Culture Powers Paper Dec09pdf

Page 1;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

Powers of Culture Connecting Culture with High Performance Abstract: Research Question 1 WHY BOTHER WITH CULTURE: What gives culture enough power to be worth human attention, study, then research? Research Question 2 ICEBERG EFFECTS SHARED BY CULTURE, HIGH PERFORMANCE, & SELVES: These share the same “iceberg effect” of repertoires of shared unconscious routines, made unconscious from original laborious conscious deliberate practice repetitions---are these different or virtually the same phenomena and what does that tell us about what culture is? Research Question 3 VASTNESS OF CULTURES: Concepts like “culture” that refer to everything human, all of civilization, every civilization, everything in every civilization, requires models of “culture” variables almost as vast as civilizations themselves---what basis of focus in models of culture reduces that vastness without ignoring the true role of vastness as a reason we must attend to and respect and research culture? Method PHENOMONOLOGY OF ENCOUNTERING CULTURE AS POWER: The reasons people end up being forced to respect and take culture into account are examined in some detail, revealing powers of culture from two sources, unconscious repertoires of routines as culture, and the vastness of culture. Neural net, artificial intelligence, knowledge management perspectives on conscious and unconscious knowledge, procedural and declarative knowledge, representational and non-representational memory are applied in this paper to produce a model of culture as the unconsciously imbibed contents in all people from dozens of contexts while growing up locally, or during intense work with a group. The unconsciousness of these contents and their vastness (we do not remember learning these things and so many things were learned) plus the missing meta-knowledge about all the alternative ways of being we did not learn and cannot imagine because we were never exposed to them (we are not aware of what alternative things we did not encounter and learn, we lack meta-knowledge of the knowledge we miss, and lack) give words like “culture” practical power to ruin human endeavors--we fail to see bases of acting of ourselves and others--and practical power to empower other endeavors--automated routines outperform consciously labored ones. Tools to handle the unconsciousness of culture and its vastness are suggested (other articles develop and present them in detail). Result TOOLS FOR HANDLING CULTURE POWERS: careful distinctions result in 10 aspects to culture, with uses of culture being often confused in other research with definitions of it. Conclusion CULTURE, HIGH PERFORMANCES, SELVES ARE THE SAME: large unconscious repertoires of routines produced by laborious conscious earlier practice A new definition of culture is presented along with nine powers of culture that it implies. Other definitions of culture from the research literature are relegated to being uses, not definitions, of culture, in this article’s view. Origins of each power of culture are suggested but not proved herein. This article’s definition of culture (as unconsciously learned and automated routines from dozens of contexts while growing up or being socialized into groups) separates unseen contents (which are “culture”) from seen contents (which, rather than being “culture” are considered, in this article either theories of culture or merely economics, law, physics, business, sociology and the like, the contents of all ordinary disciplines of knowledge). Analysis of this definition shows that high performances are always just cultures and cultures are always just high performances.

Why Culture Deserves Attention--It Causes Huge Failures and Successes The Nine Sources of Culture’s Power.

I start this paper with a careful examination of why we all bother with ambiguous concepts like “culture”. Culture, looked at academically, seems to mean everything and nothing. Culture, looked at practically, seems to mean very specific and important things that one dare not ignore, disrespect, or slight. Books say the style of buildings is culture, the trash on our streets is culture, moles on our skin are culture, absolutely everything that humans notice and care in any way about is culture, one book or another maintains. “Culture” seems, intellectually, to be an appallingly vague idea of dubious worth and precision. On the other hand, other books tell stories of two teams alike in all but “culture”. The one with better “culture” than the other goes on to year after year of competitive victory. Why is a concept that is so jejune academically so powerful practically? Below I present a list of the powers of culture dealt with in this study. The Powers of Culture

1 its invisibility = power to surprise us, pleasantly or unpleasantly 2 its ignorance of what it is ignorant of (we have no idea of alternatives from other cultures we have not met--their alternative ways of doing things) = power of running into realities we never imagined before 3 its ignorance of what it learned (we are not aware of all we are learning when near someone, in a situation, or when growing up) = power of running into realities inside us that we never realized were there 4 its abstract unity (example: Americans at Chinese dinners order their own dish each, rather than ordering theirs but sharing it with everyone present--similarly: Americans making points to win/stand-out in discussions rather than to blend, etc.) = power of how abstract the patterns in human behaviors end up being, abstractness means we miss how the same pattern is governing enormously different behaviors or situations 5 its inconsistency (example: Americans struggle to stand out except in clothing--mass produced ugly “Gap” styles--ride trains from northern US to Canadian cities, watch how fashions shift suddenly at the border) = power of disappointing our guesses at abstract unity of behaviors as situations that easily could follow the same principle for some reason do not, we cannot make rules about where and when rule will apply and will not apply 6 its vastness (in size) = power of its diversity and depth of contents; its vastness (in granularity, scales involved) = power of its diversity and depth of contents 7 its ability to shut down anxieties of trying to answer the questions of human existence = power of soft stories to make all of existence peaceful and joyful though we are tiny among immense forces in an immense universe. 8 scripting situations: ambiguous, conflicted, unclear, borderline = power of energy released because all situations have scripts for quick unthinking automatic response 9 its ability to produce high performances in individuals and teams = power of results achieved but means hidden because automated procedures, among people in a team, or within a single individual’s mind, so the gap between results and no apparent means surprises and impresses.

Culture Power One--Invisibility.

Culture deserves study because cases like EuroDisney show billions of dollars being lost year after year due primarily to failure to appreciate and respect the powers of culture. Culture deserves study, also, because of other cases, like Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Intel, and the whole US Silicon Valley dominance of Route 128, showing how culture alone suffices to allow, from roughly equivalent groups of resources, one group to dominate and vanquish another. Culture surprises in cases of failure like EuroDisney because it is hard to see, and therefore, to measure, respect, hold in mind, change, handle. Culture surprises in cases of success, like Silicon Valley, because slight intangible soft things of culture suffice to produce significant differences in outcomes. There is an invisibility aspect of culture that makes us respect it. High performance failure and high performance success both depend absolutely on creating certain cultural conditions amidst many other conditions of life and work.

The visible part of what many people call “culture”--that is, pop culture, high culture, rites and rituals, shared assumptions that people are nearly all well aware of in a group, and the like-lacks this power from invisibility. It is visible, therefore, there are books on it, guides to it, publications, videos, shows, maps, courses, and the like. It can be considered not “culture” at all, but economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, medicine, law, and contents of any other traditional discipline. In other words, this article defines culture as invisible contents, not visible ones, because this article maintains that all that visible stuff is just what traditional disciplines map, distinguish, causally study, improve, and the like. If we want to consider that visible stuff as “culture” we run into the problem of calling it “culture” sometimes and places and calling it economics, sociology, law, etc. at other times and places, in important and debilitating inconsistency.

Culture’s Invisibility and Its Relations to Culture’s Powers. The prototype for culture interactions--whether good or bad--is our encounters with the cultures of other nations or ethnic groups. We insult people without intending to or we make a negotiation fail precisely because we do what we know “works” (but that “what we do” and that “knowing” and that “what works” are from an entirely different culture than where we now operate). In this prototypic interaction of different cultures a number of different happenings can be distinguished: 1. unconscious actions--things that in my frameworks are not actions are seen and taken as actions by others operating in their different frameworks and vice versa = “I am not aware of all that I do” 2. meaning distortion--messages we send, in our frameworks, mean something entirely different when received by others having different frameworks and vice versa = “I am not saying what I think I am saying” 3. tactic failure--actions that work and are feasible in our frameworks do not work and are too expensive or otherwise infeasible in other people’s differing frameworks and vice versa = “I am suggesting actions that look ridiculous when applied outside my own turf” 4. unseen alternatives--the alternatives I imagine and suggest to myself and others omit huge other possibilities I never consider because the frameworks that make them “natural” are ones I have never experienced or thought of before and vice versa = “I am limited in ways I am unaware of”

Page 2;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

5. In Sum: unseen options, meanings, responses, assumptions--I and they are both doing, saying, assuming, limiting things we are completely unaware of. The problem is not error--we all handle error every day of our lives, more or less successfully. The problem is error and omission we are unaware of, and, therefore, that we cannot fix or respond to. Being blind in ways we are not aware we are blind, being blind of things we are not aware we are not seeing, slighting things we are not aware we are slighting removes the possibility of growth and learning and improvement (save by busting up initial such encounters clumsily and ignorantly done as we lumber around in someone else’s china shop).

