Page 24 - Cultures and Organizations

The Rules of the Social Game 9

Rituals are collective activities that are technically superfluous to reach
desired ends but that, within a culture, are considered socially essential.
They are therefore carried out for their own sake. Examples include ways
of greeting and paying respect to others, as well as social and religious
ceremonies. Business and political meetings organized for seemingly ratio-
nal reasons often serve mainly ritual purposes, such as reinforcing group
cohesion or allowing the leaders to assert themselves. Rituals include dis-
course, the way language is used in text and talk, in daily interaction, and
in communicating beliefs. 6
In Figure 1.2 symbols, heroes, and rituals have been subsumed under
the term practices. As such they are visible to an outside observer; their
cultural meaning, however, is invisible and lies precisely and only in the
way these practices are interpreted by the insiders.
The core of culture according to Figure 1.2 is formed by values. Values
are broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others. Values
are feelings with an added arrow indicating a plus and a minus side. They
deal with pairings such as the following:

■ Evil versus good
■ Dirty versus clean
■ Dangerous versus safe
■ Forbidden versus permitted
■ Decent versus indecent
■ Moral versus immoral
■ Ugly versus beautiful
■ Unnatural versus natural
■ Abnormal versus normal
■ Paradoxical versus logical

■ Irrational versus rational
Figure 1.3 pictures when and where we acquire our values and prac-
tices. Our values are acquired early in our lives. Compared with most other
creatures, humans at birth are very incompletely equipped for survival.
Fortunately, our human physiology provides us with a receptive period
of some ten to twelve years, a span in which we can quickly and largely
unconsciously absorb necessary information from our environment. This
includes symbols (such as language), heroes (such as our parents), and
rituals (such as toilet training), and, most important, it includes our basic