What is Culture?

Culture is a confusing term – covering both artistic pursuits and a set of societal values. A culture is what we grow up in – it’s our parents’ values and the class they inhabited. It’s the generation into which we were born - which will always reject some parental values. So nothing is static; we can move into a different class and many have; although it has become increasingly difficult to do - as Fiona Hill’s memoir superbly recounts 

I started this series of posts with a list of texts which, I now realise. were essentially academic if not technocratic. Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance made me appreciate the insights from books which appeal to the general reader of whom academics are far too dismissive.

So the new list of some 30 books covers all genres – cultural historians like Peter Gay, intellectual historians such as Daniel T Rodgers, popularisers such as Richard Lewis and Erin Meyer as well as the more technocratic political scientists, social psychologists and anthropologists

The early works mentioned in the last post were intuitive and impressionistic. Survey work was one of the strengths of the Frankfurt School which showed the face of Nazism after the war – Almond and Verba‘s “The Civic Culture” (1963) paved the path for systematic comparative work. Big data has transformed the field in the last 3 decades. Wiarda gives us a nice conclusion - 

I have been thinking about this matter of culture, really political culture, for some time. Here are my conclusions—so far!

1. Culture is one of the three great explanations in the social sciences, the others being structuralism (by which is usually meant class analysis) and institutionalism in its several forms.

2. Some analysts (Weber and Landes interpretively; Inglehart empirically) see culture as the most important explanatory factor. That may yet prove to be correct, though it is still not proven.

3. Social structure and class analysis are especially important in the Middle East or Latin America; structuralism, in its broader sense, meaning trade preferences and favored access to US markets, was especially important in explaining Japan’s, Taiwan’s, and South Korea’s economic take-offs in the last half of the twentieth century.

4. I see culture, along with geography and resources, as a key variable initially in explaining why some countries and areas forged ahead (Northwest Europe, North America, and eventually East Asia) while others (Latin America, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East) lagged behind.

5. At this early stage, institutions are less important. Remember Bolivia: beautiful laws and constitutions but very little democracy. As countries develop, getting their institutions and policies right becomes more important.

6. But even as institutions acquire greater importance, culture remains an important variable. Witness the ongoing differences between Southern Europe (clientelistic, patronage dominated, and high corruption) and more efficient, rationalized Northern Europe.

7. Political-cultural explanations often have a number of weaknesses: vagueness, imprecision, stereotyping, and lack of clear definition or methodology. They also tend to ignore both class/structural factors and outside, international, or globalization factors.

8. But political culture also has its strengths. It gets you at first causes, the essence of things, the basics. And in Almond and Verba’s or Inglehart’s work, it gets you closer to an empirical, scientific explanation.

9. Studying political culture is both hard work and fun to do. It enables you to travel, go abroad, and learn about other countries and cultures.

10. While political culture is important, it is not, in my view, the only explanation. Other factors, as above, are also important. So political culture should not be reified or elevated into an exclusive or single-causal explanation. Political culture explains a lot but not everything. My own preference is for a more complex, multi-causal explanation. Culture should thus be used in combination with other explanations: geography, social structure, resources, and institutions. These factors can now best be weighed and evaluated through correlations and multi-variate analysis. Such analysis can give us the explanatory weight of each factor or variable.

11. At the same time, we must recognize that cultures do change. They are not deterministic or fixed for all time. They adjust, adapt, get altered, even undergo at times revolutionary transformations. Societies change; modernization and globalization go forward; and culture change both drives and is a product of these other changes. After all, culture is mainly a human and a societal construct; it has not yet been proven that it is genetic, inherited, and organic. As cultures change, so also will societies and political systems.

12. These are my views on political culture from a macro level. That is, from the point of view of the overall importance of political culture as an independent variable and its relations to other variables.

Wiarda 

My list of 30 books has been chronological - and this next one covers the decade from 1995 

