Page 21 - Cultures and Organizations

6 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

Culture is always a collective phenomenon, because it is at least partly
shared with people who live or lived within the same social environment,
which is where it was learned. Culture consists of the unwritten rules of
the social game. It is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes
the members of one group or category of people from others. 2
Culture is learned, not innate. It derives from one’s social environment
3
rather than from one’s genes. Culture should be distinguished from human
nature on one side and from an individual’s personality on the other (see
Figure 1.1), although exactly where the borders lie between nature and cul-
ture, and between culture and personality, is a matter of discussion among
social scientists. 4
Human nature is what all human beings, from the Russian professor
to the Australian aborigine, have in common: it represents the universal
level in one’s mental software. It is inherited within our genes; within the
computer analogy it is the “operating system” that determines our physical
and basic psychological functioning. The human ability to feel fear, anger,
love, joy, sadness, and shame; the need to associate with others and to play
and exercise oneself; and the facility to observe the environment and to
talk about it with other humans all belong to this level of mental program-

FIGURE 1.1 Three Levels of Uniqueness in Mental Programming

Specific to Inherited
individual and learned
PERSONALITY

Specific
to group CULTURE Learned
or category

Universal HUMAN NATURE Inherited