Tag: cultural theory

The Google Dilemma. National Differences and Cross-Cultural Theory

“Good enough for our transatlantic friends … but unworthy of the attentions of practical or scientific men.”

Good enough for our transatlantic friends?

This was the verdict of a British Parliamentary Committee , on the implications of Thomas Edison’s new electric lamp, which had been patented in the US in 1879.

In the gloom of the gas-light they couldn’t see the significance of Edison’s invention. But equally they misunderstood national differences. If the lamp was ‘good enough’ for American use, why would that change just by crossing an ocean? And if it really had no ‘practical or scientific’ worth, why wouldn’t practical or scientific Americans be able to spot that flaw just as well as their British counterparts?

I’m exploring differences across national boundaries, specifically with reference to Geert Hofstede’s Cross-Cultural Theory, which is explored most fully in his book, Cultures and Organizations. Software of the Mind. I’m doing so to try to discover whether the recent argument between Google and the Chinese Government on censorship comes down to cultural misunderstanding, or something else.

Continue reading The Google Dilemma. National Differences and Cross-Cultural Theory

Why can’t environmentalists just all get along?

Dr Clare Saunders, from Southampton University, was awarded the first British Journal of Sociology prize for her 2008 ethnographic work on environmental organisations in London.

You can hear a podcast of her describing her research, and read the original article (as long as someone you love your institution subscribes to Wiley Interscience).

She argues that: Continue reading Why can’t environmentalists just all get along?

Cultural bias and the HPV vaccine

Health communicators need to be able to handle… political issues skilfully and they need the training and tools to do so. Otherwise, their health messages run the risk of being ignored in a storm of political outrage. (Abraham 2009)

Prof Dan Kahan at the Yale Cultural Cognition project has been involved in work on cultural influences in the public debate about the HPV vaccine. For many the HPV vaccine will save lives and improve health, while providing strong returns for the manufacturers. For others, though, jabs are just risky or even downright dangerous.  For yet others, in providing the vaccine to teenagers there is an implicit condoning of promiscuity. Whichever it is, the scientific evidence seems to fuel a political debate.  Sales of Gardasil, says the Wall St Journal “have slowed over the past two years, as Merck has encountered difficulty persuading women ages 19 to 26 to get the shot.”

The Cultural Cogniton project is investigating just how people come to their beliefs about scientific evidence.

Some really interesting results: Continue reading Cultural bias and the HPV vaccine

“God is a Brazilian” – risk perception in Brazil

Brasilia by night: Flickr - babasteve

John Adams of Imperial College London produced  a new preface for the Brazilian translation of his important  book Risk. His very interesting analysis of the social construction of risk is strongly informed by Grid-group cultural theory:

“I have been increasingly impressed by the ability of cultural theory to bring a modicum of order and civility to debates about risk. It is not a typology for pigeonholing participants in debates about risk. Occasionally one encounters a pure type, but most of us are too complex and multi faceted to be captured by a simple label. It does however provide a useful framework and vocabulary for describing the attitudes encountered in discussions about the best way to approach an uncertain future. It helps people to introspect about their own biases and prejudices.”

You can read the whole preface at John Adams’ web site.

Click to access deus-e-brasileiro1.pdf

Stewart Brand: Four sides to climate change – but which four?

Credit: D Sharon PruittStewart Brand (whom, incidentally, we have to thank for the ‘whole earth’ photo at the Fourcultures masthead) wrote an op-ed recently in which he identified four types of climate change talk, based on two scales, scientists-politicians and agreement-disagreement. This produced four poles, not merely two. They are:

  • denialists (ideological disagreement)
  • skeptics (scientific disagreement)
  • warners (scientific agreement)
  • calamatists (ideological agreement)

This is a very worthwhile attempt at getting some subtlety into the standoff between the naysayers and the yeasayers. But frankly, I think the existing typology of Grid-Group Cultural Theory does a more parsimonious job of this, at the same time as giving us more information about the motives and practices of the proponents and their institutions.

This typology, derived from the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas,  can be summarised as:

  • Indvidualist (low grid-low group)
  • Egalitarian (low grid-high group)
  • Hierarchical (high grid-high group)
  • Fatalist (high grid-low group)

Fourcultures has recently called these four approaches expanders, restrainers, managers and shruggers.

There’s more about whether climate change or its denial is a ‘new religion‘

and about climate change responses as four types of deviance (reflecting the work of Robert K Merton rather than Mary Douglas).

Which of my identities takes precedence?

Mort recently asked the following:

Where does cultural cognition reside?Is it within the individual or their cultural environ – the social assumptions and influences that we are surrounded by?
Which of my identities takes precedence, me the autonomous decision maker, or me the social role?