Book Title	Takeaway
Value Change in Global Perspective P Abramson and R Inglehart (1995)	One of Inglehart’s early books – after the marker he put down in his 1988 article The renaissance of political culture
When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard D Lewis (1996) The diagram is from his book	Lewis is a linguist who has made cross-cultural management his field. The book which introduced most of us to the subject – and gave us marvellous if somewhat superficial/untheorized vignettes of the strange habits of almost all countries of the world
Culture matters – essays in honour of Aaron Wildavsky (1997)	“Grid-Group” theory was developed by another anthropologist, Mary Douglas and basically suggests that we all identify with one of 4-5 “worldviews” or collection of values which are almost ideological The approach is best summarised here
Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business; Frans Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997)	the Dutchman who took on de Hofstede’s mantle teams up with a Brit – it’s pretty good introduction to the field which lays a lot of emphasis on how different cultures deal with dilemmas.
Culture Matters – how culture shapes social progress; ed L Harrison and S Huntington (2000)	For my money, this is one of the most interesting books – although some of the authors are no longer considered to be politically correct. But at least the authors feel free to express what they think!
Schnitzler’s Century – the making of middle class culture 1815-1914 Peter Gay 2002	Political culture is an analysis of social values  This is the remarkable biography of a class.
The Geography of Thought – how westerners and Asians think differently and why; Richard Nesbitt (2003)	An American social psychologist offers a thought-provoking book which seems a bit excessive in its argument that different continents have a different thought process
Developing Cultures - Essays on Cultural Change Lawrence Harrison and Jerome Kagan (2006)	A collection of essays by various authors which explores the role and influence of parenting and educational practices in various parts of the world – but pretty schematic
The Central Liberal Truth – how politics can change a culture and save it from itself; Lawrence Harrison (2006)	A book which both supports the idea that political cultures are distinctive but argues that they are capable of change
Adventures in Research vol 2 Howard Wiarda 2006	A delightful-looking text which has elements of a travelogue as Wiarda recounts his stays in so many countries

The Debate about Political Culture

Last year the blog had three posts on this issue – identifying a range of material I needed to get my head around and which is summarised in the table of the previous post. The balance of argument was clearly in favour of those who considered that national political cultures exist. But then, last week, I came across a management thinker (Brendan McSweeney) who disputed this and had, for the past 15 years at least, been conducting a strong critique of the work of Geert Hofstede (1928-2020) who surveyed IBM personnel in various parts of the world in the 1960s and  then started to generalise his findings and suggest certain national characteristics.

Hofstede and his younger Netherlands colleague Frans Trompenaars were the focus of the critique – but not others such as the World Values team whose work has enjoyed a high profile in the last 30 years, or individuals such as Howard Wiarda, Lawrence Harrison or Richard Lewis (although the latter may have been judged to be too pop management to be worthy of critique) 

Time clearly for one of my tables in which I list and summarise the key texts in a particular field. I’ll start with the books which vary tremendously in accessibility – with one 2014 intellectual history standing out as quite exceptional in its comprehensiveness – not just of disciplinary fields but in its summary of popular texts about such nations as the Italians, Japanese, Russians and Spaniards. That is Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance which so impressed me that I wanted to have a conversation with him – only to learn that he, very sadly, died in 2015. And other key figures have also passed away recently – Lawrence Harrison also in 2015, Geert Hofstede in 2020 and Ronald Inglehart less than a year ago.

In the spirit of Wiarda’s book, my table includes titles which appealed to both the general reading public and more specialised readers and even includes a few titles which reflect the “zeitgeist” such as Peter Gay and Daniel Rodgers. There are 30 books in the list so I’ll start with the first ten 

Book Title	Takeaway
On Germany; Madame de Stael (1813)	The link gives excerpts from the first of what is a 3 volume analysis of the customs, literature, philosophy and religion of the country as it was at the beginning of the 19th century. That’s a remarkable 1000 pages and more!
Democracy in America; Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)	A book which resonates still - after almost 200 years. Amazing insights
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards – an exercise in comparative psychology; Salvador de Madariaga (1931)	An early effort in the comparative field
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword Ruth Benedict 1948	Benedict was one of the founders of US anthropology and is one of many Westerners to try to penetrate the Japanese soul
The Authoritarian Personality Theodor Adorno 1950	Adorno moved his Frankfurt school from Nazi Germany to New York and used the surveys the School had done of workers of the period to try to understand how Nazism had taken root
Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life  Zevedei Barbu 1956	Barbu was Romanian and my political sociology tutor at Glasgow University in the early 1960s. The book has 3 parts – starting with the “democratic personality”; then looking at “the psychology of Nazism” where he has comments on Adorno; and finally “the psychology of communism”
The Civil Culture – political attitudes and democracy in five nations; Almond and Verba (1963)	The first real comparative studies of political culture – by US political scientists
The Italians Luigi Barzini 1965	One of the early best-sellers
Beyond Culture Edward T Hall (1976)	Hall was another US anthropologist but his writing shows great sensitivity and draws on wide reading in other fields
Hidden Differences – doing business with the Japanese Edward and Mildred Hall 1990	A short guidebook to doing business with the Japanese which starts with a summary of the general approach used by Hall

National Traits??

If you really want to upset the “politically correct” mob, bring up the subject of political culture and show that you actually believe that each nation has distinctive cultural traits. It’s become a forbidden subject in such company - which is strange given how far back the concept goes. Because I’ve lived and worked these past 30 years in ten different countries (with 8 years in different parts of Central Asia) I’ve become fascinated by two fundamental questions –

·       Do people in different countries have distinctive and predictable patterns of behaviour?

