we view culture as a construct it still leaves us with a construct that needs addressing. If business people (using another construct) in one country perceive an issue in working with people from another country (or group, or industry, or company, or town etc) – that is still an issue that needs resolving.
I have serious reservations about the theories underlying the majority of intercultural training – however the theories are a small part of it. The real issue is whether intercultural training delivers results. That is the bit that cannot be shown convincingly in a scientific way – however I see (anecdotally) benefits that I cannot scientifically explain – and that is where we should be focussing our attention – on finding out what those benefits are, and why they come about.