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Cultural Change

• Last Updated: Jul 31, 2023

Cultural change refers to the transformation, modification, or shifts in the cultural patterns of a society over time. This change might manifest in beliefs, values, norms, symbols, and artifacts, among others [1] . In anthropology , understanding cultural change is essential as it helps in deciphering the underlying factors that drive societies to adapt or evolve.

Definition and Characteristics

Cultural change is the dynamic transformation of shared practices, beliefs, and behaviors within a community or society over time. It involves an alteration in the collective mindset, often in response to changes in the environment, technology, or social dynamics [2] .

Characteristics of Cultural Change

• Dynamic: Cultural change is never static; it continually evolves and adapts [3] .
• Influence of External Factors: Changes often occur in response to technological advances, political shifts, or global events [4] .
• Variable Pace: Change can occur slowly through evolution or rapidly as a revolution [5] .
• Irreversible: Once a culture changes, it often cannot return to its previous state [6] .
• Inclusive: Cultural change affects almost all aspects of society, from language to social norms [7] .

Factors Influencing Cultural Change

Cultural change is influenced by a myriad of interconnected factors that interact in complex ways. Here are some primary factors:

1. Technological Advancements

Table 1: Impact of Technology on Cultural Change

Technology plays a significant role in shaping cultural norms by introducing new ways of communication, work, and leisure.

2. Economic Changes

Economic fluctuations influence cultural change by altering social structures, roles, and interactions within a community. The growth of global economies has led to a shift in traditional roles and relationships.

3. Political Factors

Political systems, governance, laws, and policies directly impact cultural change, affecting everything from individual rights to the overall societal framework.

4. Environmental Factors

Climate change and environmental degradation have driven communities to adapt their cultural practices to sustainably interact with their surroundings.

5. Social Interactions and Migration

Social interactions, migration, and globalization contribute to the mixing of cultures, leading to mutual influences and the emergence of hybrid cultural forms.

Recent Updates and Emerging Trends in Cultural Change

Understanding cultural change is an ongoing journey, and in recent years, new insights and developments have emerged. Below, we delve into some of these updates:

1. Digital Culture and Social Media

The rise of social media and digital platforms has created new cultural dynamics, affecting everything from identity formation to political activism. This phenomenon has led to significant debates and research into the effects of online interaction on cultural norms.

2. Climate Change and Sustainability

With the urgent need for climate action, there’s a global shift towards sustainable living. This movement has affected cultural practices, leading to a more conscious relationship with the environment and a change in consumer behaviors.

3. Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced unprecedented changes in cultural behaviors worldwide. Social distancing and remote work have altered traditional practices and may have lasting impacts on cultural dynamics.

4. Globalization and Cultural Hybridization

Globalization continues to drive the fusion of various cultural elements, leading to the emergence of hybrid cultures. This complex interaction provides both opportunities for enrichment and challenges in maintaining cultural identities.

Cultural Change in Specific Contexts

Analyzing cultural change in specific regions or contexts allows for more nuanced understanding. Some examples include:

A. Urbanization and Cultural Shifts

Table 2: Urbanization and Its Impact on Cultural Change

Urbanization continues to shape cultural patterns, especially in emerging economies, where rapid urban growth leads to significant social and cultural transformations.

B. Indigenous Cultures and Change

Indigenous communities are experiencing cultural change driven by various factors such as legal recognition, integration into the national economy, and environmental changes.

Implications and Future Directions

Understanding cultural change is vital for shaping policies, education, and global collaboration. It offers insights into how societies respond to challenges and opportunities, providing a roadmap for fostering positive growth and development.

Future Research

More interdisciplinary research is required to understand the complex interplay between different factors influencing cultural change. Collaboration between anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and environmental scientists can provide a comprehensive view.

Policy Implications

Governments and organizations must recognize the importance of cultural change in shaping policies that are responsive to societal needs and aligned with global trends.

Cultural change is an intricate and continually evolving process, deeply ingrained in the fabric of human existence. The study of cultural change offers profound insights into human nature and society, helping us navigate the complexities of our ever-changing world. Recent developments like digital transformation, sustainability movements, and global pandemics further emphasize the need to continuously explore and understand the dynamics of cultural change.

[1] Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.

[2] O’Neil, D. (2006). Cultural Anthropology Tutorials, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marcos, California.

[3] Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive Culture.

[4] Inglehart, R., & Baker, W. E. (2000). Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 19-51.

[5] Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

[6] Boas, F. (1887). The Study of Geography. https://www.jstor.org/stable/664572

[7] Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures.

Vasundhra, an anthropologist, embarks on a captivating journey to decode the enigmatic tapestry of human society. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, she unravels the intricacies of social phenomena, immersing herself in the lived experiences of diverse cultures. Armed with an unwavering passion for understanding the very essence of our existence, Vasundhra fearlessly navigates the labyrinth of genetic and social complexities that shape our collective identity. Her recent publication unveils the story of the Ancient DNA field, illuminating the pervasive global North-South divide. With an irresistible blend of eloquence and scientific rigor, Vasundhra effortlessly captivates audiences, transporting them to the frontiers of anthropological exploration.

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Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化

Journal of Global Cultural Studies

Accueil Numéros 4 Why do Cultures Change? The Chall...

Why do Cultures Change? The Challenges of Globalization

This essay explores cultural change in the context of the economic globalization currently underway. It aims at analysing the role that theoretical inventiveness and ethical value play in fashioning broader cultural representation and responsibility, and shall explore issues of cultural disunity and conflict, while assessing the influence that leading intellectuals may have in promoting a finer perception of value worldwide. The role of higher education as an asset in the defence of democracy and individual self-development shall be discussed with a view to evaluating its potential for an altered course of globalization.

Texte intégral

• 1  Ralph Waldo Emerson “Napoleon; or, the man of the world” in Joel Porte, Essays and Lectures , New Y (...)

2  Emerson, p. 731.

1 We are always in need of definitions whenever we want to explore why cultures change. We are pressed to come up with answers as to what culture might be and how the idea of culture might fit into a nutshell. The general applicability of the answer we struggle to devise invites theoretical formulas and abstraction from specific historical developments. It also, as a result, cautions us to choose fields from which to cull situations and conflicts that may help deliver the concepts we want to grasp, and invites to understand the theory of culture as shaped by how events unfold, and how society moves along. In particular, one may have in mind what the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote about Napoleon (our favourite dictator, to us French people) in a book he devoted to figures of historical importance ( Representative Men ): “Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born” 1 . This strikes a negative note, as does a quote from Napoleon himself that Emerson has unearthed from the vast body of memoirs the Napoleon era has handed down to us. Emerson is reported to have once declared: “My hand of iron […] was not at the extremity of my arm; it was immediately connected with my head” 2 . The remark and the quote hold a tentative definition of culture. Culture begins when sheer force is mitigated by intellect, intellect itself being shaped by a response to facts, and, we hope, as Emerson hopes, abstracted from fact by ethical imperative. On top of this, we feel Emerson’s attempt at rationality is run through by doubt: what if one might never discriminate between intellect and action? What if one might never grasp how ethics can disengage us from the cogs of history and were incapable of controlling an ongoing process that leads to disaster and apocalypse? Whenever one tries to define culture, culture breaks down into its many components: it splinters into action and responsibility, and we feel there might never be a connection between them. There lies Emerson’s historical pessimism, which it is hard to tone down.

• 3  Hubert Damisch, “A Crisis of Values, or Crisis Value ?”, in Daniel S. Hamilton (ed.), Which Values (...)

2 In recent years, a debate has been brought to the foreground, for reasons that have to do with our increasingly globalized world. Are there any values left? If such a thing as culture exists, then, there might be precise contents of an ethical sort that we want to pin down. Might not this sense of emptiness be the result of a crisis of value, as if the very idea of value had been swept away? This is what the French cultural critic Hubert Damisch thinks has happened, in a recent contribution to a volume aptly titled Which Values for our Time , published by the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon. Damisch rounds up his interrogation as follows: “Crisis of values, or crisis value?” 3 The suggestion is of course that value is no longer visible on the horizon of our history to be, that the trend should be resisted, and that intellectual resistance is what we need. It is by no means new to be aware, among philosophers and cultural critics alike, that values are hard to come by. In Plato’s Republic , book seven, humankind is looking at the walls of a cave, noting the shadows dancing there, and being taught that our poor sight precludes the perception of good and evil, and the difference between them. Now that the walls of the cave have turned into television screens, one image is chased away by the next one, while our sense of global responsibility dissolves into thin air even though all the fields of human action hold perspectives of responsibility within them. Culture, like values, is a plenum and a void, a constant expectation and in the end something impossible when one looks at results and facts.

• 4  Peter Fenves, (ed.), Raising the Tone of Philosophy  ; Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative (...)

3 We should keep in mind Jacques Derrida’s anthropology of culture, and the degree to which it identifies conflict as the prime-mover within our cultural narratives. In a major contribution at a Cerisy conference in Normandy in 1980, titled “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy” 4 , Jacques Derrida opposes two sets of attitudes: seeking rationality, and seeking mystery. Derrida views culture as the competition between the Aüfklarer and the mystics, and suggests there are possibilities that the two trends in cultural discourse might eventually reach some kind of truce achieved as a result of an interaction between them. No doubt he was trying to hold historical pessimism at a distance by suggesting gain might be reached in the historical development of cultures if rationality were capable of reading through the language of mysticism, and curb the influence of those he chose to call the mystagogues, in whom he saw a danger for democracy and human dignity. Cultures change, and when they do, they are pulled in opposite directions if we abide by Derrida’s critical thinking. They change to eliminate reason, even, as Derrida puts it, to emasculate it, and we must, as a result, apply pressure to preserve amity, and to uphold the values of democracy. To be sure, Derrida’s onslaught upon mystery is no onslaught upon religious values: there are many other targets we might think of in the current context of globalized liberal economies and environmental overuse, such as religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and the emergence of a global self-appointed elite, although Derrida’s inquiry was started some thirty years ago, and he never gets that precise about what should be indicted.

Disaster and Apocalypse

• 5  See in particular Making Globalization Work , New York, Norton, 2007, chapter 7, “The Multinational (...)
• 6  Richard Rorty, “Globalization, the politics of identity and Social Hope” in Philosophy and Social (...)

4 Our globalizing societies offer alternatives to an ideal world. In particular, market mechanisms and the rise of global capital have impoverished some non-European nations, while Europe has, in recent years, worked to thin the immigration flux while downsizing out of their jobs the low-skilled workers of a once predominantly industrial economy that has now turned to services. As a result, local communities have been struck, either in Europe or the United States, by being impoverished within the more glitzy context of affluence. In China as elsewhere, industrial activity has surged, while working conditions have never been worse among the former peasants driven to urban areas. Globalization may well pass for an agenda of disaster and social apocalypse, as Joseph Stiglitz has demonstrated 5 . Welfare and human rights have hardly benefited from the promise economic liberalism keeps harping on, and human development has been restricted to the rising middle-classes of China, or India, if we look at the most significant examples. Richard Rorty, meditating on social hope, has brought home the idea that globalization has been a blow to democracy. He wrote the following in an essay published in 1993: “We now have a global overclass which makes all the major economic decisions, and makes them entirely independently from the legislatures, and a fortiori of the will of the voters, of any given country” 6 . Rorty’s remark comes as an apposite reminder that there is no such thing as a world government, a fact that we all tend to overlook. The ideology of economic growth heralds human development, but delivers little in terms of the strengthening of local communities, both in rising nations as well as in Western ones. Might not this ideology form the most recent embodiment of some pseudo-thinking the mystagogues parade as rationality for us to kneel to?

