Page 39 - Cultures and Organizations

24 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

clearly visible, do we really need to speculate about cultures as invisible
mental programs?
The answer to this question was given more than two centuries ago
by a French nobleman, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu (1689–1755), in De
l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws).
Montesquieu argued that there is such a thing as “the general spirit of a
nation” (what we now would call its culture), and that “the legislator should
follow the spirit of the nation . . . for we do nothing better than what we
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do freely and by following our natural genius.” Thus, institutions follow
mental programs, and in the way they function they adapt to local culture.
Similar laws work out differently in different countries, as the European
Union has experienced on many occasions. In their turn, institutions that
have grown within a culture perpetuate the mental programming on which
they were founded. Institutions cannot be understood without consider-
ing culture, and understanding culture presumes insight into institutions.
Reducing explanations to either one or the other is sterile.
A country’s values are strongly related to the structure and function-
ing of its institutions and much less to differences in identity; therefore, in
Figure 1.4 the horizontal arrows appear only between the “values” and the
“institutions” blocks.
An important consequence of this fact is that we cannot change the
way people in a country think, feel, and act by simply importing foreign
institutions. After the demise of communism in the former Soviet Union
and other parts of Eastern Europe, some economists thought that all that
the former communist countries needed was capitalist institutions, U.S.

style, in order to find the road to wealth. Things did not work out that way.
Each country has to struggle through its own type of reforms, adapted to
the software of its people’s minds. Globalization by multinational corpora-

tions and supranational institutions such as the World Bank meets fi erce
local resistance because economic systems are not culture free.

What About National Management Cultures?

The business and business school literature often refers to national “man-
agement” or “leadership” cultures. Management and leadership, however,
cannot be isolated from other parts of society. U.S. anthropologist Marvin
Harris has warned that “one point anthropologists have always made is