Thanks for reading and for your encouragement Mort. I think your question is very important. Much of our discussion about human interaction assumes the basic unit is the individual, somehow isolated from their environment. Economics has been particularly successful at describing the world in terms of the utility-maximising rational individual. Psychology has progressed on the assumption that much of what matters about human behaviour is to be found inside individual brains. As a broadly sociological theory , though, Cultural Theory is compatible with the sociological idea that the basic unit of study is not the individual alone, but the person-in-relationship. In other words it is held that what is distinctive is our connections, that without taking account of my context I can hardly make sense of ‘me’. For a long time this was problematic – there were many debates about the relative significance of ‘structure’ (the context) and ‘agency’ (the actions of people in, and sometimes in spite of, that context). Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory was just one of many attempts to connect the vision of the individual with the vision of the social. Most were rather unsatisfactory. A few changes in the last decade or so have shifted these debates quite dramatically.
First there is the rise of social network theory. This studies the links between people and has lately grown in importance. You can see that if you study the links you no longer ask ‘is it the individual or the group that matters?’ Studying the ties, the relationships, tells us something about both the groups and the individuals that we wouldn’t have grasped otherwise.
Second, there is the rise of evolutionary psychology. This argues that some of what we previously took to be humans making choices about their circumstances can actually be explained in biological terms. But note that just as it takes some of the explanatory power away from ‘society’, it also offers new scope for social factors to be influencing biology, for if adaptation is a key mechanism, then the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is a central consideration.
Third, sitting within this biologocal turn, but worth noting in its own right is the advance of game theory. This has shown that mechanisms other than genetic heredity and mutation can impact on evolution. Games are entirely social/relational and not biological, and yet they have the capacity to influence biology through evolution.
Each of these frameworks of research is reconfiguring, sometimes quite radically, our ideas about what makes up the ‘individual’ and what makes up the ‘social’. Many of our ideas from the past are no longer viable and we are still coming to terms with this. But also, many of these new ideas are contested within their own fields and many issues are far from settled.
Grid-group cultural theory was developed before some of the importance of these big shifts became apparent and basically sits within what evolutionary psychologists like to to call the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), which they challenge. My own view is that it can make a distinctive contribution. I am exploring the idea that the four cultures described by Mary Douglas, her collaborators and followers can be reframed as examples of ‘ecologically adaptive heuristics’ as described by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer.

Further, as I have previously written:

there surely is an important and little understood link between the human and the natural sciences to which Cultural Theory may contribute something. I’m pretty certain it has something reasonably substantial to contribute to what Paul E Griffiths and Karola Stotz call ‘biohumanities‘. My hunch, further, is that grid-group cultural theory might be open to game-theoretical modelling, and that this would then offer something to evolutionary theory, in the way that Axelrod’s evolution of cooperation did. Specifically it might further develop some of the ideas of Brian Skyrms on the Stag Hunt and the evolution of culture.

There is a good summary of Douglas and Ney’s Missing Persons (1998), which points to some of this.

And since you mentioned coutural cognition, you should go straight to the fount of wisdom on this: The Cultural Cognition Project.

Fortify your group with religious belief! Homing in on the God Gene

NY Times God Gene Graphic“Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.”

An article in the New York Times, In Search of the God Gene, flies a kite for religion as an evolutionary benefit. But it takes a very particular view of what religion amounts to. According to the article the traits regarded as religion are those that promote a [high-group, low-grid]  egalitarian society, but then also those which favour a [high group, high grid] hierarchical society. However, the view that these cultures are the most effective and therefore the most likely to be selected for in evolutionary terms does not stand up to scrutiny. It begs the question of the relationship of nature to culture. Neither does it take account of the possibility raised by Cultural Theory of [low grid,  low group] Individualist, or [high grid, low group] Fatalist religions and religious practices.

No organised religion in the world today is claimed to have lasted more than 40,000-60,000 years. Most are far, far younger than this. Indeed we could characterise religion itself as a very recent phenomenon, far too recent to have affected evolution to any significant extent. Supposedly timeless ‘Religious’ practices such as ritual dancing or induced trance states are so general as to transcend any useful definition of religion, or else not actually necessary for a definition of religion.

The evidence cited in the article itself contradicts the claim that religion helps societies to survive over generations. Note that far from being static, the religious activities identified in the NY Times article change and involve discontinuity. Communal religious dancing floor, ancestor cult shrine, astronomical temple – it is our modern category of religion that links these structures, not the experience of those societies which changed, perhaps drastically, from one to the next. What seems to be selected for, if that is the right term, is the ability of humans to abandon their religious beliefs and practices and adopt different ones, often radically different ones. Apostacy seems to be the intergenerational norm, and even loyalty as the intra-generational norm can take a big hit from time to time. Letters of reply to the article were interesting, with some supporting the alternative view that religion is a byproduct of evolution, not a factor, and others pointing out that many ethically questionable human behaviours can be seen as adaptive.

