To Social Entrepreneurs Who Want To Change The World Someday
It is said in government circles that “implementing lasting cultural change is a strenuous process”; many nations have found this claim to be true. However, one should wonder, is it the very definition of culture that makes the process so demanding.
Contemporary Definition
Most definitions of culture reflect a given group of people’s acquired knowledge, communication, and behaviors. One of the most robust definitions being, “the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.”
Using this definition, when attempting to alter a country’s culture (for good or evil), leads to a complex undertaking where one must measure, analyze, and juggle a myriad of factors to effect change. The people’s history, from this perspective, is only seen a measure of entrenchment. Realigning incentives, rewards, and values with new outcomes is the goal. Very little credence is given to the why? Why have a given group of people decided to do what they are currently doing?
Proposed Definition
To examine the why, one must redefine culture. Culture is simply a collection of behaviors, rules of thumb, and beliefs a group of people have developed or adopted to deal with human issues (e.g., security, trade, public order, aging, reproduction, child rearing, etc.). At the root of this definition is acknowledgement and respect for the people’s intelligence. The people have likely tried things, noticed their effects, made adjustments, and accepted certain tradeoffs.
When we chose to alter a culture from this perspective, we must:
- Examine the target behavior closely;
- Determine the problems that behavior was meant to resolve;
- Determine whether the proposed change will continue to solve the original problem. Or, ascertain whether it will leave the original issue unresolved and therefore potentially introduce another issue(s).
Dealing with cultural change from this vantage point potentially yields three results:
- Allows the social engineer to acknowledge that people are essentially the same.
- Makes plain the idea that people are dealing with the same human issues everywhere on the globe; they have simply settled on different methods of handling them.
- Decreases the likelihood of the people reverting to previous ways once their leadership changes or influence wanes.
What do you think?