Where Does Culture’s Invisibility Come From. Perhaps the entire meaning of words like “culture” is stuff acquired while we grow up, getting “socialized” into a particular family, era, nation, gender, that we are not aware of. Culture would not have power, the ability to bust up huge business ventures into giant multi-decade financial failures and to thrust a few people and ideas into decades of wealth-building that self-amplifies, were we aware we had it and they had it, could see its parts, and had tools for affecting such parts. Words like “culture” mean we lack knowledge of what and who we are--what is us and what is inside us, both idea and procedure. If we knew what is us and what is inside us, idea and procedure, “culture” would not surprise us, pleasantly or unpleasantly. It would not be important. The problem is stuff inside us that we are not aware of (later, in this article, I deal with cultures we deliberately create). The opposite to culture, then, is clear--educatedness. For educatedness is “e” = out from and “duco” = being led, that is, being led out from assumed ideas, and automatic habits put in us as we grow up in particular families, genders, nations, and eras. Culture theory, the power of culture, and associated phenomena are really “lack of educatedness” theory, and the power of “not being educated”. That makes the solution to handling culture well quite simple and distinct--get yourself educated, well educated.

Getting Yourself and Others Educated as the Primary Culture-Handling Prerequisite and Skill. What makes educating yourself and others difficult as the route to handling culture differences well is being an adult. Handling cultures well usually comes to us as a needed task when we are adults, already fully unaware of how our own birth cultures have limited, distorted, empowered, and crippled us. As such adults we face having to make ourselves aware of tens of thousands of values, habits, frameworks, ideas put in us by people in “our” culture who were, probably, unaware that they we putting things into us and unaware of what exactly they were putting into us (“the blind blinding the blind” we might call these ordinary socialization processes). At the same time we face having to make ourselves aware of similar tens of thousands of values, habits, frameworks and ideas put inside others we are now encountering from another culture when those others are just as unaware of what is inside them, operating every hour and minute, as we are unaware of what is inside us (the blind encountering the blind” we might call these adult cross-culture encounters). 1. socialization (enculturation) of us--we learn ideas, values, habits, frameworks that we are not aware we are learning while growing up 2. socialization (enculturation) of others--they learn ideas, values, habits, frameworks that they are not aware they are learning while growing up

DECADES OF UNCONSCIOUS LEARNINGS learn “inside us” we don’t know learn “inside them” they don’t know learn how to get them to learn what is inside us and them learn how to get us to learn what is inside them and us

g in fins de nt lf e s se om re m du e oc ed pr iss ed m iss sm ea es id dur e d oc be pr bi ed im bib im

s ea id

FOUR EDUCATINGS OF UN-CULTURING

3. educating us, one--learning what is inside us that we are not aware of (Schon, reflective practitioners, Argyis, double loop learning) 4. educating others, two--learning how to get others to learn what is inside of them that they are not aware of 5. educating us, three--learning what is inside of them that they are not aware of as stuff inside them 6. educating others, four--learning how to get others to learn what is inside of us that they were not aware of.

SOURCES OF BEHAVIOR PATTERNING family and friends schooling gender era nation

THREE DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE HANDLING SKILL

1. twenty years of procedures imbibed from some environment/group 2. twenty years of ideas/frameworks/values imbibed from some environment/group 3. twenty years of alternative procedures not imbibed from groups because we never imagined or encountered them 4. twenty years of alternative ideas, frameworks, values not imbibed from groups because we never imagined or encountered them. 5. personal history of self defining decisions, choices, events encountered, event responses in reaction to contents imbibed or found missing 6. In Sum: a. years of contents, b. procedural contents imbibed, c. idea/frameworks/ values imbibed, d. procedural alternatives missed, e. ideas/frameworks/values missed, f. all these for each distinct grouping we grew up within (family, neighborhood community, personal friends, gender, schools, era, nation, profession, organizations plus others). This makes a five by eight matrix--the Culture-as-Educatedness Dimensions Matrix: years of contents, procedures imbibed, ideas imbibed, procedures missed, ideas missed, self defining moments as rows of a matrix with columns for family, neighborhood community, personal friends, gender, schools, era, nation, profession, organizations, etc. This matrix is repeated for each of the four Educatings-Involved-inEncountering-Cultures-Well (educatings one through four above). That makes a three dimensional matrix of contents imbibed/missed, groupings imbibed from, educatings needed.

Operating across different cultures, handling culture’s power from its invisibility, requires four educations done more or less at once--learning what is inside us that we are not aware of, learning what is inside others that they are not aware of, learning how to get others to learn what is inside of them that they are not aware of, and learning how to get others to learn what is inside of us that they are not aware of. Learning what is inside us and what is inside them prepares us to learn how to get others to do the same types of learning. Nevertheless, four educatings, all among adults, have to go on in any crosscultural encounter, if it is not to end in disaster or slop. The target of all these four educatings needs to be kept clearly in mind--all the things inside us (and others) put there unconsciously while we grew up inside particular families, genders,

eras, nations (and other groupings) need to be “learned”. That constitutes two huge scopes of contents:

What We Yet Need to Know about Culture’s Power from Invisibility: If the analysis above is correct, the idea that there might be convenient short cuts to handling culture well, perhaps some grand theory or neat empirical results, disappears. If “culture” is stuff inside us we were not aware of while imbibing it and if handling that stuff well requires learning what it all is and how it now operates automatically and unconsciously inside us to determine and limit what we think and do, then we need tools for reflection and digging deep into highly unconscious and automated contents of our own minds and of the minds of others (where things they imbibed but are unaware of operating inside them are found). Only if we can compress all that our culture is into a few ideas, models, rules and the like can we reduce the amount of work needed to educate ourselves and others well enough to work well with culture. Hofstede’s approach, the “dimensions of culture” approach consisting of doing factor-analysis of dimensions distinguishing one culture from another--gave us hope of just such a short cut. He reduced dozens of differing cultures to five or so dimensions (Bond later added a Confucian one, others have added a few others) to master. Theoretically this does reveal lots of overt differences in different cultures that co-vary so that one more abstract factor “underneath” them explains them all (captures what co-varies in particular situations compared). Do such reductions of many overt differences to a few factors “underneath” practically allow people to handle culture differences better? We can ask this another equivalent way by asking “if I understand the degree to which I am communitarian rather than individualist, close in power distance rather than distant in it, and the like, for five to ten dimensions of cultures, do I handle myself, my culture, my tasks better?” The problem is trying to be “more communitarian” when you are an American operating in Japan still leaves exactly what any particular situation requires as the way to be communitarian in Japan, completely undefined. The abstract dimension is so abstract it does not serve as a practical guide to action. It simplified intellectual life but not practice life abroad. This is a matter of gaps between espoused theory and enacted theory (Argyis, ), communities of idea versus communities of practice (Lave, Brown and Duguid, ), dis-embodied ideation versus embodied ideas (Descartes, Saul, Yuasa), declarative knowledge compiled into procedural knowledge and procedural knowledge abstracted into declarative knowledge (Nonaka, Minsky). Oceans of research in dozens of fields have found that recognizing abstractions in diverse cases and grounding features of any abstraction in cases where you intend application of the abstraction are extremely hard mental operations to do. It is worth noting here that culture dimensions, of the Hofstede sort, are all ordinary dilemmas in social psychology, phrased in language that disguises their social psychology provenance. By drawing the field of culture studies towards culture dimensions of difference, such studies have delayed study of other more important aspects of culture (traits, types, operations, tools, performances) and by phrasing factor-analysis derived factors in idiosyncratic language they have exaggerated the novelty of the dimensions involved, delaying application of many other equivalent social psych dimensions in culture study. Argyis spent an entire career at Harvard and Schon spent an entire one at MIT trying to create double loop learning and reflective practitioners, respectively. Making people conscious of what is unconsciously inside them requires reflection that both of these scholar-practitioners researched and promoted. The result of such reflection was discover of single abstract ideas governing ideation or action that people had no idea that they had and alternatives to which they had never imagined. The difficulty of getting people to do double loop learning documented by Argyis and the difficulty of getting practitioners to be reflective that Schon documented attest to the strict limits on severe abstract reductions like Hofstede’s factors as guides to improve people and practice. Nonaka, Brown, and Duguid similarly have found ideas travel readily between people sharing the same practice, often without words, but ideas traveling between different practices, because they must be made conscious, abstracted from automatic routines one can learningfully observe if from the same practice then be made automatic and unconscious again as abstraction are turned into routines in the new practice, go slowly if at all. This too attests to cultures, as different practices, imposing noticing work, abstracting from cases work, re-articulating in own context work, grounding in own cases, and automatization via training and practice work on those who would try to use Hofstede type codes to shortcut growing up in a different context set for decades. As much as we intellectually like having a model of four or five dimensions that distinguish dozens of cultures, to do practical things with such abstract distinctions, we have to do a lot of noticing work, abstracting from cases work, re-articulating in a different context work, and grounding in our own cases work. There is a granularity research question here--how many “dimensions” works best? Does four or five dimensions help us intellectually and practically? A small number of dimensions makes for few dimensions to remember but at a cost of huge abstracting and grounding work to use such few concepts. Does ten or twelve help us more either intellectually or practically? A moderate number makes memorizing them harder but it reduces the cost of abstracting and grounding work. Does fifty or sixty help us even more intellectually or practically? A large number of dimensions makes memorizing them hard (fixed by a unique format of well-ordered ideas in this study’s approach later in this paper), but reduces abstracting and grounding work to almost nothing. This paper presents an unusual well-ordered format of 64 dimensions for distinguishing cultures that allows us to test the relative utility of low granulaity models compared to high granularity models.