·       Are the “path-dependent” theorists correct in suggesting that history makes it very difficult for such patterns of behaviour to change? 

We live in a globalised age in which social values have been shifting and becoming more homogeneous and yet the past couple of decades have seen the resurgence of nationalism. Indeed each nation now seems to be divided into two tribes – the “somewheres” and the “anywheres” – depending on the freedom people felt they had to select the professions and locations of their choice.

Last year I did a series of posts on the variety of confusing terms which have cropped up in recent decades which suggest that most of us can be classified into a small number of ways of understanding the world. Some of these are descriptive – simply statements of fact. Others are prescriptive and ideological – ways in which we both understand and act. I’ve selected 5 terms – political culture, national culture, world values and cultural theory. I hope readers find the table useful…. 

Term used	Meaning	Trajectory	Typical referents
“Political Culture”	A term used by political scientists which can be traced to de Tocqueville but whose modern origin is generally attributed to the 1950s and “The Civic Culture” by Gabriel Almond The best intellectual history of the whole debate is Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance; Howard Wiarda (2014) which looks back over a century of interdisciplinary argument	In the 1940s and 1950s “culture” figured in the work of many American scholars as they tried to understand the challenge of modernisation faced by many societies but was then supplanted by the “rationality” of the economists   with  Culture Matters – how culture shapes social progress (2000) being a seminal work, criticised for really meaning “Western Culture matters”	Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Banfield, Gabriel Almond, SM Lipset  Lawrence Harrison Samuel Huntington  Howard Wiala  Brendan McSweeney is th arch critic of the school
“National Culture”	An indeterminate term	social psychologist Geert Hofstede started work in the 1960s with IBM on cultural differences – taken up by Frans Trompenaars It also figured in the discussions about “transitology” in the 1990s	Geert Hofstede   Frans Trompenaars
“World values”	Clusters of VALUES eg “traditional”, “modern” and “postmodern” used by technocrats to classify societies   Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world ; Ronald Inglehart (2018) this article summarise that work.	This stream of work began in 1981 and resurrected the debate on political culture eg The renaissance of political culture Ronald Inglehart (1988) A World of Three Cultures – honour, achievement and joy; M Basanez (2016) a beautifully-written book by a Mexican academic which seems to have exactly the outsider’s take on the subject I need. And one of the early chapters is a literature review – which has no mention of Wiarda !	political scientists and psychologists particularly Ronald Inglehart
“World views”	collection of quasi- philosophical/religious BELIEFS which seem to give us our respective identities	Series of notes on the subject a very useful overview in 12 pages an excerpt from “World Views – from fragmentation to integration” book. the full book here	Kant Wittgenstein   Jeremy Lent
“Cultural theory”	Otherwise known as “grid-group” theory which suggests that mots of us can be classified into 4-5 worldviews	Anthropologist Mary Douglas first developed the “grid-group” approach in the 1970s which was then taken up by policy analyst Wildavsky and political scientist Thompson	Mary Douglas Aaron Wildavsky Michael Thompson

The Truth about privatisation

I get so fed up with the propaganda we are constantly being fed about the need for yet more privatisation of this or that part of our public services. The reality is that privatisation has, with a very few exceptions, been an utter and total disaster. And why would we expect it to be any different?

These are, after all, generally “natural monopolies” and privatisation is achieved by “pretend competition” strongly regulated by the state which rides in to rescue the private companies when they fail. So we get the worst of all possible worlds –

·       hugely inflated prices for the consumer,

·       huge salaries for the executives,

·       additional costs of the new regulatory systems,

·       the profits to shareholders and

·       the additional tax on all of us as the companies collapse, one by one. 

During the past decade, a significant movement has been the return of privatised public facilities to municipal and national governments. You don’t hear much about this – but the TNI produced a useful paper on this in 2019 called The Future is Public. It contains lots of examples.

And today is the final day of what looks to have been an important 3 day Conference on global Public Services which considered this useful report on Shifting Narratives on Public Services whose tables map the very different narratives used variously by global bodies (including private companies), national and local governments and social movements in the last 2 decades in the fightback against privatisation of public services

The paper also assesses what we can do to get more effective stories which can help dismantle the make-believe world the marketing lobbies have created

Update; early August, UK public opinion is now really building about the unbelievable spikes in prices particularly in energy and food. Emergency payment now the subject of discussions everywhere. New campaigns catching the public imagination eg https://wesayenough.co.uk/; https://dontpay.uk/pledge/meter/; https://twitter.com/We_OwnIt; https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/06/gordon-brown-set-emergency-budget-or-risk-a-winter-of-dire-poverty; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/07/britain-social-emergency-leaders-political-vacuum 

