Thursday, 15 November 2012

Business Notes: International Awareness & Ethics - Culture

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What is culture? It was said by Kramsch in 1996 that culture is the attitudes and beliefs, ways of thinking, behaving and remembering shared by members of that community.

There are three primary ways of describing culture - these are:
  • Anthropological culture which is the ways that people of a certain group behave/live among themselves
  • High culture which includes the art, music, theatre, and literature created by culture
  • Popular culture which includes contemporary music, films and trends
It comes down to universal acceptance as to why one piece of music is high culture and another is popular culture.

There are also two further types of culture these are surface culture and deep culture.

Surface culture includes:
  • How you dress
  • Clothing
  • Gestures
  • Music
  • Art
  • Architecture
Deep culture includes:
  • Worldview - this is the orientation towards religion, humanity, nature and the universe
  • Language - this is the medium to transmit culture
  • Kinship System - this is the importance of different family roles and the relationships between family members
  • Social Organisation - this is the importance of relationships among group members.
Culture has a huge focus on values this is because cultural values identify behavioural characteristics that members of the society consider important and valuable. They also help to serve as a mechanism of social control by determining how members of a culture should behave.

As a result of the dynamics of culture systems in one main culture individual members of one culture may differ in the values and adopt several sub-cultures. Due to this boundaries are only loosely defined and therefore culture can be shared by people from different geographical locations.Values and systems can change over time.

- Esjae 

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