Page 40 - Cultures and Organizations

The Rules of the Social Game 25

that aspects of social life which do not seem to be related to one another,
actually are related.” 19
Managers and leaders, as well as the people they work with, are part
of national societies. If we want to understand their behavior, we have to
understand their societies. For example, we need to know what types of
personalities are common in their country; how families function and what
this means for the way children are brought up; how the school system
works, and who goes to what type of school; how the government and the
political system affect the lives of the citizens; and what historical events
their generation has experienced. We may also need to know something
about their behavior as consumers and their beliefs about health and sick-
ness, crime and punishment, and religious matters. We may learn a lot
from their countries’ literature, arts, and sciences. The following chapters

will at times pay attention to all of these fields, and most of them will prove
relevant for understanding a country’s management as well. In culture
there is no shortcut to the business world.

Cultural Relativism

In daily conversations, in political discourse, and in the media that feed
them, alien cultures are often pictured in moral terms, as better or worse.

Yet there are no scientific standards for considering the ways of thinking,
feeling, and acting of one group as intrinsically superior or inferior to those
of another.
Studying differences in culture among groups and societies presup-
poses a neutral vantage point, a position of cultural relativism. A great
French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), has expressed
it as follows:

Cultural relativism affirms that one culture has no absolute criteria for
judging the activities of another culture as “low” or “noble.” However,
every culture can and should apply such judgment to its own activities,
because its members are actors as well as observers. 20

Cultural relativism does not imply a lack of norms for oneself, nor
for one’s society. It does call for suspending judgment when dealing with
groups or societies different from one’s own. One should think twice before