INTB 1203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Social Stratification, Political Philosophy, Nationstates
15 Dec 2016
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INTB 1203 10/03/16
Chapter Notes
Chapter 4 – Differences in Culture
Business success in a variety of countries requires Cross-Cultural Literacy →
understanding how the culture of a country affects the way business is practiced.
Relationship between culture and the cost of doing business:
• Different cultures are more or less supportive of the capitalist mode of production
and may increase or lower costs of doing business.
• In other cases, cultural factors can sometimes raise the costs of doing business.
Culture is not static, it can and does evolve, but the rate at which this happens is
disputable and hard to calculate.
Culture in society evolves when large population segments in a country or region adopt
cultural values based on common ways of behaving.
• Culture is a system of values and norms that are shared among a group of
people and that when taken together constitute a design for living.
• Values provide the context within which a society’s norms are established and
justified. They are abstract ideas about what a society believes to be good, right
and desirable.
• Norms are the social rules that govern the actions of people toward one another.
o Folkways-the routine conventions of everyday life.
o Mores-norms that are seen as central to the functioning of a society and to
its social life.
• Society is a group of people who share a common set of values and norms.
o Nation-states are political creations that can contain a single culture or
several cultures.
o Some cultures embrace several nations.
The relationship between culture and country is often ambiguous because even if a
country can be characterized as having a homogenous culture, often that single culture
also has many different subcultures.
The Determinants of Culture
• The values and norms of a cultures do not emerge fully formed, they evolve over
time in response to a number of factors such as:
o Political philosophy
o Economical philosophy
o Religion
o Social structure
o Language
o Education
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
INTB 1203 10/03/16
Chapter Notes
Social Structure
• The basic organization of a society, which is emergent from and determinant of
the behaviors of individuals.
• 2 main aspects when explaining differences among cultures:
o the degree to which a basic unit of a social organization is the individual
as opposed to the group
o the degree to which a society is stratified into classes or castes
▪ some societies are characterized by a relatively high level of social
stratification and a relatively low mobility between strata while
others are characterized by low level of stratification and high
mobility between strata
Group → an association of two or more individuals who have a shared sense of identity
and who interact with each other in structured ways on the basis of a common set of
expectations about each other’s behavior.
➢ Human social life is group life
➢ While groups are present in all societies, some societies differ according
to the degree to which the group is viewed as the primary means of social
organization.
➢ The group is the primary unit of social organization in Non-Western
societies
➢ The social status of an individual is determined as much by the standing of
the group to which he or she belongs to as by his/her individual
performance.
➢ In business settings: strong identification with the group is argued to
create pressures for mutual self-help and collective action.
➢ The importance of the value of group identification discourages employees
from moving from company to company.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Business success in a variety of countries requires cross-cultural literacy understanding how the culture of a country affects the way business is practiced. Relationship between culture and the cost of doing business: 10/03/16: different cultures are more or less supportive of the capitalist mode of production and may increase or lower costs of doing business. In other cases, cultural factors can sometimes raise the costs of doing business. Culture is not static, it can and does evolve, but the rate at which this happens is disputable and hard to calculate. The relationship between culture and country is often ambiguous because even if a country can be characterized as having a homogenous culture, often that single culture also has many different subcultures. The determinants of culture: the values and norms of a cultures do not emerge fully formed, they evolve over time in response to a number of factors such as, political philosophy, economical philosophy, religion, social structure, language, education.
