BSNS 201

The Relevance of Culture in Business…???!!!

 What is culture?
• Raymond Williams’ comment that "culture" is one of the two or three
most complicated words in the English language (1976, 87).
• Culture is, as Raymond Williams put it, 'ordinary', it encompasses all
the diverse means by which people are shaped and in turn give
shape to their lived experience

• What gives shape to your lives- and what shapes you? What
do you draw upon to create and present an individual and
communal identity?
Culture as politics…
• Vivienne Westwood( fashion designer): “…young people
figuring out what they wanted from this world. The first thing
they have to realise is that they are all victims of propaganda.
The only way to do that is through culture. Culture is the
antidote to propaganda.” ( in Dylan Jones Sweet Dreams p45)
Culture as a saturated phenomenon?
Jean-Luc Nancy described religion as a saturated phenomenon-
and we can think of culture in the same way:
Culture manifests itself to the point of excess, to the point of
almost rendering itself nearly invisible- as almost a blur because
of the excess of details- in a sense culture as phenomenon gives
us too much all at once
Yet to understand this we need to understand who we are and
where we are - and what forms the environment we live in…
The context – or ‘why this matters’…?!
• info from statsnz.
• 2018 NZ census
• 27.4% of NZ residents born overseas (1,271,775)
• 2014-2018: 224,000 more people came to New Zealand than
departed. That’s equivalent to the population of Wellington city, or
about 150 more people every day.
• More than half the net gain in migration came from Asia, especially
India and China, with provisional net gains of 47,800 and 38,600
respectively over four years. In the same four-year period there
was a net gain of 11,200 migrants from the United Kingdom.
If NZ was a village of 100 people…
• 51 are female
• 49 are male
• 17 are Māori
• 73 born in NZ
• 27 born overseas: 5 in England, 3 in China, 3 in India, 2 in South Africa, 2 in Australia
• 70 are European, 17 are Māori, 15 are Asian, 8 are Pasifika, 1 from Middle Eastern/
Latin American/ African
• 1 from elsewhere
• 95 speak English, 15 speak other languages, 4 speak Māori, 2 speak Samoan, 2 speak
Northern Chinese
Religion in NZ ( no state or official religion….)
• 2018 census:
• 48.2% no religion
• Of those with religion, Christianity the largest:
• Anglicans 314,000, Christian 307,000, Roman Catholic
295,000, Presbyterian 221,000, Catholic 173,000
• Hinduism 121,000, Islam 57,000, Sikhism 41, 000, Ratana
43,000
• of those with religion : 157 different categories
• Religion + culture = dress, customs, beliefs, holidays, food…
Auckland… a different NZ
• Over 220 Ethnicities and more than 150 languages spoken
• Auckland more diverse than Sydney, London, Los Angeles and New
York
• 39% of Auckland born overseas
• Auckland 4th most diverse city in the world ( after Dubai, Brussels and
Toronto)
• By 2038 Auckland be be a non-European majority city (47%
European) and have hosted 60% of NZ population growth
• 1/3 will be Asian, 20% Pasifika
Migration to New Zealand 1990-2017
Migration from New Zealand 1990-2017
Culture and digital society
• as the tech consultant and designer Sara Wachter-Boetcher
critiques, “…every digital product bears the fingerprints of its
creators, Their values are embedded in the ways the systems
operate: in the basic function of the software, in the features
they prioritize ( and the ones they don’t) and in the kind of
relationships they expect of you.”

• In a digi-tech business and culture world…what frames your

tech and your decisions… and how others respond to you?
Why culture matters in business - &
life
• As VR tech guru Jared Lanier observes “it’s hard to escape the ideas
embedded in the system in which you survive and seek success.”
( who owns the future?, p2 360)

• but what if you don’t see or understand the ideas….?

• Bio-capitalism: people & culture & cultural productions are what are
invested in- and the consumer becomes an important element of
economic value.
• In Bio-capitalism the resources put to work are the totality of human
beings: their feelings, emotions, affects - that is, what is expressed in
culture and cultural production…
 The central problem…
As Jared Larnier notes in You are not a gadget
“…if we choose to pry culture away from capitalism while the
rest of life is still capitalistic, culture will become a slum” ( p.87)
And…
“the people who are perhaps most screwed by open culture are
the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creators” ( p.93)
For as Astra Taylor in The People’s Platform observes:
“No matter how technically “disruptive” or “revolutionary”, a
communications system left to the free market will not produce
the independent democratic culture we need.” ( p219)
 Back to Marx:
culture as global bourgeois commodity
The need of a constantly expanding market
for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere.
• The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation
of the world market given a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in
every country. . . . In place of the old wants,
satisfied by the production of the country, we find
new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the
products of distant lands and climes. . . . And as
in material, so also in intellectual production. The
intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property.
• —Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto (1848)
 the imaginary global…
cultural historian Greil Marcus (via Leslie Fiedler):
In a world of American popular culture
‘we are all Imaginary Americans’

