Page 41 - Cultures and Organizations

26 THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

applying the norms of one person, group, or society to another. Information
about the nature of the cultural differences between societies, their roots,
and their consequences should precede judgment and action.
Even after having been informed, the foreign observer is still likely to
deplore certain ways of the other society. If professionally involved in the
other society, for example as an expatriate manager or development coop-
eration expert, he or she may very well want to induce changes. In colo-
nial days foreigners often wielded absolute power in other societies, and
they could impose their rules on it. In these postcolonial days, in contrast,
foreigners who want to change something in another society will have to
negotiate their interventions. Negotiation again is more likely to succeed
when the parties concerned understand the reasons for the differences in
viewpoints.

Culture as a Phoenix

During a person’s life, new body cells continually replace old ones. The
twenty-year-old does not retain a single cell of the newborn. In a restricted
physical sense, therefore, one could say we exist only as a sequence of cell
assemblies. Yet we exist as ourselves. This is because all these cells share
the same genes.
At the level of societies, an analogous phenomenon occurs. Our soci-
eties have a remarkable capacity for conserving their distinctive culture
through generations of successive members and despite varied and numer-
ous forces of change. While change sweeps the surface, the deeper layers
remain stable, and the culture rises from its ashes like a phoenix.
But what do these deeper layers consist of? Although our genes give us
the capacity to create and maintain culture, the evidence that is available so

far suggests that culture is influenced far more by our experiences than by
our genes. Culture is the unwritten book with rules of the social game that
is passed on to newcomers by its members, nesting itself in their minds. In
the following chapters we will describe the main themes that these unwrit-
ten rules cover. They deal with the basic issues of human social life.