5 Communities, we hear, have gone global, which means they are now glocal. The portmanteau word means more than it seems to say. On the one hand, the buzzword suggests that local communities may be strengthened by globalization; on the other, it suggests that local communities are shaped, in ways that cannot all be positive, by the advance of global liberalism. However, one of the unsought effects of glocalization may well be that cultural interference with distant or unknown communities might emerge from the pressure of global liberalism, by dissolving national, or even nationalist perspectives, and favouring international contacts. Let us be cautious in this: international interaction, in the context of globalizing economic exchange, may well be no other than buying and selling, and one more version of materialism without national values being cross-fertilized.

• 7  Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s debate , Cambridge, M (...)

6 Globalization cannot control the rise of a new conservatism, in spite of the surge in optimism that comes with it in some areas, if we look at the poor condition of welfare systems across developed countries and elsewhere. As Habermas has pointed out, “modernity sees itself as dependent exclusively upon itself” 7 , and utopian ideals are increasingly wiped out of the Zeitgeist. Globalization is in dire need of strengthening, not exhausting, utopian energies. If it proves incapable of effecting this, renewing utopian energies, the road down globalization may well be what one supposes it to be from recent evidence: a hurdle-race, with one winner, a few good athletes, and vast crowds of anonymous losers. Jacques Derrida has pointed out that we need peace in culture, and that peace can be achieved when the mystagogues accept to interact with rationality. Rationality however, to him, is not an empty bottle, or an instrument by which societies may solve practical questions. Rationality involves moral choice, and one may well suggest that the Habermas notion that utopian ideals have to be upheld is the best way to reorder, and refashion global liberalism. No doubt, the culture wars must go on, to stay the current backlash and its related traumas, terrorism East and West, the political violence within national borders and without, the religious fundamentalism which has found in globalization its ecotope, in Israel, in the Arab world, in the United States, and elsewhere, while environmental disasters from North to South take their toll upon communities. Cultures, as a result of globalization, change, for reasons that have to do with the innate systemic risks that globalization runs through them, risks which are supra-human, but which, for that very reason, have to be identified, deconstructed, and eliminated, although we do know that this process cannot be the work of one sole generation. Indifference as well as naïveté ought to be avoided. If, as Habermas thinks they are, utopian values are used-up, because they are targeted, then, they must be invigorated.

• 8  Emery Roe and Michel J.G. Van Eeten, “Three – Not Two – Major Environmental Counternarratives to G (...)

7 No doubt any such invigoration, if we want it to have pragmatic efficiency, we need specific measures, and precautions. Intellectual clarity can help. And meditation upon what is and what is not scientific can be an asset. It is true odium has been cast on the precautionary principle by some scholars of environmental studies. In a fairly recent issue (2004) of the M.I.T. Press quarterly Global Environmental Politics, scholars Emery Roe and Michel Van Eeten have condemned the precautionary principle in matters of environmental policy on the grounds that scientific evidence is not sufficient, calling for empirical knowledge, supposed to be an index to what is and what is not scientific 8 . Is it that globalization has reshaped the image of science in academia, making us wistful once again, and inviting us to find peace of mind in a belated version of science which is reminiscent of the nineteenth century, when science was largely considered to rely on empirical observation, whatever this might mean? Empiricism and dogmatic thinking are birds of a feather flocking together. More open intellectual attitudes are necessary to face the risks of globalization upon our environment. Doubt, in particular, may be protective, in this respect. Without it, scientific thinking can be stultified. Science cannot be independent of general interest and social respect, and requires critical detachment to shelter us from the systemic dangers inherent in its objects of inquiry and the applicability of its fundamental findings. In scientific knowledge as well, the culture wars loom large, though they tend to be overlooked. These wars may lead both ways: to cultural changes that will crush social hope, and to cultural changes that will uplift a sense of community and cooperation.

The Secularization of Value

9  Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite Métaphysique des Tsunamis , Paris, Seuil, 2005, p. 85.

8 The values of science, therefore, should be secularized, and scientists should avoid generating systems which hold dangers in them that might express their potential for destruction. The French philosopher and Stanford scholar Jean-Pierre Dupuy has pointed out that the atomic bombing of Japan was the result of systemic danger, in an amazing remark: “Why was the bomb ever used? Because it existed, quite simply” 9 . The implication of what he says is that science too, and what was at one point presented as an advance of the civilized mind, may lead to pragmatic consequences that reshape thinking and emasculate it, if we want to harp on the Derrida proposition that the mystagogues are able to emasculate rationality (let us pardon Derrida’s male chauvinism if we can). Human thinking involves systemic dangers, and one therefore has to rethink thinking in different terms, which has been the task of modern philosophy. Perhaps we might suggest at this point that cultural change involves the thinking of rationality in secularized terms. This means that technology may well lead us astray, tethered as it is to scientific knowledge which we tend to view as total, whereas any inquiry into the results of science tends to demonstrate that science is provisional, and that its propositions will sooner or later be refined, or redefined, and that intellectual inquiry, whatever its field, rarely comes to conclusions that will never be reworded, or revised. Knowledge is an ongoing process, and if we keep this in mind, we secularize science, instead of projecting it onto the higher plane of superior frozen truths. Science, like any other human adventure, unfolds through time, and taking this into consideration helps science respond to social needs.

9 Political scientists are struggling for secular views, as John Rawls has amply demonstrated. Behind his eulogy of democracy as a condition and an effect of economic and political liberalism, one finds an attempt to define the nature of rationality as the mainspring of social hope. It is striking, when reading John Rawls, to realize the extent to which rationality is assessed in conjunction with its effects upon social organization, which yields workable political conceptions of justice. John Rawls, in his second major opus, Political Liberalism , defines political rationality as outcome-centered, and this leads to a list of primary goods, which reads as follows:

basic rights and liberties […];

freedom of movement and free choice of occupation against a background of diverse opportunities;

powers and prerogatives of offices and positions of responsibility in the political and economic institutions of the basic structure;

income and wealth;

• 10  John Rawls, Political Liberalism , New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 181. Joseph Stigli (...)

and finally, the social bases of self-respect. 10

• 11  Slavoj Zizek, “Le Tibet pris dans le rêve de l’autre”, Le Monde Diplomatique , n° 650, mai 2008, p. (...)

10 Rawls’ agenda relies on the traditions of the common-sense philosophy of the English-speaking world and the theoretical culture of pragmatism, which he found ready for use in his New-England intellectual environment. Nowhere do we find perspectives that would be disconnected from and independent from day-to-day preoccupations. Rawls wants to harness human development to democracy, to wring democracy out of economic growth, while there is an increasing belief, in this century, that our globalized economies hold a promise of democracy as an expectation which will always be contradicted by fact. Just recently, in a major contribution to the debate, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has pointed out that China allies a vicious use of the Asian bludgeon in Tibet with the logics of the European stock-market, and that this betrays the belief that democracy is an obstacle to economic growth. As a result of this, Zizek’s assumption is that our global culture might be brought to understand that democracy is no longer needed to back human development, which might lead global cultural change in the wrong direction 11 . Democracy has to be maintained as a horizon of belief, and as the sole teleology worthy of respect. Rawls helps us understand that teleology should be one version of practicality, though we tend to think that any political teleology is an empty promise. His contribution to political philosophy views rationality not just as a belated version of theology, but as a tool that may help deliver collective results, following in the footsteps of American intellectual traditions which assess value in terms of their pragmatic consequences rather than in terms of otherworldly conceptual exploration.

• 12  Samuel Huntington, “Foreword” in Lawrence E. Harrison & Samuel Huntington (eds.), Culture Matters: (...)

11 What if, beyond this sound conception of political values, and the organic laws that go to frame them, human culture was unresponsive, thus precluding cultural change, and sustainable development? It is this situation that Samuel Huntington examines, leaving little room for hope, suggesting that cultures cannot change, or will change slowly or with difficulty, on the grounds that society will not change and that there is no connection between assumptions, beliefs, and the economic and political opportunities that the modern liberal state offers if we are willing to grasp them. Huntington’s dream is to get rid of cultural obstacles to economic development, while it is yet unclear whether there is any strong belief in the virtues of democracy in what he has to say. Huntington’s answer does not intend to demonstrate that it is democracy which has to be left out of his global picture. In his case, if progress is not fast enough, it is because those cultures which resist progress as seen from Massachusetts are obstacles which one must remove, but Huntington is no clear analyst of how culture and democracy might hinge. “[…] We define culture, Huntington writes, in purely subjective terms as the values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society” 12 . His vision of culture has left one notion unmentioned: what about solidarity, the cornerstone of Richard Rorty’s vision of social hope? It may well be that this is one value that the modern liberal state has eroded, and that solidarity is a basic asset to those communities forming the lesser developed countries of Africa, Latin America and parts of the Asian world, where welfare is weak, and institutionalized education poorly developed, where, for political reasons, states are not ready to reach out to populations and areas left to their own resources and inventiveness in terms of welfare. Huntington’s discourse, as a result, is a perfect illustration of the New Conservatism that Habermas has targeted. Modernity, in Huntington’s world-view, is seen as totally dependent on itself. Beliefs, in particular, are taken to task, in Huntington’s definition of culture. What if beliefs were an adequate instrument of the progress Huntington has in mind, one notion which is empty enough, and which Huntington parades to conceal his conservative views? Inherited ideas and attitudes are more of a survival-kit than an obstacle to social cohesiveness. One hardly knows, when reading Huntington, whether progress, the norm of his perspective, is one serious academic case of mystagogic thinking, or whether it may have practical applicability. It is arguable that progress, with Samuel Huntington, is an abstract notion.

13  Lucian W. Pye, “’Asian Values’: from dynamos to dominoes?”, Culture Matters , p. 249 .  

• 14  On this consider Françoise Lemoine, L’Economie de la Chine , Paris, La Découverte, 2006, esp. pp. 6 (...)

12 Asian culture turns out to be an epistemological obstacle to many political scientists. Once considered incapable of generating economic growth, Asian values are seen as an asset in the ongoing economic race, with growth rates that belittle Europe and the United States alike in some quarters of the Asian world. Can one blame economic stagnation on them yesterday, and now say that some basic values of Asian cultures are the leverage of change helping those so-called miracle economies make some headway? There may well be an emphasis on hard work in Chinese culture, but one cannot see how this is specifically Chinese, or American, or British. Lucian Pye, one prominent M.I.T. scholar in Chinese studies, has suggested that Taoism and the belief in good fortune, supposed to be specific to Chinese culture (although I am aware this might be challenged), has produced outgoing dynamic character in the Chinese people, which makes them ready to grasp any opportunity likely to turn to their advantage. Pye’s view of Chinese culture may easily be taken to task, as he implies that Chinese culture leaves no room for introspection. This is most probably a typical misconception such as New-England protestant culture wants to bring home. Lucian Pye, in particular, writes the following when considering the reasons for China’s rapid expansion: “This stress of the role of fortune makes for an outward-looking and highly reality-oriented approach to life, not an introspective one” 13 . This is, we guess, one academic version of prejudice insisting that the Chinese have no soul, and no interest for an inner life. Economists, on the other hand, go for a more mundane vision of China’s development, insisting on the capacity to attract foreign investors 14 . This is also quite true of many other rising Asian economies besides China.