Culture Power Two--Ignorance of What We Are Ignorant Of.

Culture has power because we do not know huge numbers of approaches, ideas, and other things that we are not aware of not knowing. The problem is a meta-cognition one--we lack knowledge of what it is that we do not know. That person from the other culture (whether gender, profession, era, or other one) has spent two or more decades picking up lots of information, habits, values, approaches that they are unaware of having operant inside them. We, having never met that person, do not know any of that information, set of habits, values, and approaches. By happenstance we may know a few, but even then, we do not know that we know those,

Page 3;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

having not met the person yet. Most of the information, habits, values, approaches in the world we do not now know and will die without ever knowing, because the world is so big and filled with so many unique people. If people from other cultures could tell us all about the “other culture” inside them, things would be easier. We do not know what we do not know about them, so we ask them directly to explain themselves to us. This does not work because other people do not know all the “culture” inside of them. They cannot tell us what we do not know about them. The most obvious source of a solution to our ignorance of other ways, does not work. This is a primary source of culture’s power. “The Other” cannot explain itself to us in terms we could understand directly, because “The Other” does not himself have access to the automated contents inside of him. We do not know what we do not know and we cannot directly ask anyone for it. This means encountering other cultures entails, always and necessarily, complete surprise as alternatives, approaches, ideas or other things that we never imagined, and never encountered in our own culture and area of growing up, appear. There is no education, training, or anything else that can reduce or prevent this surprise. The best we can do is categorize types of surprise possible to encounter, based on all the variations encountered by ourselves or others in the world thus far. That means maps of types of utterly different ways of operating, ways of living, values to have, options for key life functions. To be of worth, such maps have to be comprehensive, which means big, and because of that, well ordered so the “bigness” does not prevent using the maps well. This study argues for concept models, large well ordered categorical models, that can serve this mapping of surprise types function better, perhaps, than current tools and models do.

Culture Power Three--Ignorance of What We Know.

We do not know our selves. We do not know our beliefs, ideas, habits, procedures, and a great deal more. We do not know all we learned while growing up. The people who taught us while we grew up do not know all that they taught us. We can see this directly when we write. We always need to write thrice, once to find what we think about the topic, and a second time to organize that thinking better, and a third time to convey that ordering well to a particular audience. While we live in our birth culture we do not become aware of our not knowing what we know, because a great deal of it is also stuff other people in that culture with us are not aware they know-we know the same things. All of us, in that culture, operate using automated routines we learned, without realizing it, from each other. None of us have consciously realized most of these routines. When, however, we go to a different culture, all sorts of aspects of what we think and do, do not work well, create trouble. We find that parts of us we never were aware of or concerned about, are problematic, in the way. We discover all sorts of patterns deeply inside us that we never realized were there before. Other cultures teach us our own contents better than our own cultures do. Typically being in another culture for several years, teaches us nearly nothing about the other culture but a great deal about our birth culture, the one we came from. The idea of coming from one culture to another is a bit of over simplification as used above. Though we typically think of cross-culture encounters as going from one nation to another, inside our birth culture there are huge culture variations we seldom realize--men women, old young, north south, immigrant founder-descendent, and others. Tools for reflection can open our eyes to these local cultures and their differences and give us ways to practice flexing our self-realization muscles. Gradually we can schedule local encounters, stays in locally strange environments where all that we naturally think and do does not work well, making us gradually aware of all the stuff inside us that we did not consciously put there ourselves. This study presents such tools for reflection work.

Culture Power Four--Abstract Unity.

Neural net pattern recognizers, principal components analysis, and factor analysis all, from a deep mathematical perspective, seem to be doing the same thing--recognizing multi-modal consistencies among varied cases, such that you can examine not all the features of each case but a very limited number, typically less than ten, and, from those ten, categorize the case correctly with other cases it shares lots of other features, not examined, with. This ability to clump cases based on examining few of their features rather than many of their features, saves time, effort, and makes people more effective. The Hofstede, Triandis, and Bond work on finding, via factor analysis type technique, the “dimensions” that distinguish national cultures from each other, is solidly in this camp. They have come up with factors like: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualist-communitarian, and masculine-feminine. Is there anything solid in reality that such math-derived factors actually correspond to? Are they real or just convenient categorization labels? They represent the abstractness of what unifies certain behaviors/thoughts in particular cultures and the even greater abstractness that unifies certain behaviors/thoughts across several different cultures. To get general patterns across the entire variety of work and life in any culture (and across diverse cultures) you have to drop details and concrete appearances and fall back on very abstract aspects of cases. Generality is bought with abstractness. The abstractness required to spot patterns across behaviors/thoughts within or across cultures makes it difficult for us ordinary people to spot such patterns. If even a little taint from the particulars of a case remains in how we view it, we fail to see similarities and connections with other cases. Since it is hard to spot such patterns, we end up constantly looking for then without finding them and constantly finding them without looking for them. Their basis is abstraction which makes it hard and unreliable to spot them. This is another source of culture’s power to hurt and help us. How do people get better at spotting such abstraction-based patterns? They have to practice abstract viewing, from afar, the case and encounters of their lives. There are specific conversation and reflection techniques that aid people doing this, some presented later in this article.

Culture Power Five--Inconsistent Patterns.

Cultures are not designed by engineers and enforced by standards committees. They emerge and accumulate from myriad encounters of person with person, group with group, idea with idea. Many of their contents emerge like genes emerge to dominate species, a chance mutation in an idea transforming a marginal idea into one that becomes central to some civilization, person, or organization for eons. People have even coined the term “meme” for meaning gene, to denote such ideas. Everytime a new idea arises, it can possibly be combined with all previously occurring ideas in human history (that portion of them retained in some way). Most such combinations will be flat, useless, and boring. A few, however, will become inventions or major insights. As each new idea arises, the total number of possible combinations with past accumulated ideas, increases exponentially. This means the actual idea combinations, that our lives and work are built on, are tinier and tinier fractions of all the useful idea combinations possible (this is true even though we get increasingly better at combining ideas). This makes for lots of possible, conceivable idea combinations of value that are never tried or explored. So any one pattern in a “culture” shows up some conceivable places and not lots of other equally conceivable places. For example, Japan is a communitarian culture, most social roles are assigned to groups not individuals, but we find that academic research in Japan has traditionally been very individualistic, with personal learning called “research” regardless of the previous literature of what others researched in the same field: some parts of Japan are more communal, other parts are more individual than in Western cultures. We think--”this is a case where X could well be applied” but we find that X was never applied there while finding that “wow, I never expected X here but there it is, fully worked out and implemented”. The patterning of ideas, especially abstract ones, in our lives is inconsistent, with them showing up in some locations of worth and missing other locations of equal or superior worth. This is another power that culture has to surprise and stymie us. The tool here is maps, huge, well ordered, maps of all the likely places an idea can pertain to, make a contribution to, be combined with other ideas at. Fractal concept models, as presented in compagnion article to this article are such a tool.

