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Culture
What is Culture?
Culture:
is the entire way of life for a group of people who
share similar ways of thinking, believing, and
living, expressed in common elements or
features.
Cultural Universals
Cultural Universals
• Customs and practices that occur
across all societies
7 Universals
1.
Economy-
2.
Institutions-
3.
Arts-
4.
Language-
5.
Environment-
6.
Recreation-
7.
Beliefs-
Examples of
Cultural Universals
Switch to Table from Textbook
Components of Culture
Beliefs/Religions
• Shared ideas people hold
collectively within a culture.
• Specific statements that
people hold to be true or
false.
• Beliefs are the basis for many
of a culture’s norms and
values.
• Beliefs orient people to the
world by providing answers to
otherwise imponderable
questions about the meaning
of life.
Components of Culture
 Culture: a society’s (group’s) system of shared, learned
values and norms; these are the society’s (group’s) design
for living
– Values: abstract ideas about the good, the right, the
desirable
– Norms: social rules and guidelines; guide appropriate
behavior for specific situations
 Folkways: norms of little moral significance
dress code; table manners; timeliness
 Mores: norms central to functioning of social life
– bring serious retribution: thievery, adultery,
alcohol
Values
Values
• Culturally defined standards by which
people assess desirability, goodness, and
beauty and that serve as broad guidelines
for social living.
• Values determine what is considered right
and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good and
bad.
• Values can provide rules for behavior, but
can also be the source of conflict.
American Values Examples
American Values
Emerging American Values
 Values change over time:
• Material comfort
• Personal growth
 U.S. always valued hard work
 Recently, increasing importance of
leisure
 Time off from work for:
 Travel
Family
Community service
Norms
Norms
• Specific cultural expectations for how to
behave in a given situation.
• Norms are expectations for behavior
• A society without norms would be in
chaos; with established norms, people
know how to act, and social interactions
are consistent, predictable, and learnable.
• Social sanctions are mechanisms of
social control that enforce norms.
Folkways
Folkways
• Folkways are norms governing
everyday behavior whose violation
might cause a dirty look, rolled eyes, or
disapproving comment
• Example: Walking up a “down”
escalator in a department store
challenges our standards of appropriate
behavior
Mores
Mores
• Mores: Means “manners” in French.
• Mores are norms that are essential to
American Values, close to legalistic.
• Mores: The fundamental ideas about
what is right/wrong, virtuous and sinful
Mores
• Strict enforcement, and insistence on
conformity, we learn through
socialization via our institutions (school)
in society.
• Examples: Americans eat beef, not
horse, dog, cat; you do not expose your
genitals in public
Sociologists Ian Robertson illustrated the difference between Folkways
and Mores: “A man who walks down a street wearing nothing on the upper
half of his body is violating a folkway; a man is wearing nothing on the
lower half of his body is violating one of mores (requirement that people
cover their genitals and buttocks in public “(1987)
Iceberg
The Iceberg Metaphor
• The metaphor of culture as an “iceberg” is
extremely helpful in that it identifies aspects of
culture that are:
• Immediately visible= explicit, visible, taught (above the
water line). Only about one-eighth of an iceberg is visible
above the water. The rest is below.
• Part of the iceberg that emerges & submerges with
the tides= “now you see it, now you don’t” (at the water
line)
• Deep beneath the surface= “hidden culture” (below the
water line)
HOW IS CULTUE EMBEDDED
IN PEOPLE AND
ORGANIZATIONS?
THINK OF CULTURE AS AN ICEBERG:
you see it, but perhaps not the important
parts
Symbols; language
Behaviors
Practices
Customs
beliefs, traditions,
priorities,
assumptions, values
Norms
The Iceberg Metaphor