Do genes drive culture? New developments in culture-gene coevolutionary theory

A recently published  research paper lends support to the idea that genes and culture influence one another mutually, effectively co-evolving. A link has been proposed between the collectivism-individualism scale of national cultures and a gene that affects the supply of seratonin to the body, the seratonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. A media-friendly summary of the research is available. On the background to biocultural anthropology see Bindon (2007).

The method used for measuring culture is interesting and fairly well documented (Hofstede 2001; Hofstede and McRae 2004). The individualism-collectivism scale is similar to the ‘group’ dimension in Grid-Group Cultural Theory.

This leads to a number of questions:

  1. If 5-HTTLPR can be seen as a ‘group’ gene (i.e. its prevalence is correlated with a communal rather than individual culture), does this mean we should now be looking for a ‘grid’ gene, to confirm or deny the typology of Cultural Theory? To be specific, the individualist-collectivist scale only allows for one type of collectivist culture (ie. collectivist) whereas from a Cultural Theory perspective there is clearly more than one basic type, namely Hierarchical collectivism (high grid) and Egalitarian collectivism (low grid). It is hard to say prima facie that these two types are so similar to one another that no further distinction needs to be made. The same goes for the two types of individualist cultural bias, Fatalist (high grid) and Individualist (low grid).
  2. Or, if the group dimension needs to be augmented with the grid dimension, what does this mean for the results of a study that claims to have described regional cultures in terms of only one dimension? It was anthropologist Mary Douglas’s claim that the group dimension, individualism-collectivism, was not on its own enough to describe cultural biases, and that a fourfold typology was necessary. If this is so, we could hypothesise that in the seratonin study, there will be interference caused by the unexamined ‘grid’ dimension, that needs to be controlled for, or otherwise accounted for.
  3. The argument of the paper is strongly functionalist. That is, culture is seen to have a clear function in relation to the mental health and genetic makeup of individuals, and reciprocally, genetic makeup is seen to have a function in relation to mental health within its cultural context.  This seems to have implications for the ways in which Grid-group cultural theory might develop in engagement with genetic and other biological studies of this kind.
  4. The paper also accepts fairly uncritically the claim of ‘cultural consonance’, that where individuals, in their own beliefs and behaviours, conform to widely shared cultural models, there is a lower incidence of psychological distress (Dressler et al. 2007). I’m concerned about the normative implications of such a claim, that cultural consonance (and possibly cultural conformity) might be seen as desirable because it reduces psychological distress. This contrasts with, for instance, Robert K Merton’s views of deviance, in which besides conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion are alternative was of engaging with cultural norms and goals.

References

Bindon, James R. (2007). “Biocultural linkages — cultural consensus, cultural consonance, and human biological research”. Collegium Antropologicum 31: 3–10.

Joan Y. Chiao and Katherine D. Blizinsky
Culture–gene coevolution of individualism–collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene Proc. R. Soc. B published online before print October 28, 2009, doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1650

Dressler, William W., Mauro C. Balieiro, Rosane P. Ribeiro and José Ernesto Dos Santos (2007) Cultural consonance and psychological distress: examining the associations in multiple cultural domains. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Volume 31, Issue 2, 195 – 224.

Hofstede, G (2001) Culture’s Consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Hofstede, G. & McCrae, R. (2004) Personality and culture revisited: linking traits and dimensions of culture. Cross-Cult. Res. 38, 52–88.

Beyond the Culture of Discipline: What makes a Great company and how Cultural Theory can help

D. Douglas Caulkins, an anthropologist at Grinnell College, Iowa, has used Grid-Group Cultural Theory to appraise and extend Jim Collins’ well known work on organisational culture, Good to Great (which is explained at http://www.jimcollins.com and about which you can read an article. )

Abstract
Jim Collins’s empirical study Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t (Harper Business, New York, 2001) has made a worldwide impact on management and leadership practice and research. His concept of “culture of discipline” is central to his ideas for achieving enduring, sustainable organizations, whether in the business or nonprofit sectors. In this essay the culture of discipline is re-theorized in the context of Mary Douglas’s grid-group analysis to provide a home within a broader theory which will locate the culture of discipline in relation to alternative cultures. The framework is illustrated with applications in a study of small, high-technology firms in peripheral areas of the UK, leading to the recognition of an organizational form missing from most of the management literature and furthering the exploration of a model of humble and collaborative leadership as an alternative to the model of charismatic or heroic leadership growing out of American management culture.

[Image credit: Woodleywonderworks]

Prof Caulkins has done a very good job of this. Caulkins’ approach is to equate the ‘great company’, with its long-termism and its culture of responsibility, with the Egalitarian bias of Cultural Theory. If this is so, Collins could be said to achieve this without at any point scaring American business leaders off by sounding like some kind of cheerleader for socialism. To recognise this strand in American business thinking is to call into question the easy assumption that the typical American approach is Individualist. Continue reading Beyond the Culture of Discipline: What makes a Great company and how Cultural Theory can help