13 However, these observations lead us to want to extend our definition of culture. Culture is not just simply a cluster of beliefs and attitudes outside the realm of economic and political development. Culture is probably much more than beliefs and attitudes. It encompasses what we might call material culture, in the sense that attitudes matter in economic development, which is no big news, if we refer to Max Weber’s understanding of the ethic of capitalism, shaped as it is by the sense of insecurity that goes with the necessity to devise for oneself advancement in this world, the better to advance in the next one, or the higher or more sophisticated one in the rich oriental spiritual heritage. No wonder then that Derrida should suggest that between rationality and mystery, there is one connection to be established. And, in Derrida’s view of how rationality and mystery interact, one finds an abiding agreement occurring, and this is of course desirable to establish peace in what he calls culture, which to him is more of a socially encompassing substance than a mere individual determinant of behaviour.

15  Pye, “’Asian Values’: from dynamos to dominoes?”, p. 250.

16  Pye, p. 250.

14 Lucian Pye is interesting as an analyst of Chinese social development, not for what certainties he may have in store for us, but for the scepticism which his propositions will cause in most areas of the academic world, and across disciplines. Examining the reasons for China’s economic advance, he writes that “[...] the driving force in Chinese capitalism has always been to find out who needs what and to satisfy that market need” 15 . One might meditate for quite a while to determine whether markets are out there for anyone to grab, or whether one should shape markets, create needs, and respond to one’s ambition to grow by being inventive. Nevertheless, Lucian Pye views Chinese economy as a simplistic answer to world needs, and the capacity to adapt to them, whereas the West is seen as technology-driven, and culturally more sophisticated: “Western firms seek to improve their products, strengthen their organizational structures, and work hard to achieve name recognition” 16 . We wonder whether Chinese firms have not always tried to do precisely this, which can only be generalized with a vast highly educated workforce, which China is trying to obtain by adequate investment in higher education. This path is promising, from what we can judge when considering our Chinese students in our higher learning European institutions.

Cultural Change and Universities

17  Habermas, The New Conservatism , p. 104.

18  Jacques Derrida, L’Université sans condition , Paris, Galilée, 2001, p. 16.

19  See “The Idea of the University”, The New Conservatism , pp. 100-127.

15 If therefore, cultures change, not just private cultures, but also public ones, as we increasingly suspect cultures to be collective assets, university education has a major role to play in this process. We, as academics, either experienced or aspiring ones, must address the issue of what a university education ought to be like. So far in this discussion, we have acknowledged that academics should avoid voicing social prejudice, and this has not always been accomplished, to say the least. Jacques Derrida has meditated extensively on this, with a view to promoting the role education might play in defending the values of democracy, no doubt because Derrida’s understanding of the effects of academic training is combined with the idea of a political education for youth. This may be easily understood when one looks at the moral paralysis of the German university system and its many graduates embracing Nazism and providing the Nazi regime with its most destructive propagandists and functionaries. However, Habermas is clear on this point. German universities cannot be blamed for what befell. Habermas, in particular, points out that the number of students was halved during Nazism in Germany, dropping from 121 000 in 1933 to below 60 000 right before the Second World War 17 . One reason why this happened, although Derrida is not explicit on this point, is that universities tend to over-specialize knowledge. This has caused the decline of humanistic study. Habermas offers similar views, though they are cast in a more sociological mould. To Derrida, higher education should be critical of whatever rationality wants to assess. He calls this “the university without conditions”, which to him involves an ambitious agenda thus defined: “the primal right to say anything, be it in the name of fiction and of knowledge as experiment, and the right to speak publicly, and to publish this” 18 . Habermas offers a more accurate version of what ought to be done, and has been insufficiently accomplished so far: integrating humanistic study and technical expertise to curb the specialization of knowledge 19 .

20  Derrida, L’Université sans condition , p. 69.

16 This may sound vague enough, and we wonder where it might lead, because one doubts whether knowledge, in various disciplines, might efficiently refrain from becoming specialized. This is why Derrida comes up with more practical propositions as to the contents and orientations of higher education in the book he published in 2001, L’Université sans condition . There are seven such propositions, all having to do with what one might call the architecture of knowledge, all answering the need to redefine humanistic study, which should come alongside more specialized training, either in established scholarly disciplines, or the training of students towards professions outside the academic world. The new humanities should, according to Derrida, deal with what he calls “the history of man”, which calls us to devote more attention than has so far been devoted to human rights, be they for men or women. To him, these rights are “legal performatives” 20 , which sounds otherworldly owing to the weight of abstraction in the phrase. However, this might basically mean that these rights are to be upheld because they can be applied to the various fields of human activity. Furthermore we must bear in mind that these so-called “legal performatives” are performatives because they hold within them an applicability that may be constantly expanded, in practical terms, to various areas of cultural practice, among which of course science and business, two areas of higher education that are growing to meet the social needs of human development.

17 The idea of democracy comes second in Derrida’s architecture of the new humanities. It comes second for reasons of clarity in the presentation of the programme he has in mind. Yet the idea of democracy is not a second-thought, because it runs, let us be reminded, through all his oeuvre as a philosopher. Let us note that democracy, as far as what Derrida has to say about it, is not tethered to nationhood. Nationhood is dangerous, and one may easily understand this in the light of European history, and also of Asia. From this, we can easily infer that cultural change in the future should not rely on national traditions, and that, in this respect, globalization offers opportunities for positive cross-fertilization. Derrida’s meditation on this hinges on the concept of sovereignty. While sovereignty is a desirable goal for each and every one of us; the idea is viewed as misleading, as it has often been a concept without practical consequences, while we may still hope that sovereignty will remain a horizon of belief for individuals, and a value that will guide collective decisions. Yet, if Derrida invites us to abide by this concept (sovereignty), he also believes that any collective formalization of the idea of sovereignty should avoid reliance on the nation-state, which may too easily lead to a betrayal of individual dignity.

21  Derrida, p. 72.

18 Derrida then focuses on the necessity to recuperate the authority of teaching, and of literature, whose proposals cannot be easily understood. One suspects, when reading Derrida’s proposals, that teaching as well as literature have to do with amity, a concept that emerges from Derrida’s body of works. This is not a norm, neither is it prescriptive, nor can it be strictly defined as a doctrine or a set of mandatory rules. We gather this is to be understood as an opening to otherness on the part of the teacher, and a eulogy of respect for the other person, which involves inventiveness and the by-passing of any sort of regulation that defines the other person in some way or other that might lead to a position of authority of a colonial or exploitative nature. It certainly is an attitude of respect, which elbows aside the very notion of authority, “routs it”, as Derrida says 21 . Universities, therefore, should constitute an idea that transcends any specialized discourse on the technicalities of education; it consists in letting the other reach out for his or her potential towards self-development. The institutional strength of higher education springs, in Derrida’s view of it, from the interaction of the person who teaches and the one being taught, to live to the full his or her aspirations. Derrida’s ideal is so elevated that it transcends any definition one might come up with. It certainly is a call to confront the normative nature of higher education in order to recuperate a lost sense of human warmth that has been eliminated by the technocratic complexities of institutions seeking intellectual identity in the measurement of student skills and their willingness to comply to them. One also cannot rule out that a backlash has been underway in higher education itself owing to the rising number of first-generation graduates from the less educated groups of our national cultures. This has been more of an opportunity for universities to fulfil their cultural mission from the sixties onwards than a serious obstacle to the growth of higher education, and one can argue that Derrida was balking away from the pessimistic discourse one hears in most academic circles today – ill-grounded as it is on the relative accessibility to higher education.

• 22  On this, consider Daniel Parrochia, La Forme des crises : logique et épistémologie , Seyssel, Champ (...)

19 The challenges that higher education has to face, in the context of an ever-increasing cross-fertilization of cultures, points to one underlying question that surfaces from an examination of current economic and social trends. Is what we call culture tethered to social and economic factors? The question is by no means new, and was handed down to us by the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, and by Marxist theory. We now tend to believe that culture is one mode of collective representation that one may disengage from submission to social and economic facts. On this point, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim referred to real structures , that he saw as disconnected from institutions or working facts . 22 There is still much thought to be devoted to whether the degree of autonomy of culture as collective representation involves radical or relative autonomy from economic factors. We are also hard pressed to determine whether, in this framework of analytical thinking, autonomy is or is not hampered by the necessities of those real structures and the institutions that shape them, and even perhaps discreetly justify them. Hence, Stiglitz’s view that one must respond to a democratic deficit, and Derrida’s view that one must face the serious issue of a democratic deficit in higher education. The question is not benign, and it calls forth an autonomy of the mind to bend social realities and economic factors to purposes that do not derive from them.

1  Ralph Waldo Emerson “Napoleon; or, the man of the world” in Joel Porte, Essays and Lectures , New York, The Library of America, 1983, p. 731.

3  Hubert Damisch, “A Crisis of Values, or Crisis Value ?”, in Daniel S. Hamilton (ed.), Which Values for our Time, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Center for Transatlantic Relations, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, p. 57.

4  Peter Fenves, (ed.), Raising the Tone of Philosophy  ; Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida , Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 117-171; French edition : « D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie » in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy (ed.), Les Fins de l’Homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida , Paris, Galilée, 1981, pp. 445-479.

5  See in particular Making Globalization Work , New York, Norton, 2007, chapter 7, “The Multinational Corporation”.

6  Richard Rorty, “Globalization, the politics of identity and Social Hope” in Philosophy and Social Hope , London, Penguin, 1999, p. 233.

7  Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s debate , Cambridge, Mass., The M.I.T. Press, (1989) 1997, p. 48.

8  Emery Roe and Michel J.G. Van Eeten, “Three – Not Two – Major Environmental Counternarratives to Globalization”, Global Environmental Politics , 4:4, November 2004; see in particular pp. 36-39.

10  John Rawls, Political Liberalism , New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 181. Joseph Stiglitz follows suits with a set of more technical criteria in Making Globalization Work; s ee the section“Responding to the Democratic Deficit”, pp. 280-285.

11  Slavoj Zizek, “Le Tibet pris dans le rêve de l’autre”, Le Monde Diplomatique , n° 650, mai 2008, p. 32.

12  Samuel Huntington, “Foreword” in Lawrence E. Harrison & Samuel Huntington (eds.), Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress , New York, Basic Books, 2000, XV.

14  On this consider Françoise Lemoine, L’Economie de la Chine , Paris, La Découverte, 2006, esp. pp. 67-68.

22  On this, consider Daniel Parrochia, La Forme des crises : logique et épistémologie , Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2008, esp. pp. 104-128.

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Alain Suberchicot , « Why do Cultures Change? The Challenges of Globalization » ,  Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 , 4 | 2008, 5-17.

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Alain Suberchicot , « Why do Cultures Change? The Challenges of Globalization » ,  Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 4 | 2008, mis en ligne le 20 septembre 2009 , consulté le 03 avril 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/237 ; DOI  : https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.237

Alain Suberchicot

Professor , American Studies, University of Lyon (Jean-Moulin)

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How to Get Beyond Talk of “Culture Change” and Make It Happen

Experts outline their roadmap for intentionally changing the culture of businesses, social networks, and beyond.

February 20, 2024

Calls for cultural transformation have become ubiquitous in the past few years, encompassing everything from advancing racial justice and questioning gender roles to rethinking the American workplace. Hazel Rose Markus recalls the summer of 2020 as a watershed for those conversations. “Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, the culture has to change,’” says Markus, a professor of psychology at Stanford. “It was just rolling off everybody’s lips in every domain.” Yet no one seemed to know what exactly that might entail or how to get started.

