Konichiwa, contradiction!

One of the problems with some of these definitions of cultures is that they allude to the idea of collectivity and take away from the ability to see people as individuals. This is something that I seem to be encountering more and more, especially at work. For example, a few weeks ago we had several visitors from a company that we are merging with in Japan come out to our Fremont office. We had all been preparing for their arrival for months; in fact, we even had speakers come in and conduct trainings and seminars on “Working Effectively with the Japanese”. However, once they arrived and we started putting everything we learned into practice we got some interesting feedback. Apparently, some of the Japanese visitors were amused at some of the overgeneralizations we had learned in our seminars about the Japanese, and the fact that we attributed some of the things they said and did at meetings, for example, to the fact that they were Japanese and not to the fact that they were regular human beings just like us- with tempers, jet lag, their own opinions, etc.

I spoke with my manager about this incident, and she responded with a heavy sigh and said, “We are getting complaints from some of our people too. I had someone come into my office and say that he didn’t understand why we were going to trainings that teach us to work better with the Japanese, when it should be the other way around and they should be learning how to work better with us. I just don’t understand why everyone just assumes that this is such a gigantic cultural ordeal and it doesn’t occur to anyone that these guys just are not very happy about what’s going on with these companies right now. I mean, why is it that it doesn’t occur to anyone that maybe the Japanese are just not in the best mood about their company being taken over?”

At first I was kind of taken aback, and it crossed my mind that her comment was somewhat ignorant but the more I thought about it, the more I understood her point. This is the problem with limited definitions of culture- they can lead to stereotypes and overgeneralizations, which can impede us from thinking “outside the box”, a slogan that resonates in today’s competitive business community.

I think the problem with defining culture is that a lot of the times it’s almost like putting people and their ways of living into the very boxes that we are encouraged to think out of.

What is culture? Nowadays it is so vast that it is really difficult to come up with definition that is vast enough to include every different aspect of regional cultures, as well as all of the different subcultures that have emerged with the recent developments in technology and communication as well as the constant unfolding of political, social, artistic and all other types of events that happen on an almost daily basis. It seems that most definitions of culture are outdated and do not encompass all of the ongoing phenomena occurring in the world we currently live in, especially in these times where cultural divisions and national borders are all being blurred and even obstructed with the advent of globalization over the past few decades. This is why I feel that Rapport’s definition is probably one of the best ones out there, due to the emphasis on a culture being an active, constantly integrating event that focuses on the relationships between the cultures themselves and the environment. This definition is, in itself, extremely abstract- but that is actually quite accurate, in my opinion. I feel that to define something so vast and to try to narrow it down in the name of “science” is to lose sight of what it really is. Of course, I acknowledge that there are indeed cultural universals, and that it is good to learn about cultures outside of our own to be able to view the world in a non-ethnocentric way and to be able to conduct business in a way that is both effective and humane but Tylor’s definition is rigid and almost stagnant in the sense that it in the sense that it implies that is not dynamic and is, as mentioned in the lecture, very concrete. Therefore, I prefer to view culture as an adverb and not as a noun.

The last point I would like to make is that it is really hard to write about this topic in a way that is completely focused because the topic of culture is so broad! If I don’t stop writing now, I will end up writing a book!