Culture on Psychology and Strategy

February 21, 2006 6:04 PM

I've been thinking about strategy a lot recently, and one of the things I stumbled upon that isn't really well covered is the impact of cultural phenomena on attitudes and actions. Are there general ideas in a culture's history that leads them to their view of the world today? I wonder, because different cultures have characteristic qualities that people pick up on. Where did these come from, and can we perform predictive analysis based on these characteristics?

For example, one could argue that the Chinese are historically pacifist people. One possible source of this attitude is the strength of Confucianism in China, both historically and today. What follows is an attitude much like this: the kid standing in front of the tank column at Tiananmen.

John Keegan addresses the idea of war as culture in "A History of Warfare," but this is more generalized in addressing warrior versus soldiering cultures. Do any resources exist that address this sort of cultural analysis?

posted by arrhn to society & culture (7 comments total)

John Stewart Mill’s “A Social Construction of Reality” comes to mind.

To answer your question(s), there’s been lots written about this sort of thing (not that much of it’s worth reading). Emile Durkheim wrote great stuff on this subject.
...And reality is socially constructed. That is, any person or group’s culture (i.e., the lens through which he/she/they make sense of the world they encounter—the conditions in which they live, including economic booms and depressions, wars, famines, sectarian strife) is the sum of their values, norms, knowledge, beliefs, behavior patterns, and cultural artifacts.
(‘Cultural artifacts’ are things like the knot you use to tie your necktie, the way you ‘do’ Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukkah, etc.)
posted by Yeomans at 6:45 PM on February 21, 2006

But only part of reality is socially constructed. There are many more similarities between cultures than differences. Even something as seemingly different as language shares striking similarities across culture.
One could just as easily make the argument that the Chinese are an overly militaristic society, it certainly has had plenty of blood shed on its hands.
JOhn Bodley talks about cultural evolution a bit (ok, a lot), and while I disagree with some of what he writes I find some of those notions interesting. That cultures tend to evolve along the same path, from small scale to global scale culture, and each of these steps has distinctive scholastics. My own research, done from a warfare evolution approach seems to suggest that this is true. That, in fact, all nations to-date have been involved in war, or threat of war. This is not saying that war is biological necessary, but that our current global culture relies upon war to make and establish independent nation states.

sorry got a little carried away
posted by edgeways at 7:05 PM on February 21, 2006

scholastics= characteristics (not sure how that happened)
posted by edgeways at 7:06 PM on February 21, 2006

I'm not sure whether this a pertinent example but the apparent lack of resistance to stem cell research in the South and South East Asia comes to mind.

I had read an article that made this point, that it all boils down to cultural factors, cet. par. But I'm hard pressed to come up with it now.

Perhaps someone else will have also read it and could point to the location.
posted by sk381 at 7:24 PM on February 21, 2006

Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond

Many sections of the book deal with this topic.
posted by frogan at 8:20 PM on February 21, 2006

Hans Morgenthau discusses national character in the classic international-politics textbook Politics Among Nations.
posted by russilwvong at 11:34 PM on February 21, 2006

Great ideas, all! I was walking down memory lane (OK, I was looking for a reference to an obscure paper I cited in one of my sociology courses), and I have a couple of names/concepts to add to the list of ‘follow up on these’ suggestions:
1) Peter Berger - Invitation to Sociology, especially
2) C. Wright Mills The Promise
3) Earl Babbie, especially, addresses the post’s topic. Look through An Idea Whose Time Has Come for Babbie’s discussion of ‘public issues’, ‘private troubles’, and ‘personal orbits’.
4) Max Weber (pronounced vay-ber)
5) Erving Goffman - The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life
6) Charles Horton Cooley The Looking-Glass Self
7) Already-mentioned’s: Durkheim and Diamond
posted by Yeomans at 3:50 AM on February 22, 2006