As they followed these discussions, Markus and her colleagues Jennifer Eberhardt and MarYam Hamedani wondered what they could contribute at this moment as experts with years of experience studying how communities and organizations can turn the desire for change into something real. “Culture is all around us, but at the same time, it feels out of reach for a lot of people,” says Eberhardt, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and of psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Markus and Eberhardt are the faculty co-directors of Stanford SPARQ , a “do tank” that brings researchers and practitioners together to apply the lessons of behavioral science to combating bias and disparities; Hamedani is its executive director and senior research scientist. Recently, along with associate director of criminal justice partnerships Rebecca Hetey , they published an evidence-based roadmap to intentional cultural change in American Psychologist . They hope, Hamedani says, to illustrate “a path forward and to make the claim that culture change is possible.”

Stanford Business spoke with Eberhardt, Hamedani, and Markus to discuss the complexities of changing a culture and how leaders and readers who are committed to doing things differently can get started.

You start the paper with the “four I’s,” categories you believe can help people map their cultures and see where there might be tensions or mismatches. Using organizational cultures as an example, can you take us through those?

Hazel Rose Markus: There are the ideas , the big ideologies that are foundational for any organization: This is how we do things, what’s good, and what we value. Then the institutional parts, which are the everyday policies and practices that people use to do their work. Often, those have been in place for a long time and people tend to follow them as if they were the natural order of things. Another I is the interactions, which have to do with what’s going on in the office every day, in your relationships with your colleagues, with the people you supervise, with those you answer to. And finally, the fourth part is your own individual attitudes, feelings, and actions.

Is there a way to sum up your roadmap for changing culture?

MarYam Hamedani: The first key idea is because we built it, we can change it. There are many forces out there that are out of our control, but the societies we build and pass on — the organizations, the institutions, the way we live our lives — those are things that are human-made. And so we should feel empowered by that inheritance because that’s the thing that gives us the ability to make change.

The second part is that culture change usually involves a series of power struggles and clashes and divides. You have different groups that feel like they’re winning and losing. There’s a lot at stake for people. It’s important to try to have strategies to deal with that.

Finally, culture change can be unpredictable and have unintended consequences. Yet the dynamics can also follow patterns — for example, backlash happens. Timing matters. So you have to be nimble; you have to realize that cultural change never ends. It’s a sustainable process that you have to stay on top of, and that’s OK.

Markus: Yes, changemakers can’t be discouraged when they see backlash. Also, we want to help people remember that yes, they are individuals, but they are also making culture through their actions. How our everyday actions can contribute to a larger culture and to its change is something I think we are less likely to think about in our individualistic system.

Hamedani: Right. We are individuals and in charge of our own behavior, but then we are powerful as a group.

Markus: With each other, what are we modeling? What are we putting our efforts behind? What’s the impact on the workplace?

Your paper was written with the problem of social inequality in mind. What message does it have for business leaders?

Jennifer Eberhardt: As business leaders, you have both a lot of power and, I think, a lot of obligation to understand the workings of culture. You have the power to pull the levers of change. You dictate what the social environment is like for everyone else. So you have a heavy hand in creating and sustaining the culture that is there — but you can also have a heavy hand in changing that culture for the better.

Markus: When culture change is on the agenda, you often hear leaders — like those in the tech industry — and the first thing they often say is, “OK, I’m going on a listening tour.” But you rarely hear about what they’re going to listen for or what they heard from those who report to them or how they’re going to put that into action.

Listening is valuable because it conveys empathy, but it is useful to listen specifically for what people understand as the important values of our organization, the undergirding ideas. What are we about? What are we trying to be as an organization? And, very importantly, do our policies and practices reflect these ideas and values and our mission? We can say we’re about one thing or another, but how is it materialized? How does it show up in our everyday work? Is there a general alignment across the four I’s of the culture?

You worked with Nextdoor on a project to change its culture. How did that go?

Eberhardt: They reached out to me and other researchers trying to figure out how to curb racial profiling on their platform. In the tech industry, people are focused on building products that are easy to use, products that are intuitive, so that users don’t really have to think too hard. But those are also conditions under which racial bias might thrive. So we encouraged them to slow users down, to increase friction rather than trying to take friction away.

Quote As business leaders, you have both a lot of power and, I think, a lot of obligation to understand the workings of culture. You have the power to pull the levers of change. Attribution Jennifer Eberhardt

They accomplished this by creating a checklist for users to review before posting on a Nextdoor forum. The first thing they ask people to consider is that a person’s race is not an indication of their criminal activity. And also when they describe a person, you don’t just describe their race, you describe their behavior. What are they doing that seems suspicious? Nextdoor found that just simply slowing people down in this way, based on these social psychological principles, they were able to reduce profiling by over 75%.

They were trying to solve for something at the interaction level. What they could change was what the experience was like for users at the institutional level. Just by making these simple tweaks to the platform itself and how they presented information, they changed these negative interactions that were taking place that then could also shape people’s ideas about race.

You also talk in the paper about the example of investment firms struggling to become more diverse.

Markus: Typically this has been the territory of white men with economics degrees from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton. It was a closed and locked world. In studies we did in the investing domain, we found that race can influence professional investors’ financial judgments. Many people in the industry would like to create a culture that is more open and inclusive, but there is a powerful default assumption at work that acts as a barrier. In a lot of these firms, the default is still, “I know in my gut what a successful idea is and who is likely to build a company that can grow. I can see it and feel it, and either you match or you don’t match.”

It seems like a point of tension where the institutional level says it wants change, but at the interaction level, this is still a relationship-driven industry. So what do you do about that?

Hamedani: It depends where in the culture map you want to start. Let’s say you diversify the students coming in and getting MBAs. Then you have to look at how are they’re being mentored and supported through their schooling experience, through the internships and job opportunities that they have. Are you simply assuming that they should assimilate to the default? Are you training a new, exciting, and diverse group of people to act like those that have been there all along? Or are you incorporating their ideas and diverse ways of being that might look or sound different and affording them the same respect and status? Are you teaching them how to do a pitch a certain way because there’s only one right way to do a pitch? Or might they have other styles of communication or ways of selling an idea?

At the GSB, Jennifer has a class, Racial Bias and Structural Inequality , where she brings in all these amazing CEOs who are women and people of color. Most of the students, they’ve never seen it before. And that’s what happens to people in these investment firms: They haven’t seen it before. Even that intervention of seeing, week after week, these leaders coming in and the students get to ask them questions and have a conversation with them — that’s an interaction .

Eberhardt: I had Sarah Friar , MBA ’00, the CEO of Nextdoor, come in. I had the president of Black Entertainment Television, Scott Mills , come in; I had the police chief of San Francisco, William Scott , come in — they are both African American.

And the hope is that these students who will go on to work in the business world will have a broader definition of what is a “culture fit”?

Hamedani: Exactly right. And more specifically, a “leader fit.” And for women and students of color, that they can also see themselves as leaders. But it takes things happening at all levels in the culture map to make that happen. You’re seeding this change and then the levels are reinforcing each other to help it grow.

What would you recommend as a starting place for readers who are thinking that they want to spark intentional cultural change wherever they are?

Markus: It would begin with mapping the culture: What matters to us, what do we value? And then, to the extent that there’s some consensus about our culture, reflecting on whether our ways of doing things reflect this. In so many organizations we’re working with now, there’s really a gap between what leaders feel their values are, what they care about, and what the employees are experiencing. What we see is that it’s important to give the employees chances to get together to talk about this and have some company time, some paid time, to discuss these issues —

Hamedani: — to vision the future. Because there’s that virtue signaling, “OK, we care about that, but really we’re so busy and we have all these things to do. We have to hit our targets for the quarter or for the year.” Of course, those things are important, but are people — employees and leaders alike — participating in visioning that future and laying out the goals and objectives together? Can you make some small or even larger changes such that people feel empowered that they’re part of building that culture together?

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

For media inquiries, visit the Newsroom .

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August 01, 2023 Follow the Leader: How a CEO’s Personality Is Reflected in Their Company’s Culture There’s no ideal personality type for executives — but businesses need the right one for success.

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Cultural Identity Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

No matter where you study, composing essays of any type and complexity is a critical component in any studying program. Most likely, you have already been assigned the task to write a cultural identity essay, which is an essay that has to do a lot with your personality and cultural background. In essence, writing a cultural identity essay is fundamental for providing the reader with an understanding of who you are and which outlook you have. This may include the topics of religion, traditions, ethnicity, race, and so on. So, what shall you do to compose a winning cultural identity essay?

Cultural Identity Paper: Definitions, Goals & Topics 

Before starting off with a cultural identity essay, it is fundamental to uncover what is particular about this type of paper. First and foremost, it will be rather logical to begin with giving a general and straightforward definition of a cultural identity essay. In essence, cultural identity essay implies outlining the role of the culture in defining your outlook, shaping your personality, points of view regarding a multitude of matters, and forming your qualities and beliefs. Given a simpler definition, a cultural identity essay requires you to write about how culture has influenced your personality and yourself in general. So in this kind of essay you as a narrator need to give an understanding of who you are, which strengths you have, and what your solid life position is.

Yet, the goal of a cultural identity essay is not strictly limited to describing who you are and merely outlining your biography. Instead, this type of essay pursues specific objectives, achieving which is a perfect indicator of how high-quality your essay is. Initially, the primary goal implies outlining your cultural focus and why it makes you peculiar. For instance, if you are a french adolescent living in Canada, you may describe what is so special about it: traditions of the community, beliefs, opinions, approaches. Basically, you may talk about the principles of the society as well as its beliefs that made you become the person you are today.

So far, cultural identity is a rather broad topic, so you will likely have a multitude of fascinating ideas for your paper. For instance, some of the most attention-grabbing topics for a personal cultural identity essay are:

• Memorable traditions of your community
• A cultural event that has influenced your personality 
• Influential people in your community
• Locations and places that tell a lot about your culture and identity

Cultural Identity Essay Structure

As you might have already guessed, composing an essay on cultural identity might turn out to be fascinating but somewhat challenging. Even though the spectrum of topics is rather broad, the question of how to create the most appropriate and appealing structure remains open.

Like any other kind of an academic essay, a cultural identity essay must compose of three parts: introduction, body, and concluding remarks. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the components:

Introduction 

Starting to write an essay is most likely one of the most time-consuming and mind-challenging procedures. Therefore, you can postpone writing your introduction and approach it right after you finish body paragraphs. Nevertheless, you should think of a suitable topic as well as come up with an explicit thesis. At the beginning of the introduction section, give some hints regarding the matter you are going to discuss. You have to mention your thesis statement after you have briefly guided the reader through the topic. You can also think of indicating some vital information about yourself, which is, of course, relevant to the topic you selected.

Your main body should reveal your ideas and arguments. Most likely, it will consist of 3-5 paragraphs that are more or less equal in size. What you have to keep in mind to compose a sound ‘my cultural identity essay’ is the argumentation. In particular, always remember to reveal an argument and back it up with evidence in each body paragraph. And, of course, try to stick to the topic and make sure that you answer the overall question that you stated in your topic. Besides, always keep your thesis statement in mind: make sure that none of its components is left without your attention and argumentation.

Conclusion 

Finally, after you are all finished with body paragraphs and introduction, briefly summarize all the points in your final remarks section. Paraphrase what you have already revealed in the main body, and make sure you logically lead the reader to the overall argument. Indicate your cultural identity once again and draw a bottom line regarding how your culture has influenced your personality.

