The four important CULTURE

This summary will be elaborate four important questions to understanding of the phenomena culture. The first question is why does culture exist? As culture exist in two characteristics. One characteristic for human beings and social group is mental tendency to categorize and the other characteristic is as a human need sosial interaction. The tendency to classify our experience into categories is a fundamental and universal aspect of human cognition. We create concepts in order to make sense of the endless complexity we encounter in our environment. This is a necessary part of human thought, allowing us to process information efficiently and quickly. If we did not create categories, our entire life would be a buzzing mass of confusion.

In social categorization, we place people into categories. People also reflexively distinguish members of in-groups (groups of which the subject is a member) from members of out-groups. Furthermore, people tend to evaluate out-groups more negatively than in-groups. In this way, social categories easily lend themselves to stereotypes in general and to negative stereotypes in particular. Most cultures start as a result of the environment that the people live in. Then the cultures further evolve with religions, wars, major events both good and bad, and competition from neighboring cultures. It is virtually impossible to have a group of people co-exist with each other for a long time and not have a culture develop.

The second question is what does culture look like? The culture look like as an iceberg. It is mean that the surface the visible aspects of culture which are easy to see such as language, food, greeting & dress. Because we see them we can respond to them.The biggest part of culture is hidden below the surface, the invisible rules and values that define each culture. Difficulties arise when the rules of one culture are used to interpret the behavior of another culture with a different set of cultural rules.

The third question is what types of culture exist? As many different layers of culture as there are different type of human grouping. What will help is being able to recognize the particular cultural differences that are relevant in any given situation. Then, why organizations and teams spend so much time focusing in cultural differences and similarities at the level of national culture? There are number for reason this, first, the country or region of origin often influences the context in which other cultural levels (company, team, and so on). Second, national culture often resides less in practices and  more in taken-for-granted values and assumptions. Finally, cultural differences are often most apparent along linguistic fault lines as it is in the relative isolation of a shared languange that distinct culture can emerge.

The last question is how is culture transmitted? On the basis of cultural transmitted is to look how we learn to behave and think the way we do,people create, remember, and deal with ideas. They understand and apply specific systems of symbolic meaning. Cultural learning is dependent on innovation or the ability to create new responses to the environment and the ability to communicate or imitate the behavior of others. After all, people have always ‘done’ things this way, or at least frequently enough to lead to the conclusion that everyone else behave similarly.

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