Managers take all

More than 60 years after I first started studying economics, I still find myself utterly confused about a subject I actually taught for a few years in 1968 until I realised my mistake. From time to time, posts share my confusion in the blog which has followed with interest the various attempts made in the new millennium to bring what is nothing else than a religious/metaphysical doctrine – kicking and screaming – into the modern world. Economics is abstract and boring for a reason – Economists simply don’t want you to know their dirty little secret; that it’s all constructed on sand…on a pile of debt (for which read, equally appropriately, another 4 letter word beginning with Sh) 

The proud Scottish tradition of Political Economy had been killed off only a few years after I left the University of Glasgow (proud home of Adam Smith) – to be replaced by the much more technocratic-sounding “Economic Science” which quickly threw over its flirtation with Keynesiasm and succumbed first to monetarism and then scientism. If only they had persevered with political economy, they would now belong to the new Brave Hearts who have recently hoisted once again the flag of Political Economy (such as Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson).

Such writers expose the fallacy of those who persevere with the nonsense that “the Market” gives us what Voltaire’s Candide more than 250 years ago satirically described the “best of all possible worlds”. Such writers like to set up 2 strawmen - “the market” and “the state” - with the former requiring a set of “heroic” assumptions such as “perfect competition” dependent on consumers having “perfect knowledge” and companies having free access to markets. In the real world, such conditions hardly ever exist. 

One thing which economists try to ignore is “power” – one of the main elements of the separate discipline of Political Economy. The can’t therefore fit “Monopolies” and “oligopolies” into their schema – which is a bit awkward as they are the basic reality in our globalised world – with innovative small companies increasingly swallowed up by multinationals owing allegiance only to shareholders of conglomerate Investment Funds interested only in short-term profit. The European Union still takes competition seriously – that was the point of its “Single Market” programme which was pushed so strongly (ironically by an acolyte of Margaret Thatcher). But, thanks to Bill Clinton and the Democrats, the United States stopped taking competition seriously some 30 years ago 

All this is by way of a preamble to an important book I’ve been reading these last couple of days - Winners Take All – the elite charade of changing the world by Anand Giridharadas (2018) and starts with a Leo Tolstoy quote which is a favourite of mine 

I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible…except by getting off his back.

and goes on to argue that –

·       The image of the “market” is so powerful it has shaped our expectations of the state

·       The public sector now likes to pretend that it has “quasi-markets” which set bodies with public funding up against one another in mock competition

·       “Thought-leaders” receive great rewards from corporate leaders who want to hear positive stories of what can be done – not be cast down by the difficulties and problems presented by critical intellectuals

·       The tech sector now offers the promise of being able to solve problems which were previously seen as too difficult or impossible

·       Private companies are invited by the state to become involved in “Partnerships” which generally involve them pocketing profits and the state the sizeable losses

·       Global health and educational problems are increasingly the focus of significant philanthropic funding eg the Clinton Global Initiative

·       The key actors in such work are the managers of International Consultancies such as McKinsey

·       Who are looked to by both the public and private sector as saviours – with their “protocols” and smart advice

·       It was to McKinsey that Obama turned when he wanted to explore the future of democracy 

The book is a very easy read – from a journalist well-versed, I sensed, in the social sciences since he profiled very appropriately some of the books used for his argument eg “The Ideas Industry” by Daniel Drezler. And I liked the way he brought individuals in to illustrate the story – in the opening pages a young woman vacillating between the private or public sectors who chose McKinsey; in the middle a music student who went to live in Mongolia for 5 years, joined McKinsey and ultimately helped Soros set up his new Social Investment Fund; in the chapter on Philanthropy an older guy who dared to call out the hypocrisy of the rich; and, finally, Bill Clinton. 

When I think about change-agents, I’ve often wondered how we can distinguish the real deal from the fakes. But how do we ever know what’s in our hearts – and how we might change? Both the book’s sub-title and argument certainly made me think very seriously about this. As a middle-of-the-road sceptic and “mugwump”, I am myself at least potentially guilty of such charades. Also appropriately, the book includes this famous quotation from Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” which people often get wrong 

 “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (Falconeri)

Useful Reading

-       A thoughtful review from one of the book’s targets

-       and it seems to have hit home at the famous Wharton School of Management

-       this review briefly summarises each chapter and gives a good sense of the book

-       blog reviews are quite rare but can be quite deep – and this is a good example

-       The McKinsey Way; Ethan M Rasiel (1999) shows the nature of the beast

-       The McKinsey Mind; EM Rasiel and PN Friga (2002) reveals the dirty secrets

-       The LSE Book Review was very positive

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/14/winners-take-all-by-anand-giridharadas-review