The Role of Culture in Conflict Management
MANAGEMENT OF CONFLICT, CULTURE AND CHANGE
By: Sir Wilson Marotse Mulei1
What exactly is culture? Unfortunately a fixed, universal understanding does not exist; there is little consensus within, let alone, across disciplines. Often “culture” is applied so broadly, merely as “social pattern,” that it means very little. Highly specific, idiosyncratic definitions also abound where the term is used in various contexts in support of any agenda.
When “culture” first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary around 1430 it meant “cultivation” or “tending the soil,” based on the Latin culture. Into the 19th century “culture” was associated with the phrase “high culture,” meaning the cultivation or “refinement of mind, taste, and manners.” This generally held to the mid-20th century when its meaning shifted toward its present American Heritage English Dictionary definition: “The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.”
Culture thus consists of group norms of behavior and the underlying shared values that help keep those norms in place.
One of the primary characteristics of human life, over animal life, is that we assign symbolic meaning to ideas, behavior, and objects, as well as have language and speech. We say that humans have culture while animals do not. This is largely due to their inability to ascribe arbitrary symbolic meaning to their world—a chimpanzee could not designate his banana to signify honesty, for example. Culture is also adaptive in that it can and does change in response to various influences and conditions. No culture is truly static— many aspects of American culture are radically different in the wake of the Internet, the dot-com bubble, and global terrorism. And finally, culture is integrated in the sense that it permeates society and becomes part of the social machinery. Culture is the ever-present, ethereal medium in which members live and through which
By: Sir Wilson Marotse Mulei1
What exactly is culture? Unfortunately a fixed, universal understanding does not exist; there is little consensus within, let alone, across disciplines. Often “culture” is applied so broadly, merely as “social pattern,” that it means very little. Highly specific, idiosyncratic definitions also abound where the term is used in various contexts in support of any agenda.
When “culture” first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary around 1430 it meant “cultivation” or “tending the soil,” based on the Latin culture. Into the 19th century “culture” was associated with the phrase “high culture,” meaning the cultivation or “refinement of mind, taste, and manners.” This generally held to the mid-20th century when its meaning shifted toward its present American Heritage English Dictionary definition: “The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.”
Culture thus consists of group norms of behavior and the underlying shared values that help keep those norms in place.
One of the primary characteristics of human life, over animal life, is that we assign symbolic meaning to ideas, behavior, and objects, as well as have language and speech. We say that humans have culture while animals do not. This is largely due to their inability to ascribe arbitrary symbolic meaning to their world—a chimpanzee could not designate his banana to signify honesty, for example. Culture is also adaptive in that it can and does change in response to various influences and conditions. No culture is truly static— many aspects of American culture are radically different in the wake of the Internet, the dot-com bubble, and global terrorism. And finally, culture is integrated in the sense that it permeates society and becomes part of the social machinery. Culture is the ever-present, ethereal medium in which members live and through which
References: [1] Bennis, Warren G. et al. 1989. The Planning of Change. 4th edition. New York: Holt Rhinehart & Winston. [2] Boulding, Kenneth E. 1962. Conflict and Defence. A General Theory. New York: Harper & Row. [3] Burton, John W. 1969. Conflict and Communication. London: Macmillan. [6] Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond Culture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. [7] Hampden-Turner, Charles and Fons Trompenaars. 2000. Building Cross Cultural Competence. How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. [8] Lederach, John Paul. 1995. Preparing for Peace. Conflict Transformation Across Cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 94. [9] Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic vs. analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291–310. [10] Norenzayan, A.,&Nisbett, R. E. (2000). Culture and causal cognition. Current Direction in Psychological Science, 9, 132–135. [11] Peng, K., & Knowles, E. (2003). Culture, ethnicity and the attribution of physical causality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 1272–1284.