Culture Power Six--Vastness (of size, scales).

The vastness of culture gives rise to several illusions--that culture is everything whatsoever that humans do and think and notice, and that culture can be reduced to a handful of abstract dimensions. Somewhat sloppy thinking by researchers has, for years, led to revisiting and revisiting these illusions, in a confusing manner. I hope to clarify things here a bit. Since decades of learnings that we were not aware we were learning, fill us up and define “culture”, as this article views it, the amount of “culture” there, inside each of us, is huge. First, it is a matter of sheer volume--decades of learning dozens of things an hour we were unaware we were learning. Second, it is a matter of learning across many size scales-seconds to eons, bath mats to galaxies, big bang to the next election, and so on. The vastness of culture creates two distortions--the illusion of unity (it feels like it is everything, like it is one thing)-and the illusion of short cuts (all culture is just four Hofstede dimensions, end of story). We want vast things to be unified otherwise we have to learn and explore and map the particulars of their unorganized vastness. We want vast things to have short cuts, only five features of them are important, the other tens of thousands of details can be omitted. We may want both of those but that does not make them reality. Wanting does not make reality by itself. When we reduce vastness to “culture dimensions” obtained by factor analysis, what have we done? The fewer the dimensions, the easier the load on memory of remembering them, but the greater the recognition work of spotting something abstract in any concrete case and the greater the grounding work of mapping abstract features onto any one local case for taking action. Reduction reduces memory loads while greatly increasing recognition and grounding/application loads. It makes mental life easier while ruining practical life. Empires and imperial Westerners spent a century showing this, face to face, to people’s all over the world. Descartes, the monster, this felt like (or Voltaire’s Bastards, a recent book entirely on this point). The solution is some moderately larger number of dimensions--small enough and well ordered enough to be usable yet large enough that recognition and grounding work is greatly reduced. Fractal concept models can do this job, as explained in a compagnion article to this article. Such mid-level categorical models of 50 to 100 factors combine factors as abstract as Hofstede’s dimensions with successive layers of more numerous, less abstract factors, till a lowest level of factors rather easy to recognize and ground in case situations is reached.

Culture Power Seven--Stops Anxieties.

The human situation is basically terrifying--we are tiny creatures in a huge universe, living on a planet that in 100 million years will be inside of our sun, greatly expanded into a red giant on its way to star death. Genetic engineering gives us a way to turn ourselves into bacteria so we might drift on interstellar clouds of gas between suns, as they die off around us. That is the kind of hope we have today. As children we ask our parents about death, “mommy, will I die”, and about responsibility, “mommy, I did not mean to hit her”, and about fourteen other fundamental anxieties of living. Our parents generally give us rote answers, the answers given them by their parents. The answers tend to be the same generation after generation, in other words, a culture. It is not clear that the answers work all that well--in most cases they merely shut up our questioning, giving us a verbal formula to apply whenever the anxiety bursts forth. In a few cases, unusual parents give non-rote answers, a synopsis of the parent’s own journey of dealing with that anxiety and with poor answers to that anxiety from “culture”. All of us, as we grow up, do the same, work to reconcile the anxiety we feel with the rote answers we have been given, and with real, live answers we forge ourselves, inside our own minds and emotions. We all answer all the questions of existence, all of our lives. If we do not create myths and symbols and stories and attitudes as answers we create alcohol, divorce, violence, or despair as answers. At a minimum, it is a power of culture to stop an anxiety, reduce our interest in handling it, and send our energy back to other tracks of engagement. Beyond minimum improvement, it is a power of culture to allow us to see nearly all of reality in its awesomeness, where others around us hide from the terrors of that, by going beyond rote inherited answers to questions of existence and instead forging our own newly invented answers and explanations. If we find a way to face more of scary reality than others, we prosper though at a cost of emotional growth and change, and forging new stories and symbols. Myths are just collections of such individually forged inventions of ways to face more of reality without fleeing into magic, fundamentalism, or bigotry. Myths held onto and used magically that do not open us to scary abysses underneath human existence, become blocks to reality, not bridges, destroying entire cultures eventually, with magic, fundamentalism, and bigotry. Community Quality Cabarets are tools for achieving this beyond-minimum power of culture, consistently, year after year, personally and for large groups that we live or work with. Such cabaret tools will be explained later in this article.

Page 4;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

It is important to note that culture shuts us off from reality, crippling entire lives, or it opens us to reality, propelling lives into historic levels of happiness and fame. If the symbols and myths of culture are taken literally, that is as facts not symbols pointing to complex realities, they become handling anxiety by lying. If, on the other hand, they are taken as metaphors for what pioneering other individuals or groups discovered about what reality is and how to face it emotionally and rationally, they open our lives to facing and using more of reality. For example religions that talk about living after death simply tell lies to people to calm their fears of dying, whereas religions that talk about a second birth, a spiritual birth, that happens while you are still alive, that allows you to detach from the biologic fate of your own body and identify with what you were before you were born, expand lives to face more of reality. For a more particular example, believing that Jesus’ body rises from the dead, decided by a church council in the 4th century A.D. to help Northern Italian bishops collect funds from rich people facing anxiety at their own deaths, is essentially fleeing reality into magic. The immense stuff we learn unconsciously, while growing up, includes either vital, alive religious content, that opens the door to realities that others flee from, or dead overly-literal content, that shuts us off from reality, crippling entire lives without ever being consciously considered or recognized. It is not the presence of culture or its absence that does this, but whether the symbolic and mythic content inside such “culture vastness”, is vital or dead. Any of us, can, unfortunately, inherit unconsciously, entirely dead symbol and myth systems, that cripple us, without ever rising to conscious awareness. It is not just mythic/symbolic culture contents unconsciously inside us that can hurt us by being dead--theories of culture outside us in society, in the form of historic religions, can overtly teach entirely dead, literal interpretations of symbols, promoting magic and shrinking from reality. Such religions are as anti-spiritual as it is possible to be, using symbols to turn people from spiritual awareness back into magical flight from awareness. Cynics note, such religions tend to justify mass killing of other “infidel”, “idolatrous”, “deluded” such religions, so, in the long term, such religions are not a problem as they kill each other off, regularly, throughout history (witness the Middle East in recent millennia). Cultures unreflected on, undiscovered by education, and un-mapped by fractal models, tend to suffer from such problems. Similarly, past victories, in any organization or personal life, tend to become worshipped (as well as their leaders) turning lived ambiguous efforts into sure-fire recipes that bypass anxiety and effort, so that the victories themselves insure subsequent defeats. The symbol taken literally (the victory taken as the power not the ambiguous strenuous efforts that produced it) misleads people into facing less of reality and reducing effort with magical trust in outside or past things that “guarantee” worth and future comfort (always falsely). As Danny Miller (Miller, ) says: success breeds failure. Two frontiers most people face in life, make them aware of culture “contents” inside them--encountering another culture, and, being overwhelmed by the anxieties of existence because the mythic/symbolic contents unconsciously inside of them and used by them fail to address feelings and thoughts challenging our lives and confidence to live. Either of these can force serious re-examination of all that stuff inside us that we did not consciously and voluntarily put there.

Culture Power Eight--Scripts Borderline, Ambiguous, Unclear, Contested Situations.