Best Tips For Writing Cultural Identity Essay

Writing a ‘cultural identity essay about myself’ might be somewhat challenging at first. However, you will no longer struggle if you take a couple of plain tips into consideration. Following the tips below will give you some sound and reasonable cultural identity essay ideas as well as make the writing process much more pleasant:

• Start off by creating an outline. The reason why most students struggle with creating a cultural identity essay lies behind a weak structure. The best way to organize your ideas and let them flow logically is to come up with a helpful outline. Having a reference to build on is incredibly useful, and it allows your essay to look polished.
• Remember to write about yourself. The task of a cultural identity essay implies not focusing on your culture per se, but to talk about how it shaped your personality. So, switch your focus to describing who you are and what your attitudes and positions are. 
• Think of the most fundamental cultural aspects. Needless to say, you first need to come up with a couple of ideas to be based upon in your paper. So, brainstorm all the possible ideas and try to decide which of them deserve the most attention. In essence, try to determine which of the aspects affected your personality the most.
• Edit and proofread before submitting your paper. Of course, the content and the coherence of your essay’s structure play a crucial role. But the grammatical correctness matters a lot too. Even if you are a native speaker, you may still make accidental errors in the text. To avoid the situation when unintentional mistakes spoil the impression from your essay, always double check your cultural identity essay. 

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50 Culture Essay Topics — Best Ideas for College Students

From time to time, students have to observe various aspects of spiritual and material worlds and values. This process is frequent for History, Anthropology, Philosophy, Sociology classes. Talking about culture in the USA and other countries and conducting culture research helps to develop various skills and ways of thinking. Writing about it boost your creativity and help to formulate interesting thoughts while supporting them with reasonable evidence.

In college, young people are faced with a wide range of writings, and the culture is one of the most interesting essay topics to be assigned. It's always interesting to compare and analyze the development and importance of different customs around the world and find ways to understand contemporary popular art. But to express your opinion appropriately, it's important to decide on a subject matter first. And, if you don't have culture essay topics at hand, we are glad to help.

In this article, we offer you 50 topics for an essay in which you can explore customs, traditions, lifestyles, and art from different perspectives.

Choosing Your Topics

It is not that easy to select essay topics on this issue— there are too many of them! We can only pick the most relevant ones and give a hint on how to choose the best topic ideas.

• If your professor does not assign a topic, specify whether you can choose one on your own.
• Check your social media accounts for trends.
• Brainstorm with your college friends.
• Write down all possible topics that culture conveys well.
• Search for the sources in your college library or online (e.g., Google Scholar).
• Pick only credible references and fresh ideas to cover in your paper.
• Decide which of the topics can be supported by most of the sources.
• Think about the culture you're more-or-less familiar with.
• Stay original — don't be afraid to come up with new topics!
• Think of the reasons your theme to be rejected. If you doubt, it's better to consult your professor before writing.

Now, if you need some inspiration, you may use the ideas offered below.

The American Culture Essay Topics

Here, it's obvious that you should cover issues related to the history of the United States. Here are some of them:

• The customs of American tribes that still exist in today's lifestyles.
• The difference between the North and South American cultures.
• "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and its culture influence in the history of the US.
• Best pop culture products with their ideas on the Civil War.
• The impact of the most known works in American literature on the rest of the world.
• The role of the so-called Beat Generation in the development of American art heritage.
• The origins of rock'n'roll and dance music.
• Why do some works of art fall under certain genres?
• The evolution of cinematography in the United States.
• Massive amounts of immigration and its influence on native American society.

Note: While writing on American art and customs, make sure you have enough reliable evidence from history.

Canadian Culture Topics

As you may know, Canadian traditions and ways of living look significantly different from one people have in the United States. The essay example topics below can help you analyze different culture aspects of these countries and come up with a good paper:

• The way Canada is showed in South Park.
• Avril Lavigne and other famous Canadian rockers in the US.
• How did Canadian hockey change sports development?
• Why is Canada frequently associated with cold and ice?
• Living in a chilly region with warm hearts.
• Ukrainian and Russian diaspora in Canada.
• Ethnicity groups that shaped the Canadian way of living.
• Canada — before and after the exploration.
• Famous Canadian actors and actresses.
• Wild animals living in Canada that have an impact on their art and customs.

Note: If you're writing an essay about a foreign country, the simplest strategy would be to compare its lifestyle with the one you have in your homeland.

Pop Culture Topics

In the context of culture influence, the issue of pop art is exciting. If you think about soap operas and Britney," you're in the essence of that concept. Here are some interesting ideas for you:

• The impact of popular art on marketing.
• The connection between modern pop art stars and social networks.
• Several ways to become popular today.
• Sexism and feminism in the United States.
• The top preferred reality shows.
• Iron Man as the reflection of all heroes.
• Heroes 3: Of Might and Magic.
• Pop culture influence of Japanese anime on the life of students.
• What makes Pokemon so popular?
• Comparing different trends in culture.

Note: Remember that phenomena that have mass accessibility aren't always perfect. That is a good thought for an argument or persuasive essay.

World -Related Topics

These culture essay topics cover all regions, so you have a great variety of options to choose from. It is always a good decision to select the area (country, state) that interests you or that you've been to:

• Generational trends in everyday life.
• The way customs and art are different and similar in Japan and China.
• Russian and Slovenian heritage and customs.
• Customs and traditions of the Middle East.
• The Chinese culture: leisure activities as a form of art.
• The impact of Eurovision on world music trends.
• Famous rock and metal bands from the United Kingdom.
• A geisha in the Japanese culture.
• Carnivals and other holidays in Brazil.
• Things that make the Australian lifestyle so exciting.

Note: When comparing different lifestyles and customs, remember that there are historical reasons for everything. Even to discuss any heritage issue or custom of another country, you have to provide enough evidence.

Cultural Analysis Topics

If you need to write a paper on one of the analysis essay topics, we recommend using credible, up-to-date external sources and conduct in-depth research to analyze the specific issue from all possible aspects. Grab one of these ideas if you like:

• Promotion of social changes nowadays.
• "Strength lies in differences, not in similarities." Do you agree with this statement?
• Things that make a motion picture popular.
• Reasons why some music albums fail.
• Modern pieces of art and their difference from retro.
• A specific TV show that you like.
• Revealing human worst traits on the example of a chosen antagonist.
• Traveling and learning art and customs.
• How does learning a foreign language help to get closer to the culture of people who speak it?
• The origins of siesta and its role in the countries where they follow this tradition.

Note: Whatever topic you choose, analyze the concepts and phenomena objectively. Any analysis assignment requires a diligent approach and thoughtful background research.

Now, you have a full list of wonderful topics for culture essay. If you need more help or a custom essay written from scratch for you, contact professional writing service online!

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Culture Change Essays (Examples)

1000+ documents containing “culture change” .

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Culture change case 2 healthcare acquisition case.

Culture Change Case #2 Healthcare Acquisition Case Six months after the merger described in Change and Culture Case Study I, the new administration initiated a significant reduction in force. A decision was made to redesign patient care delivery. The administration's first job redesign recommendation was that of a universal worker. The universal worker would deliver many support services. Aware that this model often failed when implemented in other organizations, your administrator charged you with making redesign work this time. How would you begin the process of job redesign? Do not consider only the universal worker. The process of cutting staff is a common practice these days in hopes to lower the costs associated with healthcare (Eaton-Spiva, Buitrago, & Trotter, 2010). This is creating a plethora of problems in job satisfaction and hence job redesign demands the utmost attention in order to mitigate some of the common issues. Furthermore, it is estimated that nearly fifty….

Works Cited

Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't. New York: Random House.

Eaton-Spiva, L., Buitrago, P., & Trotter, L. (2010). Assessing and Redesigning the Nursing Practice Environment. The Journal of Nursing Administration, 36-42.

Intergrated Healthcare Strategies. (2010). Separation Arrangements in Healthcare. Retrieved February 15, 2011, from IH Strategies:  http://www.ihstrategies.com/articles/139.pdf 

Li, L. (2005). The effects of trust and shared vision on inward knowledge transfer in subsidiaries' intra- and inter-organizational relationships. International Business Review, 77-95.

Organizational Culture Change Is Noted by Kotler

Organizational culture change is noted by Kotler et al. .(1996) noted to be a common aspect of every organization. This is due to the fact that change is the only thing that can be said to be constant in any given organization. Organizational change is often met with a lot of resistance. This resistance can undermine the operations and the performance of any given organization. Kudler Fine Foods Virtual Organization recently had a change in the leadership of its accounting department. The first level manager in this department (Senior Accountant) was fired as a result of involvement in corporate fraud as well as nonperformance. He was however liked by the staff in that department since he was an inspirational figure to most of the junior accounting staff. His departure as well as the introduction of a new team leader and procedures (processes) would no doubt be met with a lot….

Barr, P.S., Stimpert, J.L. And Huff, A.S. (1992) "Cognitive Change, Strategic Action,

and Organizational Renewal," Strategic Management Journal, 13 (Special Issue),

Hassink, F et al. (2009).Corporate fraud and the audit expectations gap: A study among business managers. Corporate fraud and the audit expectations gap: A study among business managers. Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation. Vol 18, Issue 2,, 85 -- 100

Home Depot's Blueprint for Culture Change Start

HOME DEPOT'S BLUEPINT FO CULTUE CHANGE Start reading Harvard Business eview (HB) article: Charan, . (2006). Home Depot's Blueprint Culture Change. Harvard Business eview, April, Vol 84 Issue 4 p. 60-70. Assignment Expectations (Content) Based HB article Charan (2006),pages paper Home depot's blueprint for culture change Steps the team took to make the change The Home depot team undertook four main steps to ensure that the company changed its mechanisms are metrics, processes, programs, and structures. Metrics involved describing the company values and making it clear what each person would be accountable for Charan, 2006. This way each employee and manager would understand their role within the company and work as a team. Metrics also provided measurement data in areas that had never been measured before. The data revealed some discrepancies towards the company's held beliefs. Employee performance reviews were not standardized. Using the metric system the team implemented a standardized performance process that was….

Charan, R. (2006). Home Depot's Blueprint for Culture Change. Harvard Business Review, 84 (Issue 4), P 60-70.

Stanford, N. (2011). Corporate Culture: Getting It Right. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Organizational Culture Change

BP Change Management The forces that are driving BP to change are relatively weak compared with the forces that are restraining change. The driving forces are a pending legal action, and the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The further that the disaster is from the public consciousness -- it occurred in 2010 -- the less impactful it will be in terms of sparking organizational change. Change is typically motivated in organizations by crises that take the key players outside of their comfort zone. Deepwater Horizon can still be used as impetus for change, but it would have been more effective had the company immediately used the incident to spark a cultural overhaul back in 2010. To do it today simply demonstrates a lack of urgency, lack of commitment and a lack of leadership. The people within the organization would have reason to doubt that leadership is truly committed to change. The….

Ladies and Gentleman Cultures Change Dramatically Over

Ladies and Gentleman Cultures change dramatically over time, and thus how we view different cultural and societal roles have also changed. In a modern context, where women are fighting for greater equality, what is considered gentlemanlike and ladylike has evolved since the time of Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier. Although some elements remain relatively similar when comparing a modern idea of what a gentleman is, there are a number of clear distinctions that have changed dramatically. Castiglione's The Courtier presents a very clear and defined sense of what it was like to be a gentleman and lady back in the 1500s, when it was written. Published in 1528, the work outlines both the characteristics of a gentleman, or courtier, and a perfect lady written in the style of fictional conversations. From this description, a character type can be generated, which can then be tested against the more modern connotation of gentleman characteristics. According….