In response , we need to ask…

what forms of identity arise- and what modifications of culture?
The glocal? [global–local…]
• C.K. Stead (b.1932) in his 1991 Metro
discussion of ‘colonial realities’:
• There were two realities – the one we
saw and touched, and the one you read
about – and it might be said that each was
in some degree compromised by the other.
 Colonialism and The World System

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and
looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting
of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic
proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads
the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre”- Karl
Marx
Global Interdependence and the Spatial
Distribution of Productive Power
• The modern world system emerged in 16th century: Europeans to
Americas and India, establishing colonial interests.
• Resulted in: The political and economic interdependence of nations
through differential relations of wealth & power
• The spatial distribution of productive power in relation to the categories
of core, semi-periphery, and periphery (NZ semi-periphery)
Defining ‘Capitalism’
and
‘World-Economy’

• World-economy: “a large geographic zone within which

there is a division of labor and hence significant internal
exchange of basic or essential goods as well as flows of
capital and labor…not bounded by a unitary political
structure” (Wallerstein 2004:23)
• Capitalism: a system that gives priority to the endless
accumulation of capital
• Schumpeter(1943): Capitalism as ‘creative destruction’
• Capitalism and a world-economy: the efficacy & extraction
of the division of labour who gets what % of wealth?
Ancient Exchange and Encounter
• The Silk Road- trading routes that spanned Eurasia, connecting the
ancient Roman and Chinese empires - receiving goods from people
they had never met
• Multiple zones of encounter in which cultures and religions mixed
• A form of globalization preceding the age of European maritime
adventure, air travel, and international telecommunications
 The new silk road in 21st century
Belt [land] & Road [sea] initiative 2013
est. cost $1.3 trillion by 2027…
157 nations and international organizations signed up
 How we experience - or…
Culture as pre-mediated

• The result is what Steve Redhead terms:

A reality that has already been mediated and pre-digested;

a veritable ‘post(realist)realism.

A culture, predetermined and given to us to respond to as

consumers….
 The Cultural predicament…
• This has been the predicament for Culture in
New Zealand; it is formed/created/digested in reference
to some already second-hand experience.
• In Baudrillardean terms we can refer to it culturally as
the simulacrum of the simulacrum
( the idea of the idea)
• In other words we (re)make ourselves in reference to
the already fabricated that we come to know
primarily through the media.
• Identity is therefore global and local
• a ‘glocal’ inauthenticity that is, at the same time
(hyper)really‘authentic’.
Pakeha response to Te Māori exhibition:
what is Pakeha Taonga?
(Bob Brockie NBR 1984)
 The politics of global culture:
•

•Benjamin Barber: Jihad vs McWorld (1995)

•Jihad: the parochial ethnic, racial, and religious allegiances that tend to balkanize
and separate regions of the world.

•McWorld: the universalizing economic market that fosters a homogenizing popular

culture of consumer items, films, and music that is virtually global in its scope.
•Caught between these two forces and virtually crushed by them is a third, the
trend toward democracy.
 Confronting globalization

Dick Hebdige:

It means acknowledging the extent to which a fundamental restructuring

in strategies for capital accumulation has made questions of
cultural value figure more and more centrally in calculations concerning
investment, corporate growth and profitability.
The collapse of any firm line between 'culture' and 'commerce'.
• The values and meanings attached to place and homeland remain
as charged as ever but the networks in which people are caught up in
extend far beyond the neighborhoods in which they're physically located
or the alliances to which they are consciously committed.

• Results in rise of multiple 'imaginary communities’

• All cultures, however remote temporally and geographically, are

becoming accessible today as signs and/or commodities.
 
• If we don't choose to go and visit other cultures they come and visit us
as images and information on tv, as snatches of world music or Italian
opera heard on the radio, as Indian or Chinese takeaways…. and now
the global culture access and imposition of the internet and social
media… which is digital capitalism
 Liquid culture?
• Transmitted by internet & global satellites global culture
now digitalized and increasingly individualized
• All cultural objects now may be produced, reproduced,
stored, and disseminated in networked computers in the
same information machine.
• Most crucially, instead of fixity, digital technology gives us
fluidity of text, image, and sound…
& IDENTITIES
• Jean Baudrillard:

Universalization:
human rights, liberty, culture, democracy
Vs
• Globalization:
technology, the market, tourism, information

• While globalization is expanding, universalization is retreating as a culture

& value system that was developed in context of western modernity
 
• “the globalization of exchanges puts to an end the
universalization of values.”