Humans live inside an artificial world that protects us all from the harshness of nature. We have civilization, irrigation, agriculture, arts, professions, families and all the rest that treat us more nicely than raw nature does. Our artificial world, however, is incomplete. It handles feeding us very well indeed (if you are in the industrial world where working 20 hours a year buys all the food you need to subsist each year). It handles lots of our needs very well, but not infrequently we run into needs it handles poorly, inconsistently, badly, or not at all. There are even needs it pretends are not there, denying us when we bring them up. For example, we come across a recent Russian immigrant interviewing us for a job we really want. John Wayne talking to Indians, Harvard MBA courses on negotiation tactics, popular books on getting to “yes”, and all sorts of scripts immediately come into our minds as ways to respond, ways to guide us in confronting the unexpected at that interview because the interviewer is a recent immigrant from a nation we are not very familiar with. Inside us are hosts of similar scripts for all sorts of situations we have never really faced, that we can call on to show us instantly what to do or think next when confronted, confused, dismayed, discombobulated. This frees up energy we would otherwise waste in anxiety. Freeing up energy and speeding up responses in this way is another power of culture.

The repertoire of scripts we accumulated while growing up in one nation, era, gender, family, and the like while huge is very partial--omitting what hundreds of other cultures have invented. Systematic searching through others and other ways can greatly expand the choices, the scripts, we apply to unexpected, ill-fitting situations. Fractal concept models, produced by encoding what others in books or speeches or talks with us have conveyed about their scripts for handling things, are a tool presented in a compagnion article to this article, for this purpose.

Culture Power Nine--High Performance.

If we plot creative people by level of fame we find it correlates almost perfectly with hours of professional practice, regardless of field: 10,000 hours equals city fame, 13,000 hours equals regional fame, 18,000 hours equals national fame, 25,000 hours equals national prizes, 30,000 hours equals international fame, 35,000 hours equals international prizes (and similar patterns for all professions). What is going on in all those hours of practice that is producing high performance in these people? It is building culture via automating things so conscious minds can be clear to tackle new frontiers in performance problems. More and more routines get automated, then forgotten, becoming automatic, unconscious in execution, not taxing conscious minds during performance. All high performance is merely culture and all cultures are merely high performance. The only distinction is in the competitive quality of the routines automated--if you automate ordinary routines for years that becomes high performance, but you have the option of comparing routines and automating competitively superior ones too, that makes one high performance an even higher performance.

Naive people, untraveled people, when first abroad, encountering a culture new to them, experience many daily life aspects of the foreign culture as high performances--”my, look how that woman handles that huge flying circle of bread dough, no one does that where I come from”, and like comments. The only reason we do not ordinarily realize that all other cultures are high performances is other cultures tend to aim for performances that do not necessarily mean much to outsiders--they expertly achieve things we outsiders do not value or appreciate. Also, some of the high performances they achieve come to outsiders as burdensome “rituals” or behavioral requirements, not found in the outsiders’ own cultures. Nevertheless, high performance is all that culture is and culture is all that high performing is. Both culture and high performance use the Magician Effect. The Magician Effect is people greatly impressed, in awe even, because they have seen a performance but not the means used to do the performance and they cannot readily imagine any means that would suffice. The gap between performance attained and means visible and imaginable is awe, the Magician Effect. Nearly all of leadership depends on it too--leaders are people who achieve moderate things but with no visible means being employed so the effect looks magical, based on some great talent we cannot even specify. In fact, a great portion of all leaders spend a great portion of their time hiding their means of attainment to achieve the Magician Effect in their careers. Cultures are applications of the Magician Effect to people not from the same culture, hence, unable to see or imagine the means used for daily life attainments there. High performances are applications of the Magician Effect to people not doing similar feats, hence, unable to see or imagine the means used for attain some outcome. If culture and high performance are synonymous, then all the tools for culture handling in this article, explained later, are also how you attain high performance. One particular type of high performance---the self that each of us builds through the lifespan---impresses. Who we each are and become is a high performance particular to us. We expertly enact us-ness in encounters. We each are unconscious repertoires of routines built via repeated practice in earlier conscious laborious effort campaigns of life. Cultures, high performances, and selves are the same thing--such unconscious repertoires of routines from laborious conscious earlier repeated practice sessions.

Culture Power Ten--Norms? Excuse? Etc.

This paper presents only nine powers of culture. All the other powers of culture normal people imagine, this paper classifies not as powers of culture but as uses to which culture is put. One big one that most people think of as a power of culture is norms. We all have met Japanese who self doubt whether they are good Japanese or not because they dislike certain sushi or certain office rituals in Japan. We have all met Germans, Americans, and others similarly in self doubt about matters considered defining for their own cultures. Cultures do act as norms and such norms are so powerful that everyone who is Japanese pays a price for not conforming to the general norms about what Japanese expect other Japanese, and themselves, to be like. If I am Japanese and I do not do a Japanese-like thing in a certain situation, I am free to thusly depart from Japanese norms but I pay inside myself a price for that departure, even if the price is only reminding myself of why I hate parts of my Japanese background so much. If I am American and I do not do a Japanese like thing in that situation, I pay no cost, no one, including myself, expects me to do Japanese-like things. So cultures powerfully act as norms. But that is not what cultures are--they are not norms, they are too confused, accumulated happenstancely, to be that coherent. That is, instead, a purpose to which cultures are put--people choose to use generalized ideas about a culture as norms for evaluating their own behavior and the behavior of others.

The ultimate issue at stake here, in whether norms are culture or a use of culture, is the difference between a culture and theories of that culture held by people in the culture and people from without viewing it. Some cultures even have specific words for such theories of their own cultures, and government funding of such theories (Japan for example funds Nihonjinron “Japaneseness theory”). The norm power of culture comes not from the culture, whose contents, afterall, are largely unconsciously learned stuff not available to consciousness, but from theories of a culture held by members of it, who apply those theories as norms for how to think or behave. Such theories are not automated, unconscious, and vast, but deliberate, conscious, and specific.

The Powers of Culture and Their Sources The above discussion has taken us fairly deeply into one approach to defining culture. Now it is time to flesh out this approach with precise detail. The powers of culture are enumerated in the diagram below. These also are definition of culture--it is only encountering these powers all of which come from ways we do not know what we know, we do not know our own selves, and we do not know what we do not know. The Definitions of Culture and High Performance --The Meta-Cognition Definition of Culture: Culture is the name for eight powers--from the invisibility, vastness (size/granularity), abstract unity, inconsistency, ignorance of what it does not know, ignorance of what it does know, ability to shut down anxieties--all of which come from the ways we do not know what we know, we do not know our own selves, we do not know what we do not know--all of which comes from automating routines to clear our minds for new work (creating an iceberg of unconscious contents in us). Culture is a failure of or lack of meta-knowledge. --The Iceberg Definition of Culture: Culture is patterns among the vast amount of things inside us that we learned unconsciously while growing up in some particular place and time or while intensely working with some particular group. The vastness of culture is directly responsible for the existence of patterns among that vastness and for the inconsistency of where in the vastness such patterns appear and fail to appear. --The Performance Definition of Culture: Culture is energy freed up by using others’ scripts for ambiguous situations and others’ answers to questions of existence, at a cost in not engaging reality ourselves directly, with the benefit of having energy left over for directions of energy investment we consciously choose. Culture is thought freed up via automating procedure sequences till they drop from consciousness. Culture is high performance attainment of doing such procedures. Culture is also energy found when scripts, stories, symbols, or myths inside us expose us to more reality others can handle, enabling higher performance.

