2.1 The Importance of Culture

It is a common assertion that while all humans have culture, it is something learned and, in the case of national and ethnic cultures, passed down from generations. At the same time, many social scientists argue that it is culture that makes us unique, and all human behavior is cultural. Culture is like language (and expressed within it) in that every human society has language and its possession as a symbolic mode of representation is one of the distinguishing features of being human. As with language, the structure of culture functions at an underlying level, and is, as organizational culture theorist Geert Hofstede subtitled one of his books, “software of the mind” (Hofstrede, 2004).

As Hofstede explains, culture involves unwritten rules of a social game, and “is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.” This “collective programming” obtains at every level of culture. One way of understanding culture is as a system; science recognizes that all systems exist within systems—and we must identify in our analysis the boundaries of the system that interests us. If we understand a system as composed of two or more subsystems oriented toward a common purpose we can situate cultures within cultures within cultures. In this manner, we can argue that there is an organizational culture to continuous larger groupings; the largest of which would be human c....¹