PMGM7002 Chap.1 What Culture Is and How It Is Transmitted
What Culture Is and How It Is Transmitted
A definition built around interpretation
The course opens by treating culture as the knowledge people acquire and then use to make sense of what happens around them. That knowledge turns into values, beliefs and attitudes, and those guide behaviour. Two features of the definition matter for everything that follows.
Culture is learned from other people and reinforced by societies and governments, so a newcomer can be taught it. And it works on meaning first, so colleagues from different backgrounds can witness the same event and describe it in incompatible ways without either of them lying.
Depth, and why it predicts how fast things change
The iceberg and the onion both describe layers.
Food, holidays and the arts sit at the surface and are noticed at once. Ceremonies, customs and classic texts sit lower and take time to register. Values, beliefs and assumptions sit deepest and become visible only with familiarity. An organisational version of the same idea separates what can be observed, what a group says it values, and what it takes for granted.
The chapter uses depth as a forecasting tool: a friction rooted in an artifact fades after a briefing, while one rooted in an assumption can last the length of an assignment.
Levels, enforcement and transmission
Culture is carried by nations, organisations, teams and even couples, and the course asks whether national and organisational culture can really be separated.
It adds a second axis, tightness and looseness, describing how strongly a society enforces its norms.
It then shows how culture moves between people, informally through daily interaction and media, and formally through schools, the military and, in firms, induction and training.
Communication and three stances toward difference
The first cost of culture shows up in communication: how it happens, what is said and whether confrontation or saving face is preferred.
High-context and low-context cultures sit on a continuum, and each reads the other through its own norms. The chapter ends with three stances a manager can take, parochial, ethnocentric and polycentric, and the course's corrective habits: avoid stereotypes, describe differences neutrally and prepare for the unexpected.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Culture as acquired knowledge that shapes interpretation
- 02
The iceberg and onion metaphors
- 03
Observable artifacts, espoused values and underlying assumptions
- 04
Culture at national, organisational and team level
- 05
Tight and loose societies
- 06
Formal and informal transmission
- 07
High-context and low-context communication
- 08
Parochial, ethnocentric and polycentric stances
Worked example · free
Sort a new office's frictions by depth
- 2Place each friction at a depth: artifact, espoused value or underlying assumption.
- 2Explain the feedback friction using high-context and low-context communication.
- 2Rank the three and say what intervention fits each.
Key terms
- Culture
- Knowledge people acquire and use to make sense of events and behaviour, which becomes the values, beliefs and attitudes that guide behaviour.
- Observable Artifacts
- The visible and audible surface of a group's culture, such as dress, office layout, ceremonies and forms of address.
- Espoused Values
- The values a group states publicly as its own. They may or may not match what members actually take for granted.
- Underlying Assumptions
- The beliefs a group takes for granted without discussing them. They are the deepest layer of culture and the slowest to change.
- Tightness-Looseness
- A measure of how strong a society's social norms are and how heavily deviance is sanctioned, running from tight to loose.
- High-Context Culture
- A culture in which the setting, relationships and what is left unsaid carry much of a message's meaning.
- Ethnocentrism
- Believing that your own way of doing things is best even when aware of alternatives, and so declining to adapt to local practice.
- Polycentrism
- Treating every international subsidiary as a separate national entity that should follow local practice.
What Culture Is and How It Is Transmitted FAQ
Is culture the same thing as nationality?
No. The course describes culture as existing at many levels, including organisations, teams and couples, so a behaviour that looks national may belong to a firm or a profession. When you analyse a case, check whether people of the same nationality in a different organisation behave differently before attributing a habit to a country.
Why does the course use both the iceberg and the onion?
Both images make the same point from different angles: what you notice first about a culture is the least important part of it. The iceberg stresses what is hidden below a waterline, while the onion stresses layers that must be peeled away in sequence. Either one helps you decide how deep a problem goes before choosing a response.
What goes wrong if a firm simply copies local practice everywhere?
Adapting everything to local practice can leave a multinational without shared standards, so it stops behaving like one company. The course places this polycentric stance at the opposite end from parochialism and treats both extremes as risky, recommending neutral description of differences instead of wholesale adoption or rejection.
Assessment move
Take three recent misunderstandings you have experienced with someone from another background and place each one at a depth, surface, below the waterline or deep, and on the high or low context continuum. Then write one sentence on what would have prevented it. Doing this for your own experience makes the vocabulary automatic when a case describes someone else's.
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