Page 5;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

--The High Performance Definition of Culture (& the Culture Definition of High Performance): High performance is only culture (from automating competitively superior routines or non-competitive routines); Culture is only high performance (from automating competitive or non-competitive routines). Both culture and high performance produce the Magician Effect. --Definition of the Magician Effect: Results attained by means that are not apparent or easy to imagine (the magician effect), high performance is the production of a performance the means of attaining which are not apparent or easy to imagine (and hard for any particular observer to match); --Corollary Definition of the Equivalence of Culture & High-Performance: Every particular culture, found in the world, is also a corresponding high performance; Every particular high performance, found in the world, is also a corresponding culture. Both can be specified by what routines in particular were automated, how they were automated, in cooperation with what other people and routines they were automated (and when and where they were lost to consciousness). --Definition of the Uses of Culture: Many “powers” of culture, as ordinary folk cognition considers it, turn out to be better understood as uses to which culture powers are put. In particular, there is the culture of a group or person or technology and there is the theory of their culture of that or other groups, persons, and technologies. There are effects of the culture that can and should be distinguished from powers of the conscious theory that a person, group, or technology has of its own or others’ cultures. Many supposed powers of any culture are really effects of the theory of that culture consciously held by someone. For example, culture is a powerful norm set for people, who worry if they depart from what their own culture’s norms in certain situations require, we think; however, such norms come from the theory of what their own culture is that people hold, not from the unconscious enormity inside them that is their actual culture (as this article defines it). --Definition of Fractal Concept Models: Rather than reducing the vastness of culture contents in any one individual or group to five or ten highly abstract factors, that, though easy to memorize for intellectual work, greatly increase the error rate and workload of recognizing abstraction features in cases faced and grounding abstraction features when applying the abstractions to cases, we have an alternative. We can create hierarchical, fractal (patterns repeated on each level), categorical models of factors, with a top level of highly abstract factors, like Hofstede’s dimensions, and subsequent levels of more numerous factors, each less abstract than the previous till a lowest level of many factors quite easy to recognize and ground in cases is reached. A regularized form of fractal concept model exists that makes it as easy to remember and handle 50 to 100 factors as it is to remember and handle five to ten factors in ordinary models.

The Powers of Culture 1 its invisibility = power to surprise us, pleasantly or unpleasantly 2 its ignorance of what it is ignorant of (we have no idea of alternatives from other cultures we have not met--their alternative ways of doing things) = power of running into realities we never imagined before 3 its ignorance of what it learned (we are not aware of all we are learning when near someone, in a situation, or when growing up) = power of running into realities inside us that we never realized were there 4 its abstract unity (example: Americans at Chinese dinners order their own dish each, rather than ordering theirs but sharing it with everyone present--similarly: Americans making points to win/stand-out in discussions rather than to blend, etc.) = power of how abstract the patterns in human behaviors end up being, abstractness means we miss how the same pattern is governing enormously different behaviors or situations 5 its inconsistency (example: Americans struggle to stand out except in clothing--mass produced ugly “Gap” styles--ride trains from northern US to Canadian cities, watch how fashions shift suddenly at the border) = power of disappointing our guesses at abstract unity of behaviors as situations that easily could follow the same principle for some reason do not, we cannot make rules about where and when rule will apply and will not apply 6 its vastness (in size) = power of its diversity and depth of contents; its vastness (in granularity, scales involved) = power of its diversity and depth of contents 7 its ability to shut down anxieties of trying to answer the questions of human existence = power of soft stories to make all of existence peaceful and joyful though we are tiny among immense forces in an immense universe. 8 its scripting of situations: ambiguous, conflicted, unclear, borderline = power of energy released because all situations have scripts for quick unthinking automatic response 9 its ability to produce high performances in individuals and teams = power of results achieved but means hidden because automated procedures, among people in a team, or within a single individual’s mind, so the gap between results and no apparent means surprises and impresses.

Page 6;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

9

is high performance

7 stops anxieties

3 invisibility

Missing Meta-Cognition

1 ignorant

culture is stuff we do not know that we know

of ignorance

Performance

8

great automated results without apparent means

scripts situations: ambiguous,borderline, contested, unclear

Culture’s Powers 4 2

ignorant of what we know

abstract unities

6 vast: size, scales

Iceberg Patterns

5

culture is patterns spottily there among vastness inconsistent inside us

patterns

{ { {

exponential increases of uses of ideas

culture’s abstract unity culture’s inconsistency

harsh world

MISSING META-COGNITION

4

5

Each new idea combines with all previous ideas exponentially to make newer ones so any past idea shows up in myriad future ideas, unexpectedly. The same goes for behavior patterns we automate, they show up in myriad future areas combined with ther mastered behavior patterns, like words in sentences based on grammars of combination. Older, isolated, crisis intense cultures have more abstract unity. Each new idea combines with all previous ideas exponentially to make newer ones, so any past idea shows up in some future ideas but not in other ones as not all exponential combinations are useful, seen, realized, implemented, or envisioned. Older, isolated, crisis intense cultures have less culture inconsistency.

artificial human-built world

culture’s 6 vastness of size/granularity

anxieties of existence

metaphor myths of self-meetingreality journey

PERFORMANCE

ICEBERG PATTERNS

Plausible Causes of Culture’s Nine Powers

Humans erect an artificial world of hospitals, weddings that is much gentler than nature, this artificial world is vast in size, history, and size scales, from sub-atomics to black holes.

culture’s stopping anxieties = released energy

script situations: ambiguous, unclear, borderline, contested

culture’s high performance teams/persons

culture’s invisibility

exquisite human “fit in” propensity

drive for clear mind

years of following the herd while growing up

Our drive for clear mind combines with our anxieties about existing to force answers to aspects of existence/universe/world we cannot control/understand so holes in knowledge get scripted fully without real answers/basis but speeding thought and action, lowering energy costs.

8

groups that automate cooperative actthought streams

conscious direction laborious

7

3

culture’s ignorance of what it knows

2

9

High performance is an optical illusion of observing others who have automated what the obserer has not automated, so goals are obtained “effortlessly” it seems (the observer has not observed years of practice involved). Magic = result + method unseen.

Humans automate whatever they like doing reducing mental load on conscious thought so we can do many things at once; we want to forget the details of good behaviors and action streams.

us-them fear of others mindset

high cost of diversity

A most special part of the artificial world that human erect around them is myths, stories of how youth must self transform if they are to see and travel safely in all of the real world around us, inside the safer artificial human-built one and outside it.

Everything about diverse others needs laborious conscious effort that we avoid.

culture’s ignorance of its ignorance

1

While growing up we have, built into our hardware, a drive to watch others, be social, and fit in (as well as a drive to stand out), so we coast, unconsciously, through all sorts of activities that end up patterning our behavior in ways we never realized or were aware of.

The Interlevel Problem: Situations (Culture) or Individuals as Causes We know that presenting the same stimulus to a human in the same situation is impossible to do--human systems have memories that prevent them from ever being in exactly the same situation, twice (neural chemical bases to post traumatic stress syndrome notwithstanding). We know, on the other hand, that in a great many cases humans are stunningly unimaginative, unoriginal, unchanging, therefore producing exactly the same response to the same or similar stimuli. It is like Nobel laureates in economics investing in the stock market, using the algorithms for pricing derivatives they won their prizes for--most of the time they rake in winnings, but, at times they cannot predict, their algorithms go terribly wrong, bankrupting them. We can assume that people are always original until something suddenly proves that wrong or we can assume that people are always conservative herd-like conformists (to themselves if not always to others) until something proves that wrong. The problem is discovering when either of those rules breaks down. The interlevel problem here is translated into a boundary condition determination problem. When, exactly, do people stop being determined by their situations? When, exactly, do people stop determining their situations? Researchers who suggest schema, merely transfer the scale of ambiguity from a situation-self-determination dilemma to a use-old-schema versus change-schema dilemma. Researchers who suggest nonlinear system dynamics emergence phenomena merely shift the scale of ambiguity from the situation-self-determination dilemma to the “what conditions ‘cause’ the emergence of particular types of conditions” dilemma. If ultimately whatever we perceive or know of situations and of our selves is coded in neural nets (parallel non-representational layers of nodes with no node corresponding to any idea or word in any language), there can be no boundary between situation causation and self determination, both blending without boundary. Organizational learning theorists have long supposed () that organizational learning is expanding one’s repertoire of possible responses and of things to possibly notice and respond to” so that organizations learn even when they do nothing different, they merely acquire an ability to notice something and respond someday to it that they lacked hitherto fore, for example. Impacts of situations on individual humans can take this form--merely expanding repertoires of possible noticings and reactions--and impacts of individual humans on situations can take this form as well--merely expanding repertoires of possible noticings and reactions of people or groups in the situation. Talcott Parsons, long ago (Parsons, ), emphasized the code aspects of human life, actions of entirely different nature and results come from slight differences in the codes in people’s minds, whether those codes be consciously or unconsciously acquired and used. Culture is such coding. Culture affecting culture includes such subtle, unnoticeable effects as a code change in an individual effecting a code change in a group and vice versa. Nothing overt happens but potentials for the future of both are changed and if relevant future conditions never appear, the individuals and group die with nothing whatsoever having resulted from the encounter (either of them may or may not manage to pass on the code change to subsequent generations). This interlevel issue, in this way, ends up merely emphasizing the unseenness and unconscious acquisition aspect to culture that is the basis of its practical interest and power in the world. Note that the ecological fallacy--taking individ-

Page 7;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

uals in communal cultures as being communal themselves, when in fact, whole nations are merely “on average” more communal than other nations, so individuals in communal nations can easily be more individualistic than individuals in more individualistic nations, for one example--is a different, simpler, inter-level issue of less portent.