Castiglione, Baldassarre. (1903). The Book of the Courtier. C. Scribner's Sons.

Reed, Austin. (2010). What do women expect of a 'modern gentleman'? Newslite. Web. http://newslite.tv/2010/09/30/what-do-women-expect-of-a-mode.html

Sayre, Henry M. (2011). Humanities: Culture, Continuity and Change. Volume 1. Pearson Education, Limited.

Nardelli's Sweeping Initiatives Culture Change

Home Depot's move to target professionals with wholesale is unusual given their competencies. Professionals do not need much staff advice -- they simply need selection and price. The core competencies that deliver these are in logistics and purchasing. Therefore, for Home Depot to effectively move into this market they need to focus on improving their performance in those areas. The company needs to cut its back-end costs. The company also needs to shift its brand image as well. This is difficult, because Home Depot cannot sacrifice the DIY market, of which it still holds a significant market share. The separate stores may help, but it would be easier if Home Depot could incorporate the professional market into its existing stores, to take advantage of its current purchasing and logistics efficiencies as well as its existing real estate holdings. The professional market should not be courted at the expense of the….

Change There Are a Few Instances Were

Change There are a few instances were a company tried to institute a large-scale organizational change effort and failed. One recent one was with the FedEx purchase of Kinko's. FedEx had decided that Kinko's would complement its business since they had many mutual customers. The shipping company also felt that if it could professionalize the information Kinko's it would improve the company's profitability. That was not to be. Kinko's had a strong organizational culture that was a bad fit with the FedEx culture. Kinko's culture was informal in nature, while FedEx has a formal culture based on a high level of professionalism. After years of failing to integrate Kinko's into the FedEx culture, FedEx ended up taking a massive writedown on the transaction and rebranding the subsidiary as FedEx Office in an attempt to kill off any remaining Kinko's culture within the organization. The change was radical, not incremental. FedEx basically made….

References:

Morris, B., Neering, P. (2006). The new rules. Fortune International In possession of the author

Goldgeier, D. (2007). A ream of culture clashes at FedEx Kinko's. AdPulp. Retrieved May 5, 2013 from  http://www.adpulp.com/a_ream_of_cultu/ 

Deutsch, C. (2007). Paper jam at FedEx Kinko's. New York Times. Retrieved May 5, 2013 from  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/business/05kinkos.html?_r=2&oref=slogin& ;

Change Management Scenario the Contemporary Business Environment

Change Management Scenario The contemporary business environment is rapidly evolving. Globalization has taken over the organization environment, and with this business is forced to undergo continuous and rapid change driven by increasing stakeholder expectations, new technological advances, and competition that is not only global, but viral (Bendell, 2005). This has resulted in a dramatically different business environment in which the modern business, in order to survive and prosper, is forced to evolve and regularly revise their internal and external business processes. Typically, aggressive and rapid change management systems germinate within the private sector -- only after trial and error, testing, and numerous permutations did they become standard within the public sector organization. This paradigm, however, changed in the late 1990s with a combination of rising client expectations to effectively address major socio-culture, economic, and demographic issues, and change in governmental oversight and minimal requirements pushed management in the public sector to….

Home Depot, Inc. (September 29, 2012). The New York Times. Retrieved from:

 http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/home_depot_inc/index.html 

Aluise, S. (January 19, 2012). Frank Blake Has Brought Home Depot Home. Investorplace.

Com. Retrieved from:  http://investorplace.com/2012/01/frank-blake-has-brought-home-depot-home/

Culture and the Military Cultural

This also has major implications for military operations, both within a military unit and in the interaction between the military unit and another culture. Essentially, the problem of ethnocentrism can be seen at the root of the other cultural problems discussed in this context; it implies both a lack of understanding about the impacts of the unit's culture on the people of a foreign culture, as well as a lack of appreciation and understanding for that culture (Hoskins 2007). Conclusion Culture is strange, in that it is both constant and always changing. The only static culture is a dead one; as the various elements and generations of a culture interact, change is bound to happen. When there is no longer any interaction within a culture or between a given culture and other cultures, there is no longer any point to that culture, and indeed that culture could not realistically exist -- in….

DiMarco, L. (2003). Traditions, changes, and challenges: Military operations and the Middle Eastern city. Diane Publsihing.

Harrison, D.; Light, L. & Rothschild-Boros, M. (2008). Cultural anthropology: Our diverse world. New York: Wadsworth.

Hoskins, B. (2007). "Religion and other cultural variable in modern operational environments." Accessed 16 October 2009.  http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA470675&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf 

O'Neil, D. (2007). "Characteristics of Culture." Accessed 16 October 2009. http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_2.htm

Change Leadership by Carlos Ghosn

" Change must therefore be accomplished by the institution of a strong leadership of just a single individual (Kotter,1996,p.25) .In this case, the person was Ghosn. Change however requires a special team of leaders as well as managers who have a common goal that is communicated succinctly by the team leader. Ghosn therefore "walked the talk" since his leadership style which was transformational, brought real change to the organization. Conclusion It is important to note that for any organization to succeed, a balance must be struck between leadership and the management. This is because there can never be any form of transformation without a true leader. All successful organizational transformations are only achieved via the right mix of leadership and management. eferences Baggaley, B. 2006. Using strategic performance measurements to accelerate lean performance. Cost Management (January/February): 36-44 Cloud, C (2010). Epilogue: Change leadership and leadership development. New Directions for Community Colleges; Spring2010, Issue 149, p73-79, Elving,….

Baggaley, B. 2006. Using strategic performance measurements to accelerate lean performance. Cost Management (January/February): 36-44

Cloud, RC (2010). Epilogue: Change leadership and leadership development. New Directions for Community Colleges; Spring2010, Issue 149, p73-79,

Elving, W, JL (2005) "The role of communication in organisational change," Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 10 Iss: 2, pp.129-13

Kotter, J.P. (1995), "Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail," Harvard Business Review, March-April, 59-67

Changing Environment of Human Resources Management

Changing Environment of Human Resources Management Describe the business case for having HR report to the CEO/President in large organizations. The Human Resources (HR) function in many firms, particularly in large firms with functional specialties, has traditionally been perceived as an administrative function that plays a support role in recruiting, training, paying, and retaining (or firing) members of the workforce. HR has also been seen as supporting other managers in providing a safe workplace and dealing with labor-relations issues. Over the past decade, as down-sizing has occurred throughout much of the corporate world, business cases have been made to reduce the size of the overall HR function, to outsource elements of the HR function such as pay or training, and to offload HR duties to other managers. This paper posits that a business case exists for retaining a strategic HR function in organizations, and for having the senior HR person report directly….

Bibliography

Barney, Jay and Patrick Wright. On Becoming A Strategic Partner: The Role of Human Resources In Gaining Competitive Advantage. Human Resource Management, Spring, 1998, Vol. 37, No. 1, pages 31-46.

Beatty, Richard, Jeffrey Ewing and Charles Tharp. HR's Role in Corporate Governance: Present and Prospective. Human Resource Management, Fall, 2003, Vol. 42, No. 3,-page 257-269.

Enns, Harvey and Dean McFarlin. When Executives Influence Peers: Does Function Matter? Human Resource Management, Summer, 2003, Vol. 42, No. 2, pages 125-142.

Fischer, Heinz and Klaus Mittorp. How HR Measures Support Risk Management: The Deutsche Bank Example. Human Resource Management, Winter, 2002, Vol. 41, No. 4, pages 477-490.

Change at Smith & Falmouth

The offering of financial incentives, in the form of salary increases, premiums and bonuses, is often the most popular means of employee motivation. Non-financial means, such as flexible working schedules or promotion opportunities, also constitute a powerful source of stimulated employees (Bruce, 2002). The realization of the important role played by the staff members within the Smith & Falmouth Company would lead to several beneficial effects. At an individual level, the employees would feel better valued and they would as such increase their loyalty to the organization, their commitment to supporting the entity achieve its goals and their performances. At the group level, the teams would be more united and better prepared to deal with organizational chores. In terms of the entity, it will be better able to pursue its interests. b) Communications The ability to communicate effectively and efficiently is the pillar of any successful organizational outcome. Communication in the workplace….

Bruce, a., 2002, How to motivate every employee: 24 proven tactics to spark productivity in the workplace, McGraw-Hill Professional, ISBN 0071413332

Hickman, C.R., 2005, Management malpractice: how to cure unhealthy practices that disable your organization, Adams Media, ISBN 1593373503

Noe, R.A., 2004, Fundamentals of human resource management, ISBN 730209683X

Culture and the Evolutionary Process of Human Beings

Acheology THE ROLE OF CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY Undestanding the evolution of humanity has been one of the most citical quests fo most individuals in the cuent society. The intesection between envionmental influences and cultue ceates an aea of social inteest with a focus on human evolution. Empiical eseach shows that the society plays a significant ole in shaping the evolution of human beings as evidenced by psychological analysis of human evolution. The extaodinay coopeative natue of human beings aises moe questions on the peceived changes of human behavio and inteaction ove time (Hawkes, Paine, & School, 2006). Among the factos that dive human beings to stive to undestand thei evolution, include paleoanthopology esults that povide unique infomation that povides significant evidence to the aspects of human evolution postulated to have occued millions of yeas ago. Results fom fossil studies such as inceasing bain size and the emegence….

references: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12(01), 1 -- 14.

Croll, E., & Parkin, D. (2002). Bush Base, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment, and Development. Routledge.

Darlington, P.J. (1978). Altruism: Its characteristics and evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 75(1), 385 -- 389.

Eagly, A.H., & Wood, W. (1999). The origins of sex differences in human behavior: Evolved dispositions vs. social roles. American Psychologist, 54(6), 408 -- 423.

Foley, R. (1995). The adaptive legacy of human evolution: A search for the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 4(6), 194 -- 203

Changing Customer Service

Customer Service We shall, for the purposes of this paper, accept the proposition that we are moving from a culture that can be categorized as "you get what I give" to one where the customer is always right. In the real world, there are companies that do either, depending on their business model. But for the sake of argument we will assume the position of a company that is seeking to shift from the former to a more customer-centric vision of customer service. There are two elements to such a shift -- operational and cultural. Operations can be laid out in such a way that barriers to customer service that may have existed in the past are now removed, for example. Yet, because service is inherently customer-oriented, based on interactions, it is critical that the organization shifts to a customer-service-based culture. This is a massive cultural shift from an organizational culture….

Brady, M. & Cronin, J. (2001). Customer orientation: Effects on customer service perceptions and outcome behaviors. Journal of Service Research. Vol. 3 (3) 241-251.

Homburg, C., Muller, M. & Klarmann, M. (2011). When does salespeople's customer orientation lead to customer loyalty? The differential aspects of relational and functional customer orientation. Journal of the Acad. Mark. Sci. Vol. 39 (2011) 795-812.

Leggett, K. (2014). Forrester's top trends for customer service in 2014. Forrester. Retrieved March 22, 2014 from  http://blogs.forrester.com/kate_leggett/14-01-13-forresters_top_trends_for_customer_service_in_2014 

Linnenluecke, M. & Griffiths, A. (2010). Corporate sustainability and organizational culture. Journal of World Business. Vol. 45 (2010) 357-366.

Culture Essay

This essay examines the meaning of culture and provides several possible titles and topics that may be used as starting points for developing a paper on culture. It discusses the definition of culture, how culture is developed, and how cultures change. It shows how cultural identity and cultural differences are formed and how culture diversity is a fact of life. It also explains why in spite of diverse cultures commonly existing in one group there is usually a dominant culture that comes to the fore and is promoted by the leaders of the group. The essay closes with recommendations for other ways in which a paper on culture can be written. Culture is the heart and soul of a society, group or organization: it is the manifestation of what a particular set of people thinks, feels, believes in, and holds as ideal. It is the communication of what a people view….

