Opinions: All About Culture

Edgar H. Schein, Jana Costas, Gideon Kunda, Majken Schultz, Tomoko Hamada Connolly, Susan Wright, Gert Jan Hofstede, Dixon Wong Heung Wah
2015 Journal of Business Anthropology  
The word "culture" has been used in so many ways in the last few decades that it has virtually lost all meaning. In this short opinion piece, I want to bring back the concept of culture, as it has been used by anthropologists, and show its power when used in relation to nations, organizations and occupations. The multiple uses of the word culture today have led me to reinforcing a concept drawn from anthropology that is applicable to organizations and occupations (Schein, 1985 (Schein, , 2010.
more » ... think culture is a property of a group of some sort, reflecting the shared learning that the members have experienced in their efforts to survive, grow, and remain internally integrated. Culture thus always has shared components that deal with managing the external environment and other components that deal with the rules and norms of how to get along inside the group. One of the commonest mistakes in recent usage is to link culture only to the inside "how we get along" components. I had the good fortune as a social psychologist to get my Ph.D. at
doi:10.22439/jba.v4i1.4792 fatcat:v2sq6hx6enfcpniai2dizj2jwa