The Issue of Creating Cultures and Using Them This article holds that culture is unseen things operating inside people that influence how they think and behave and that such unseen things are vast because they include what people unconsciously learned during decades of growing up sometime somewhere. Also people are not aware of what they culturally are missing (what alternative things they did not get exposed to while growing up and hence did not learn as alternatives to the things they did learn). If, however, you consider people who create new cultures, say for example, Phil Jackson the coach of the six time champion Chicago Bulls basketball team, and the cultures that they create, there is less than two decades of time and there are adult people imbibing more things consciously than babies and kids imbibe consciously. This makes the amount of culture, defined as this article defines it, less, diminished by reduced time and reduced degree of unconscious imbibing. Nevertheless, sects that spontaneously kill themselves, urged on by megalomanic leaders, attest to the power of such reduced cultures to overwhelm ordinary while-growing-up acquired cultures, producing more or less voluntary strenuous results. If such reduced created cultures have such power, the cultures we all absorb while growing up some where and some time have potential for even more power (though since some such cultures of era, nation, gender, family, etc. that grow us up obtain for huge populations a diluted intensity, power, can be expected). Small groups deliberately erecting their own invented cultures can use focus and small scale to reach intensity of practice, belief, coherence, unconscious automatic execution that overwhelm imbibed-while-growing-up cultures from gender, nation, era, and the like. Winning teams like the champion Chicago Bulls basketball team with Michael Jordan, based their winning on tens of thousands of hours of practice together. What goes on in such practicing is inventing routines and repeating them till they become fully automated and unconscious. Eventually they become forgotten, though still in the repertoire, called on, and used. Practice, the primary culture creation means of such teams, is merely consciously selected and accelerated gathering of experience, as if to make up for lack of decades of growing up as kids with intensity and focus of experience as adults. Similarly, as people become aware of culture inside themselves determining or influencing them or inside others determining or influencing those others, they use such discoveries. They learn to excuse behaviors using their own culture as excuse; they learn to reject certain behaviors of others as “merely” rote projection of their own local culture (or as harsh rejection of their nice local culture). They use culture in negotiating, contracting, merging, divorcing, founding, enticing, selling, persuading, influencing, predicting, and the like. The meaning of particular culture contents in this way becomes double--what people unconsciously influenced by them do with them and what particular purpose people aware of them use them for. When groups of interrelated people thusly use culture for certain enduring purposes, over a period of time, the purposes may be forgotten, automated, and lost from consciousness, with the result that the cultural contents operate, unseen, in contexts now unseen as well, making the contents into new culture contents, it can be said. This can be viewed as a second way that new cultures get established, an unconscious, unseen way. This is so powerful that (Jervis, ) nations who labored hard to do X, which had foreseeable consequence Y, when faced with Y claim utter surprise, claiming Y an attack on them by bad-minded others, trying to take no responsibility for it, even though Y is merely the direct product of their efforts toward X.

Issues for Research By making the distinction between “culture” and “culture theory” in any society or social entity, this article was also making a distinction between an unconscious set of contents inside people and a conscious set. If you call both of them together “culture” you combine an unseen part that has lots of power to unpleasantly surprise us in life with a seen part that does not have that power of unseenness but is where routines consciously are devised, practiced, and via that practice lost to consciousness, that is, automated. In volume terms the latter is like the surface on a sphere, a boundary where contents consciously selected are transferred into automated unconsciousness. To call the thin surface “culture” is in volume terms distortive and this article has maintained that much of the confusion in culture talk, research, and use comes from treating the surface and the volume inside the sphere as equal or nearly equal in casual ways of talking and thinking. By making another distinction between the vastness of culture contents and the patterns that show up among some of those contents, this article has clarified how “culture” can have so many and such strong patterns within it while lacking those very patterns in places where one would most expect them to show up. The consistency of culture patterns impresses us but we also are impressed by large inconsistencies in such patterns. What connects these two is the vastness of culture contents and the combinatorial process of idea with idea that makes patterns appear, happenstancely, within that vastness. By making the distinction between culture contents as a whole and whether such contents contain live or dead symbols, myths, stories, and images of reality further ambiguity in the culture literature is dispelled. You can have a lot of culture in you, with lots of patterns in it, without any of that serving to expose you to reality very much. Some cultures can be better than others in terms of the degree to which they expose members to various aspects of current and future-coming realities. Having culture, lots of it, by itself, does not give you a good life or even an acceptable one. The stuff you unconsciously picked up while growing up or intensely working in some group may have been dead literally-interpreted symbols that pushed you toward magical hopes and thinking. Having culture does not equate to having touch with reality unless the culture contents are live not dead, metaphoric not literal. By making the distinction between powers of culture and uses of culture this article suggests keeping true to the above distinction between “culture” as unconsciously acquired contents and “culture theory” as the theories about its contents that any society has and funds and sanctions (positively or negatively). For powers of culture come from culture and uses of culture come from culture theory in this article’s framework. More particularly, the normative role of “culture”, is greatly confused in usual research treatments because differences between espoused theory and enacted theory, procedural and declarative knowledge, tactic and explicit knowledge, and the like are slighted or ignored. There are norms promoted consciously, that is, culture theory in content and there are norms, happenstancely acquired while growing up in that “culture theory” and its real environment, which norms may be cynical distortions, revolutionarily counter-actions, or sublime fulfillments of such overt, conscious, culture theory norm contents. In other words, in quite a bit of the real world culture theory normative contents are precisely countered in actual, unconsciously enacted, routines of life. By removing the distinction between culture and high performance several kinds of intellectual clarification are accomplished. First, both culture and high performance are seen as based on automating routines and processes. Second, the common experience of people viewing another culture for the first time that they are seeing high performances all over daily life there is explained. Third, the tactics commonly reported for the world’s best leaders and coaches, of creating mini-cultures of their own, for each team or organization they handle are explained. That other cultures have goals that mean little to outsiders viewing them reduces the high performance impression they transmit. That high performers consciously examine competitor groups and copy some of their routines, automating them via practice till unconsciously operative distinguishes high performance from culture a little--culture does not require competitive examination of routines committed unto unconsciousness. All the above are definitional, not empirical or model-building from data. They are, however, of some theoretical interest and have practical power. Theoretically they make clear the reason culture study repeats what economics, sociology, political science, law, and a host of other fields already do--map all the contents of the artificial world erected by humans to treat themselves nicer than nature does. Culture is entire worlds imbibed unconsciously while growing up in society or in small groups. The unseenness of culture motivates people to map its contents as they are revealed happenstancely or by deliberate reflection. Mapping its contents amounts to mapping the entire artificial world erected by humans around themselves, that is, it repeats what separate disciplines are already assigned to do. This clarifies the role of culture study relative to the role of other academic disciplines of knowledge. That is one theoretical clarification provided by this model. Seeing culture and high performance as the same phenomenon, with the former not so deliberate and the latter more deliberate, allows all the tools of culture understanding and building to be seen also as tools for achieving high performance. We knew this intuitively without acknowledging it fully in the past. That is one practical power provided by this model. To handle the unseenness of culture, tools for reflection help. To handle the vastness of culture and its inconsistent patterning fractal concept models, a special type of highly regularized categorical model (presented in detail in a compagnion article), help. To handle the high performance that all culture is, all tools for analyzing and building cultures pertain (and vice versa, tools for high performance attainment help build cultures). This tri-partite specification of tools for culture handling is another practical power provided by this model. Future research might examine the four “plausible” causes, suggested in this paper, for culture’s nine powers: idea combinatorics, harsh world, drive for reducing what has to be consciously thought about, and drive to fit in socially. Whether one or more mental, hardware modules are involved in each might be examined. Genetic versus environment contributions to abilities in these areas could be examined. More interesting, perhaps, practically, is future research of the particular profile among the nine powers of culture presented here, that any one person in any one culture situation faces. We might find regularities in what profiles of culture powers overwhelm people. We might find shortest path training or orientation treatment regimes that handle particular such culture power profiles. A corollary under this research project is examining particular culture dimensions coming into conflict, say, people from individualist cultures embedded suddenly in communal ones, or the like. What profiles, that is, distributions of culture powers do they face compared to other combining dimensions of culture? Then there is the distinction between powers of culture and uses of culture. Trying to use culture without regard to its powers is a futile endeavor, unfortunately promoted by previous theorizing and practice treatments in this area. This article’s model allows precise measurement of the profile of culture powers involved in any particular culture use proposed, considered, or analyzed. This is a rich area for future research. The image, offered by this article, of practice as speeded up growing up, also presents some interesting lines of research. Practice is so very professional, that is, goal directed. Growing up is goal directed too, but the goals of huge, diverse, and pluriform--namely, all that life is and can be in a single lifespan. The idea of growing up fast into a professional role, be it basketball or genetic engineering of new forms of human beings, entails images of adulthood in the field, schooling, initial jobs, competitors, markets, and a whole host of machineries in daily life that are not normally considered as parts of professional practice in any field. Research on whether some of these aspects of life in general that we grow up into, if imported into professional practice, would improve outcomes is worth considering.

