Cultural Knowledge

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By: Dr. (cand) Christina Ekawati, SE. MM.
 What is culture?
Culture consists of shared mental programs that condition individuals’
responses to their environment (Hofstede: 1980)

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 Three
Level of Mental
Programming

• Human nature: based on common

biological reactions
• Culture: based on common experiences
that we share with a particular group
• Personality: based on the specific genetic
makeup and personal experiences that
make each individual unique

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 Characteristics of Culture
• Culture is shared
• Culture is learned and is enduring
• Culture is a powerful influence on behaviour
• Culture is systematic and organized
• Culture is largely invisible
• Culture is be “tight” or “loose”

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 National and Global Culture
• National culture: often formed because of cultural similarities among
different population groups, and over time they reinforce their adherence to
national culture by means of shared institutions, legal and educational
systems, and the mass media.
• Global culture: often formed because of travel, business, and the media
become more internasional, all countries converge toward a single culture.

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 Key Culture Values
• The culture values are fundamental shared beliefs about how things should be or
how one should behave.
• Individualist cultures: people are most concerned about the consequences of action
for themselves, no others. They prefer activities conducted on one’s own or in
relatively private interactions with friends.
• Collectivist cultures: people primarily view themselves as members of groups and
collectives rather than as autonomous individuals. They are concerned about the
effects of actions on these groups and the approval of other people in their groups.

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 Schwartz Value Survey
• Egalitarianism
• Harmony
• Embeddedness
• Hierarchy
• Mastery
• Affective autonomy
• Intellectual autonomy

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 The GLOBE Study
• Institutional Collectivism
• In-Group Collectivism
• Power Distance
• Uncertainty Avoidance
• Gender Egalitarianism
• Assertiveness
• Humane Orientation
• Future Orientation
• Performance Orientation
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 Effect of Culture:
The “in-group” and “out-group”
• The tendency is important in terms bias, typically bias in favour of our own
group of culture (the in-group), and against others (the out-group) external
to our own.
• We tend to identify everything about the in-group as being normal.
Consequently, whenever we encounter people doing thing in different way,
we tend to see their actions not just as different but as deviant, even as
wrong.

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