Bert hamminga Identifying culture groups version date 990923 Goto: Questions
People differ. That's a hard one for economics theories and teachers of economics. The type of thing you can write, say, and believe and teach are general things:
Consumers are....
A business is....
If everything differs completely from everything else, teaching is impossible. There's nothing to do but to start a long march along all these different things to study them all, give them a name and save them by individual name in your files. Fortunately, in discussing differences, people usually feel they succeed in agreeing on a common language to talk about them. When the different things are very "similar", in most respects, like different pieces on a chess board, there will be little trouble. But when you compare things that seem "totally different", like cultures, severe conceptual (language, communication) problems are bound to occur. That is why studying culture differences is the typical business of "philosophical" minds. As people know who had contacts with other cultures, as soon as you talk about something more abstract than food and housing, it is very difficult to understand what others try to explain about themselves, and to make yourself clear to the others. You desperately look for "common words", but every time you want to say something, you realize the other person may well not understand.
This course is about culture differences, and how culture differences lead to
differences in attitude towards all those things relevant to business: work, leisure,
saving, investment, making a contracts or agreements, such as paying, delivering, lending,
borrowing.
By a culture we shall roughly mean a set of traditions maintained by larger groups by
upholding them as family values in which children are raised. We say "a larger
group", because we shall not speak of a different culture upheld by say, one family,
although clearly no two families, not even two persons are exactly identical. The
"larger groups" we are talking about can be ethnically delineated
("Asian", "Sub-Sahara African", "Western"), but ethnically
different people can be part of the same culture (like white and black Westerners). The
"larger groups" meant can be located in geographically identifiable regions, but
they can also be spread over different regions (you find lots of people with Indian
culture in Africa, who shall have our special interest).
Though from an historical point of view cultural, regional and ethnic
categories do roughly refer to the same peoples, the history of the world mixed
mankind, and now these terms cannot anymore simply be taken as referring to the same.
We take cultures as the central object, because it is culture that defines your way of life, the meaning of life, and all basic attitudes that give you a view on why you (and usually you will think of other people the same way) work, save, invest, consume etc., in general: why you do what you do in life. People that you consider to be part of your culture share a philosophy: a philosophy of life, of society, of how to behave in all kinds of social situations like marriage, getting and raising children, working, business, leisure, consumption, crime, politics. Many cultures have a rich history of philosophy: of academic and public discussion on right and wrong, of how to adapt to the changes that a culture undergoes and underwent in history. One of the main philosophical achievements of your culture is to give you a self interpretation, a way to understand yourself, what you do, what is your place among your fellow humans. And it is this self interpretation that differs enormously among cultures. We shall use the term philosophy (though it is in other writings often chiefly associated with the principles of Western thinking) as denoting the principles of thinking in any culture.
The main culture groups
Once you start to distinguish a set of cultures, or culture groups, like Western (including North America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel), Asian, Arabic, Sub-Sahara African, dissatisfaction immediately arises: inside these groups, the differences are so big! And between some parts of different groups, similarities can be quite remarkable (think of the USA and Japan). Actually, there is ample space to claim that no scientific classification is possible at all. Yet, everyone who traveled far has clearly experienced that people differ, not merely in accidental personal characteristics, but because they are raised differently, and therefore think and behave differently. We should, dealing with cultures, reconcile ourselves with the considerable sloppiness of terms we shall use (like "Western","African" etc). Though sloppy, such terms are useful and instructive to apply as long as they are not overstretched. Clich�'s are only bad once you are giving them strict general validity. They should be used as signs to indicate some directions, and not be mixed up with what you find if you follow them.
So, we shall identify many things as "Western", "Asian", "African" even though the preciseness of questions one might ask about such conclusions has limits, and we shall almost always have to admit that the real world has a lot of exceptions.