References What Things Have Cultures 1. Pheysey, Organizational Cultures, Routledge, 1993

Page 8;

Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

2. Denison, Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness, Wiley, 1990 3. Trice and Beyer, The Cultures of Work Organizations, Prentice Hall, 1993 4. Raelin, the clash of cultures, managers and professionals, Harvard Bsns, 1991@ 5. Paul, Miller, Paul, ed, Cultural Pluralism and Moral Knowledge, Cambridge, 1994 6. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, Norton, 1976 7. Kotkin, Tribes, how race religion and identity determine success, Random, 1993 8. Berger;The Culture of Entrepreneurship, Inst of Contemporary Studies, San Fran 91 9. Tannen, Deborah; You Just Don’t Understand; Morrow, NYC, 1990 10. Rasmussen and Rauner, eds, Industrial Cultures & Production, Understanding Competitiveness, Springer, 1996 11. Cole, Cultural Psychology, a once and future discipline, Harvard95%%% Sociology of Culture 12. Crane, the Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, 2002@ 13. Munch and Smelser, editors; Theory of Culture, Univ. of California, 1992 14. Alexander and Seidman, ed, Culture and Society, Cambridge, 1990 15. Smith and Bond, Social Psychology Across Cultures, Allyn and Bacon, 1999@ Psychology of Culture 16. Berry, Poortinga, Segall, Dasen; Cross-Cultural Psychology, Research and Applications, Cambridge, 1992 17. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently, Free Press, 2003@ 18. Scollon, Intercultural Communication, Blackwell, 1995 19. Shweder, Thinking Through Cultures, Harvard, 1991 20. Stigler, Shweder, Herdt, eds, Cultural Psychology, Cambridge, 1990 21. Goodwin, Personal Relationships Across Cultures, Routledge, 1999%%% 22. Rogoff, The Cultural Nature of Human Development, Oxford03%%% 23. Paige, edr, Education for the Intercultural Experience, Intercultural 93%%% 24. Cole, Cultural Psychology, a once and future discipline, Harvard95%%% Tacit Knowledge, Practical Intelligence, Communities of Practice, & Situated Learning Theory 25. Baumard; Tacit Knowledge in Organizations, Sage, 2001@ 26. Sternberg, Forsythe et al, Practical Intelligence in Everyday Life, Cambridge, 2000 27. Sternberg and Horvath, eds; Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice, LEA, 1999 28. Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 1988 29. Brown& Deguid, The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School, 2000 30. Nonaka and Teece, editors, Managing Industrial Knowledge, Sage, 2001@ 31. Lave&Wenger;Situated Learning,LegitimatePeripheral Participation;Cambrdg 1999 32. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, Grove Press, 1958 33. Brook, The Open Door, Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, TCG, 1995@ 34. Willett editor and translator, Brecht on Theatre, Hill and Wang, 1957 35. Grint, The Arts of Leadership, Oxford, 2000 36. Luboff, 88 Songwriting Wrongs and How to Right Them, Writer’s Digest, 1992 37. Managing as a Performing Art by Peter Vaill, Jossey-Bass, 1989@ 38. Elliott, Concepts of the Self, Polity, 2001 39. van Maurik, Writers on Leadership, Penquin, 2001 40. Travis, The Director’s Journey, Michael Weise, 1999 41. Performance Research 1.1: The Temper of the Times 42. Segel, Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret, Columbia, 1987 43. Argyris, Knowledge for Action, Jossey-Bass, 93 44. Lord and Brown, Leadership Processes & Follower Self-Identity, LEA04%%% 45. Gardner, Changing Minds, HBSchool, 04%%% 46. Damasio, et al, Unity of Knowledge, New York Academy of Sciences02%%% The Power of Culture 47. Weber, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Prentice Hall76 48. Levi-Strauss, The View from Afar, trans. Neugroschel and Hoss, U Chicago, 83 49. Fox, Pagans and Christians, Knopf, 1989 50. Nixon, Advertising Cultures, SAGE, 2003 51. Schwartz, The Creative Moment, How Science Made Itself Alient to Modern Culture, Harper Collins 1992 52. Collins and Porras, Built to Last, Successful habits of visionary companies, Harper Business, 1994 53. Pucik, Tichy, Barnett eds, Globalizing Management, Wiley, 1992 54. Kotkin, Tribes, how race, religion and identity determine success in the new global economy, Random House, 1992 General Theories of Culture 55. Trompenaars&Hampden-Turner, Riding the Waves of Culture, McGraw Hill, 1998@ 56. Gannon&Newman,The Blackwell Handbk of Cross-Cultural Management, 2003 57. Rugman&Brewer, eds., Oxford Handbook of International Business, Oxford, 2001@ 58. Holland&Quinn ed, Cultural Models in Language&Thought, Cambridge, 1987 59. Hofstede, Geert; Cultures’ Consequences; Beverley Hills, Sage, 1980. 60. Hofstede; Cultures&Organizations: Software of the Mind; McGraw Hill, 1991 61. Martin, Cultures in Organizations, Oxford, 1992 62. Sackmann, Cultural Knowledge in Organizations, SAGE, 1991 63. Thompson, Ellis, Wildavsky, Cultural Theory, Westview, 1990 64. Cole, Cultural Psychology, a once and future discipline, Harvard95%%% 65. Shimizu and Levine, eds; Japanese Frames of Mind, Cultural Perspectives on Human Development, Cambridge, 01 66. Cross-Cultural Psychology by Berry, Poortinga, Segall&Dusen, Cambridge, 1992 67. Kasukis, Ames, Dissanayake, eds, Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, SUNY, 93 68. Birnbaum and Leca, eds; Individualism, Theories and Methods, Oxford, 1990@ 69. Carrithers, Collins, Lukes, editors; The Category of the Person, Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge, 1985 70. Besser, Team Toyota, transplanting the Toyota culture in Kentucky, SUNY, 1996 71. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently, Free Press, 2003@ 72. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, discovering the adaptive unconscious, Harvard, 2002 73. Wegner, The Illusion of conscious Will, MIT, 2002 74. Wierzbicka, Understanding cultures through their key words, Oxford, 1997 75. Goodwin, Personal Relationships Across Cultures, Routledge, 1999%%% 76. Buddhism and Science, Wallace, ed, Columbia03%%% 77. Paige, edr, Education for the Intercultural Experience, Intercultural 93%%% 78. Cole, Cultural Psychology, a once and future discipline, Harvard95%%% 79. Rogoff, The Cultural Nature of Human Development, Oxford03%%%