• the triumph of a uniform thought over a universal one

 • Baudrillard:

• “What is globalized is first & foremost the market, the

profusion of exchanges and all sorts of products, the
perpetual flow of money”
 
• “Culturally, globalization gives way to a promiscuity of
signs & values, to a form of pornography…the global
spread of everything and nothing through networks”
 What is popular culture?
Some definitions…

• John Storey ( 2018): popular culture always defined implicitly or

explicitly in contrast to folk culture, mass culture, high culture,
dominant culture, working-class culture
• so the question arises of what is the absent other?
• Is popular culture an empty category that can be filled in various
ways by its use?
• The Verve ‘Bittersweet Symphony’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lyu1KKwC74

• Fat Les ‘Vindaloo’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va6nPu-1auE

 It involves politics…
• John Fiske: popular culture is deeply contradictory in societies
where power is unequally distributed along the axes of class,
gender, race and the other categories that we use to make use
of social distances
• Stuart Hall (2018) Anybody who says ‘popular culture’ doesn’t
need to say: ‘as opposed to unpopular culture, elite culture, or
folk culture, traditional culture, or aristocratic culture or
whatever.’
• Malcolm McLaren ‘Buffalo girls’ (1982)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN0uRg71bVY
 Popular culture…
• Dick Hebdige: popular culture: the politics of cultural forms and
the plasticity of social identity – about how social groups use
commodities expressively to project attitude, to mark
boundaries and to embody aspirations.
• Charlotte Brundson: popular culture involves analyzing ‘the
political and intellectual conditions of particular practices, while
always paying attention to the space and place of the current
account – the conjunctural now’  
 Capitalism all the way down?
• in capitalism there is no authentic folk culture to situate as that
is lost with advent of mass or popular culture
• so is capitalism (just?) mass culture or popular culture?
• to go Marxist… is popular culture the new opiate of the masses
whereby capitalism becomes its own opiate?... that which not
only creates and perpetuates false consciousness but also,
crucially, acts to lessen the pain of existence?
• popular culture as the Marxist cry of distress means pain
becomes commercial as mass culture - we see this in
subcultures especially music
 As creative destruction…?
• in popular culture and capitalism – the consumer decides what will
sell- and so becomes the producer of the ‘thing’… therefore is popular
culture a type of/expression of creative destruction capitalism?
• yet all choices are framed … so consumers are in popular culture and
are sites of conflict
•  for in popular culture what you are consuming and creating is first and
foremost an idea- or an emotion/ feeling…
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q56M5OZS1A8
(levis 501 ad 1985)
 In globalization…
• global popular culture is an interweaving of ideas, people, responses, productions
within global capitalism
• the ideas and the people of popular culture are often in one location but the making
of the things of popular culture are in another while the circulation of popular
culture is global… and then there are the local customizations of popular culture
• so popular culture is multi-sited
• Yet is popular culture primarily an export of and imposition by the global North?
• popular culture central to the post-industrial service economy - this is where
popular culture circulates and creates jobs in media/ entertainment, fashion,
design.. so popular culture is actually part of what is termed the knowledge economy
 Urban cosmopolitanism
•Appiah, “the freedom to create oneself…requires a range of socially
transmitted options from which to invent what we have come to call
out identities.”

•Anderson : cosmopolitan canopies within urban life:

those places of intermingling and the “positive acknowledgment” of
the existence and difference of others, often around sites and forms
of consumption and cultural production..ie Riverside market…?

• “[i]f nothing more, through constant exposure, such environments

can encourage common, everyday, taken-for-granted civility towards
others who are different from oneself.”
 Intermestic cosmopolitanism
• Urban cosmopolitanism recognises cities are composed of
and constantly created by actors who are international -
and part of a series of international and transnational
networks.
• David Held’s neologism: “intermestic”
describing those issues and activities that “cross the
international and domestic’,
• as such intermingling of identities and cultures is what
occurs in the pluralistic public and private spheres of
cities, but not in ways that can be – nor should be- easily
legislated or controlled.
 Conclusion…
• Since 2007-8 over 50% of the global population is urban
• cities are cultures, and consumers, and producers of culture/s
within capitalism
• culture is a commodity and a resource, it is both traditions and
the breaking and remaking of such traditions
• culture is experienced both top down( traditional culture) and
ground up (popular culture)