Page 35 - Cultures and Organizations

20 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

these were learned when we were children, from parents who acquired
them when they were children. This makes for considerable stability in the
basic values of a society, in spite of sweeping changes in practices.
These basic values affect primarily the gender, the national, and maybe
the regional layer of culture. Never believe politicians, religious leaders, or
business chiefs who claim they will reform national values. National value
systems should be considered given facts, as hard as a country’s geographi-
cal position or its weather. Layers of culture acquired later in life tend to be
more changeable. This is the case, in particular, for organizational cultures,
which the organization’s members joined as adults. It doesn’t mean that
changing organizational cultures is easy—as will be shown in Chapter
10—but at least it is feasible.
There is no doubt that dazzling technological changes are taking place
that affect all but the poorest or remotest of people, but people put these
new technologies to familiar uses. Many of them are used to do much the
same things as our grandparents did: to make money, to impress other
people, to make life easier, to coerce others, or to seduce potential partners.
All these activities are part of the social game. We are attentive to how
other people use technology, what clothes they wear, what jokes they make,
what food they eat, and how they spend their vacations. And we have a fi ne
antenna that tells us what choices to make ourselves if we wish to belong
to a particular social circle.
The social game itself is not deeply changed by the changes in today’s
society. The unwritten rules for success, failure, belonging, and other key

attributes of our lives remain similar. We need to fit in, to behave in ways
that are acceptable to the groups to which we belong. Most changes con-
cern the toys we use in playing the game.
More about cultural change, including its origins and dynamics, will

be found in Chapter 12.

National Culture Differences

The invention of nations, political units into which the entire world is
divided and to one of which every human being is supposed to belong—
as manifested by his or her passport—is a recent phenomenon in human
history. Earlier, there were states, but not everybody belonged to one of

these or identified with one. The nation system was introduced world-
wide only in the mid-twentieth century. It followed the colonial system