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Acheology THE ROLE OF CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY Undestanding the evolution of humanity has been one of the most citical quests fo most individuals in the cuent…

Capstone Project

Customer Service We shall, for the purposes of this paper, accept the proposition that we are moving from a culture that can be categorized as "you get what I give"…

This essay examines the meaning of culture and provides several possible titles and topics that may be used as starting points for developing a paper on culture. It discusses…

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Free Essay On Cultural Change

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Culture , Development , Organization , Sociology , Social Studies , Knowledge , World , Amendment

Published: 01/18/2022

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Introduction

Cultural change is seen as the alteration of a community through modernization, development as well as the contact with alternate communities (Global Sociology, 2016). This paper is going to explain about what is culture along with when it is essential. According to “Quappe and Cantatore” in their article concerning “what culture awareness entails.” It is clear that cultural change engrosses the potential of one being able to draw back from ourselves and getting conscious of our cultural principles, attitudes as well as discernments. The authors go further to state that “cultural change becomes more vital when we have to interrelate with individuals from alternate cultures (2016).” Concerning this explanation on cultural change, it is definite that people observe, understand along with estimate things in an alternate way. What is perceived as suitable for one culture is usually incompatible with the other one. An Article by “James McCalman and David Potter” on when is cultural change essential is explained regarding an organization alteration. It is seen that to understand the benefits as well as challenges in an organization. It is important for one to appreciate the cultural theory that is found in the body. Shifting culture is eventually alarmed by leadership along with the power problems (McCalman & Potter, 2015). The significance of culture depends upon our close connection to the ways through which we believe as well as stay. Discrepancies in culture have led to an assortment of the people from diverse parts of the universe. Thus, from the second article, it can be said that cultural change is essential in the way we approach our means of living.

Based on the two articles, it is clear that cultural change serves as the starting renaissance doctrines in our present day lives. They also shape our perception concerning things, character along with personality.

Global sociology. Cultural Change. Retrieved from http://globalsociology.pbworks.com/w/page/14711169/Cultural%20Change McCalman. & Potter, D. (2015). The Key Importance of Culture in Organizational Change. Retrieved from http://www.Koganpage.com/article/the-key-imporatnce-of-culture-in- organization-change Quappe, S. & Cantatore, G. (2016). What is Cultural Awareness, anyway? How do I build it? Retrieved from http://www.culturiosity.com/articles/whatisculturalawareness.htm

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A Culture of Change Essay

“describe the key elements that organizations use to make change a part of their culture”..

As a means of achieving cultural change, an entity ought to familiarize itself with the diverse aspects. First, the process of change must begin with influential employees in the organization who will convince colleagues that change is significant. As such, employees ought to understand why change must occur from the cognitive viewpoint.

These employees ought to facilitate the management in the distribution of company resources to areas that could profit the organization. Since change requires significant proportions of company resources, management should ensure convenience of resources before the change process proceeds. According to Jellison (2006), there should be appropriate allocation of funds for definite purposes with the intent of enhancing the change process.

In addition, there must be proper planning of details of the change process; thus, avoiding confusions at the later stages of implementation. Indeed, employees must be sufficiently motivated for them to acknowledge that they are constituents of the process and enable the realization of positive results. A Reward and Recognition plan for employees should be included in the plan of the change process.

They must get protection from institutional politics, which might slow the process (Jellison, 2006). There should be an evaluation of the creativity abilities amidst all employees so that the most creative employees can become leaders of task forces in the change process. Further, training of the desired cultures through hiring of professional personnel for example a Culture Manager is paramount.

“Identify one company that does this well, provide a justification for your answer”.

According to Ashley (2012), Chrysler Corp is a domestic automaker company, which was subject to criticism because of poor management. However, the company has experienced organizational changes over the years and is ranked the third largest in USA.

Justification

According to Ashley (2012), Chrysler Corp is a superior illustration of an entity that has productively implemented a culture of change. The implementation of the change process occurred through planned network, which included modifications in the make of Chrysler cars and restructuring of company operations. Chrysler Corp changed from conventional management style to a more advanced style.

According to Ashley (2012), the newly established style designed five ‘smaller’ companies within the larger Chrysler Corp company in order to achieve immediate and efficient results. In addition, there was an adoption of new operations in the company like hiring Robert Eaton as company chair. There was a ban on many computer systems and a sole combined data base system was established.

Further, there was an introduction of an updated technological centre in the company. Indeed, the forceful and elaborate down sizing in the company yielded immediate results. For instance, Chrysler Corp had its expenditure reduced significantly as evident in cutting down unnecessary costs. Additionally proper address of competition from other automobile companies was evident. Consequently, Chrysler Corp divide in the market augmented since customers sent affirmative feedback.

According to Ashley (2012), there was a deliberate effort by new management to advance the superiority of products fabricated when the change process commenced. Additionally employees of the company were sufficiently motivated; thus, becoming part of the change process. A leadership that could implement the changes at Chrysler Corp with success justifies why the company qualifies as an example of an organization that exudes a culture of change.

Ashley, S. (2012). Keys to Chrysler’s comeback. Web.

Jellison, J. (2006). Managing the dynamics of change: the fastest path to creating an engaged And productive work force . Illinois. ILL: McGraw Hill Publisher.

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Essays on Cultural Change

Feeling stuck when writing an essay on Cultural Change? If you are unable to get started on your task and need some inspiration, then you are in the right place.Cultural Change essays require a range of skills including understanding, interpretation and analysis, planning, research and writing. To write an effective essay on Cultural Change, you need to examine the question, understand its focus and needs, obtain information and evidence through research, then build a clear and organized answer. Browse our samples and select the most compelling topic as an example for your own!

Essay examples

Essay topics, information.

Organization Culture And Change Organizational culture – a popular but also a very complex concept – has been identified as an influential factor affecting the successes and failures of organizational change efforts. Organizational culture could be looked at as the pattern of shared valued, beliefs …

The proposed cultural changes are expected to form a new vision of constructive culture within the company. By encouraging employees to be open in their ideas and assumptions, the company will create a healthy working environment, where all employees are treated as individuals in themselves. …

Throughout the past century, the British agricultural system has experienced considerable changes in footings of direction patterns and attitudes to environmental protection. The most dramatic and influential alterations occurred in the late fortiess, with post-war mechanization. Following World War 2, concerns over nutrient security grew, …

Cultural Changes: The Effect on Art You’re an artist during WWI, bombs exploding everywhere, innocent people even children losing their lives, how will you express your intense anger and sadness towards the events that are taking place? The frustration towards war and other social, political …

Within today’s increasingly globally-infused corporate workplaces, conventional wisdom holds that demographic and/or cultural diversity contribute positively to enhanced performance by groups, teams, or other divisions of a trans-global corporate entity, thus ultimately enhancing, by association, company products and/or services and the company itself, at home …

Television and Cultural Change Research Paper: 1. Introduction Once considered a complete luxury for a family to own, the television has become a stable fixture in British and American households over the past few decades. In recent years, it has become unusual for a family …

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Checkboxes for race and ethnicity on government forms will include more choices

Hansi Lo Wang

New checkboxes for "Middle Eastern or North African" and "Hispanic or Latino" are coming to the U.S. census and federal forms. Advocates say these changes will help enforce civil rights protections.

Next U.S. census will have new boxes for 'Middle Eastern or North African,' 'Latino'

DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:

Major changes are coming to how the U.S. government asks about your race and ethnicity. And supporters say these changes could improve the accuracy of statistics about Latinos and people of Middle Eastern or North African descent. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.

HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Guillermo Creamer says one of those changes is going to solve a conundrum. On federal government forms he answers, yes, he identifies as Latino, which the government considers to be an ethnicity. And then he has to answer...

GUILLERMO CREAMER: What's your race? I genuinely don't ever know what to answer.

WANG: You see the boxes and none of them quite fit for you?

CREAMER: No because to me, you know, being Latino, that's all-encompassing for me.

WANG: Creamer will soon be able to answer a new combined question that asks about a person's race and/or ethnicity and the checkboxes under it include Hispanic or Latino. The White House's Office of Management and Budget has released an example.

CREAMER: I sent it around to my parents and other members of my family. And I was like, hey, like, finally, like, there's more than just the other for us (laughter).

WANG: And there will be a completely new checkbox for Middle Eastern or North African.

MAYA BERRY: It is progress. It is progress.

WANG: Maya Berry is the executive director of the Arab American Institute, which for more than three decades has been campaigning for this box and to change what research suggests to be an outdated policy for racially categorizing people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa - or MENA.

BERRY: Yes, no longer rendered by definition in terms of formal federal policy as exclusively white. The point is, folks can self-identify with any racial category they feel comfortable with.

WANG: Still, Berry says she is concerned that the government's new definition for Middle Eastern or North African is not inclusive enough of people who are of MENA descent and identify with Black diaspora communities. And she's worried that can affect the data that will be used to redraw voting districts, enforce civil rights and guide policymaking and research across the country.

Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News.

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Why baby boomers and retirees are ditching Florida for Appalachia

The shift is causing a population spike in many rural Appalachian communities

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The stereotype of baby boomers moving to Florida post-retirement is one of the oldest around. But while many people from that generation have indeed retired to the Sunshine State, recent reports indicate that boomers are now abandoning Florida for an unlikely alternative: Southern Appalachia, a region that includes Northern Georgia, the Carolinas, and portions of Tennessee and Virginia. 

An influx of boomers moving to Appalachia is "transforming the region from poor, serene and rustic to a bustling retirement haven," said a recent report in The Wall Street Journal . These boomers have become known in Appalachia as "halfbacks," which the Journal said is a "reference to how many first moved from the Northeast and Midwest down to Florida before settling somewhere in between."

Historically, this region has been besieged by negative press coverage, painting a "portrait of Appalachia the same way: poor , backward and white," NPR said. However, in shifting the demographics of the region, boomers may alter that narrative. What is specifically causing this change, and what's next for the Appalachians? 

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Why are boomers moving from Florida to Appalachia?

Most of the boomers moving to Appalachia are "drawn by lower housing costs and living expenses, lower taxes, lower insurance costs, low crime, warm weather (but with seasons) and less chance of hurricanes," the Journal said. One retired couple, Ed Helms and his wife Johnnie Helms, moved from Panama City Beach, Florida, to Northern Georgia to escape rising costs of living and hurricanes.  

Property insurance in Panama City Beach "was going sky high," Helms said to the Journal. The couple was "tired of being unable to find a place to sit in restaurants. Everything was getting out of reason. We wouldn't go back for anything." 

Other hypotheses for the recent demographic change include a pandemic-inspired longing for quiet and the natural world. The Covid-19 pandemic "helped fuel interest in Appalachia because people wanted to get back to nature and leave crowded areas," Gayle Manchin, the Appalachian Regional Commission's co-chair and wife of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) , said to the Journal. Manchin "expects southern Appalachian growth to continue as more Americans retire."

How is this change affecting Appalachia?

The boomer shift has caused a sudden population surge in Appalachian areas that were previously rural. It has "brought forth a sort of whiplash," Business Insider said, as "counties once defined by miles of countryside now see sustained development — newly-sprouted retirement communities featuring upscale amenities."

All of these new retirees need places to shop and eat. So, unsurprisingly, big-box stores "have also crept further into Southern Appalachia, where local downtowns have long been the economic engines of many towns and small cities," said Business Insider. Major chain restaurants and shopping destinations like Walmart have become commonplace throughout the region.

All of this has resulted in a major spike in the number of people living in the region. From April 2020 to July 2022, the population in Southern Appalachian counties designated "retirement" or "recreational areas" increased by 3.8%. This is more than six times the national average, said Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia, to the Journal. 

Georgia's Dawson County — where the Helms live — has seen some of the largest growth in Appalachia. Dawson saw a 12.5% population increase from 2020 to 2022, ballooning the county's population to more than 30,000, plus the "population aged 65 years or older reached 21% of the county in 2022, up from 14.1% in 2010," said the Journal. 

How do native Appalachians feel about this?

Many appear angry at the development. In Dawson County, arguments "erupt regularly on Dawson Facebook pages over newcomer-spurred traffic, which has been a shock to the folksy culture for which this Republican-dominated county is known," the Journal said. 

For many of the residents native to Appalachia, the influx of boomers is "transforming the region and causing a major effect on the rural communities who have resided there for generations," the Tallahassee Democrat said. The continuing population bumps "have caused longtime residents of Appalachia to worry about rising housing costs and impacts to the environment," the Democrat added.

"They ought to go back where they come from," Helen Anderson, who has lived in Dawson County her whole life, said to the Journal. 

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 Justin Klawans has worked as a staff writer at The Week since 2022. He began his career covering local news before joining Newsweek as a breaking news reporter, where he wrote about politics, national and global affairs, business, crime, sports, film, television and other Hollywood news. Justin has also freelanced for outlets including Collider and United Press International.  

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Guest Essay

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture

By Erik Hoel

Mr. Hoel is a neuroscientist and novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

Increasingly, mounds of synthetic A.I.-generated outputs drift across our feeds and our searches. The stakes go far beyond what’s on our screens. The entire culture is becoming affected by A.I.’s runoff, an insidious creep into our most important institutions.

Consider science. Right after the blockbuster release of GPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI and one of the most advanced in existence, the language of scientific research began to mutate. Especially within the field of A.I. itself.

Adjectives associated with A.I.-generated text have increased in peer reviews of scientific papers about A.I.

Frequency of adjectives per one million words

Commendable

A study published this month examined scientists’ peer reviews — researchers’ official pronouncements on others’ work that form the bedrock of scientific progress — across a number of high-profile and prestigious scientific conferences studying A.I. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” more than 34 times as often as reviews did the previous year. Use of “commendable” was around 10 times as frequent, and “intricate,” 11 times. Other major conferences showed similar patterns.

Such phrasings are, of course, some of the favorite buzzwords of modern large language models like ChatGPT. In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. And the closer to the deadline the submitted reviews were received, the more A.I. usage was found in them.

If this makes you uncomfortable — especially given A.I.’s current unreliability — or if you think that maybe it shouldn’t be A.I.s reviewing science but the scientists themselves, those feelings highlight the paradox at the core of this technology: It’s unclear what the ethical line is between scam and regular usage. Some A.I.-generated scams are easy to identify, like the medical journal paper featuring a cartoon rat sporting enormous genitalia. Many others are more insidious, like the mislabeled and hallucinated regulatory pathway described in that same paper — a paper that was peer reviewed as well (perhaps, one might speculate, by another A.I.?).

What about when A.I. is used in one of its intended ways — to assist with writing? Recently, there was an uproar when it became obvious that simple searches of scientific databases returned phrases like “As an A.I. language model” in places where authors relying on A.I. had forgotten to cover their tracks. If the same authors had simply deleted those accidental watermarks, would their use of A.I. to write their papers have been fine?

What’s going on in science is a microcosm of a much bigger problem. Post on social media? Any viral post on X now almost certainly includes A.I.-generated replies, from summaries of the original post to reactions written in ChatGPT’s bland Wikipedia-voice, all to farm for follows. Instagram is filling up with A.I.-generated models, Spotify with A.I.-generated songs. Publish a book? Soon after, on Amazon there will often appear A.I.-generated “workbooks” for sale that supposedly accompany your book (which are incorrect in their content; I know because this happened to me). Top Google search results are now often A.I.-generated images or articles. Major media outlets like Sports Illustrated have been creating A.I.-generated articles attributed to equally fake author profiles. Marketers who sell search engine optimization methods openly brag about using A.I. to create thousands of spammed articles to steal traffic from competitors.

Then there is the growing use of generative A.I. to scale the creation of cheap synthetic videos for children on YouTube. Some example outputs are Lovecraftian horrors, like music videos about parrots in which the birds have eyes within eyes, beaks within beaks, morphing unfathomably while singing in an artificial voice, “The parrot in the tree says hello, hello!” The narratives make no sense, characters appear and disappear randomly, and basic facts like the names of shapes are wrong. After I identified a number of such suspicious channels on my newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective, Wired found evidence of generative A.I. use in the production pipelines of some accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscribers.

As a neuroscientist, this worries me. Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? Einstein supposedly said : “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But what happens when a toddler is consuming mostly A.I.-generated dream-slop? We find ourselves in the midst of a vast developmental experiment.

There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models. As A.I. capabilities ramped up in 2022, I wrote on the risk of culture’s becoming so inundated with A.I. creations that when future A.I.s are trained, the previous A.I. output will leak into the training set, leading to a future of copies of copies of copies, as content became ever more stereotyped and predictable. In 2023 researchers introduced a technical term for how this risk affected A.I. training: model collapse . In a way, we and these companies are in the same boat, paddling through the same sludge streaming into our cultural ocean.

With that unpleasant analogy in mind, it’s worth looking to what is arguably the clearest historical analogy for our current situation: the environmental movement and climate change. For just as companies and individuals were driven to pollute by the inexorable economics of it, so, too, is A.I.’s cultural pollution driven by a rational decision to fill the internet’s voracious appetite for content as cheaply as possible. While environmental problems are nowhere near solved, there has been undeniable progress that has kept our cities mostly free of smog and our lakes mostly free of sewage. How?

Before any specific policy solution was the acknowledgment that environmental pollution was a problem in need of outside legislation. Influential to this view was a perspective developed in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, a biologist and ecologist. Dr. Hardin emphasized that the problem of pollution was driven by people acting in their own interest, and that therefore “we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.” He summed up the problem as a “tragedy of the commons.” This framing was instrumental for the environmental movement, which would come to rely on government regulation to do what companies alone could or would not.

Once again we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are refusing to pursue advanced ways to identify A.I.’s handiwork — which they could do by adding subtle statistical patterns hidden in word use or in the pixels of images.

A common justification for inaction is that human editors can always fiddle around with whatever patterns are used if they know enough. Yet many of the issues we’re experiencing are not caused by motivated and technically skilled malicious actors; they’re caused mostly by regular users’ not adhering to a line of ethical use so fine as to be nigh nonexistent. Most would be uninterested in advanced countermeasures to statistical patterns enforced into outputs that should, ideally, mark them as A.I.-generated.

That’s why the independent researchers were able to detect A.I. outputs in the peer review system with surprisingly high accuracy: They actually tried. Similarly, right now teachers across the nation have created home-brewed output-side detection methods , like adding hidden requests for patterns of word use to essay prompts that appear only when copied and pasted.

In particular, A.I. companies appear opposed to any patterns baked into their output that can improve A.I.-detection efforts to reasonable levels, perhaps because they fear that enforcing such patterns might interfere with the model’s performance by constraining its outputs too much — although there is no current evidence this is a risk. Despite public pledges to develop more advanced watermarking, it’s increasingly clear that the companies are dragging their feet because it goes against the A.I. industry’s bottom line to have detectable products.

To deal with this corporate refusal to act we need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to legislatively force advanced watermarking intrinsic to generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture.

Erik Hoel is a neuroscientist, a novelist and the author of The Intrinsic Perspective newsletter.

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Barrel racer Kortnee Solomon on her horse at her home in Hempstead, Texas.

Black rodeo culture has been overlooked. This photographer wants to change that

Photographs by Ivan McClellan Story by Kara Nelson, CNN Published March 29, 2024

A horn blares, the stall gate opens, and out comes a raging 2,000-pound bull, bucking its hind legs wildly to knock a rodeo rider off its back.

Red dirt fills the air as the crowd cheers, and a countdown begins. For the rider, everything in the world narrows down to the next eight seconds.

They must remain on the bull for those critical seconds. Survive that long, and then they’re judged on how well they ride — the wildest ride earns the highest score.

“It’s a time frame that these cowboys live and die by,” said photographer Ivan McClellan , who has spent nearly a decade documenting Black riders in and outside of the rodeo ring.

McClellan said his debut book, “ Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture ,” is inspired by the adrenaline-pumping high stakes of rodeo culture. His camera captures the look of determination as the rider fights to stay mounted, one hand gripping a rope while their free arm swings uncontrollably in the air.

Growing up in Kansas City, McClellan remembers listening to his grandmother relive stories from her childhood on a hog farm — but she wanted a different life for her family.

“She just kind of viewed that rural country cowboy living to be something that we should avoid,” he said.

But he couldn’t escape the allure of the cowboy lifestyle forever.

His first introduction to Black rodeo culture came in 2015 when he traveled to a small town in Oklahoma with a Black rodeo documentarian, Charles Perry.

“I saw thousands of Black cowboys that were listening to hip-hop, that had braids, and long acrylic nails,” McClellan remembered.

“They were frying chicken, cooking turkey legs and doing the Cupid Shuffle in the dirt,” he told CNN. “It was cowboy culture, mixed with Black culture in a way that I never knew existed.”

Although the experience was new for McClellan, rodeos have long been influenced by Black culture, according to historians.

“Black cowboys have always been a part of the American West,” said Tracey Owens Patton, a professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyoming, and co-author of the book “Gender, Whiteness and Power in Rodeo .”

Patton said the contributions of Indigenous people, African Americans and Latinos to the culture of the American West have been overshadowed by popular depictions of cowboys as White men, like the “Marlboro Man.”

“Rodeo culture has a very cross-cultural beginning and most people around the world don't realize that,” Patton told CNN.

McClellan said he still sees this disparity and lack of representation today when it comes to rodeo athletes, and he aims to correct the misconception with his book.

He traveled the country to document the rawness of Black rodeo culture. His journey brought him to rodeos, stables and family ranches in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas and California — where he spent time with the famed Compton Cowboys at their Los Angeles ranch.

“I hope that young people seeing this (book), it'll light a lot of them up, hopefully get them on horses and get them involved,” he said.

In the blood

As word spread about McClellan’s work, Ronda Howard, a mother from McCalla, Alabama, invited the photographer to her family’s ranch.

A week later, McClellan said he found himself there, watching her son, then 13-year-old Rodney Howard, ride one of his Tennessee Walking Horses. McClellan said the Walking Horse is like the “Cadillac of horses” because of the steed’s smooth trot and pace.

“I was taking pictures of him and then all of a sudden, Rodney rode up to his mom and just swooped his sister out of her arms and rode off at full speed,” McClellan recalled. “I just thought, ‘Wow, this is the culture at work.’”

Rodney told CNN he remembers riding even when he was a toddler. He now competes professionally and has won multiple awards at rodeo events. He sees the same future for his little sister, Riley.

“She's been loving horses since she first saw one,” Rodney said. “Ever since then, when I get on the horse, she asks if she can get on.”

McClellan said he’s found that a passion for horseback riding spans generations across many of the families he’s photographed over the years.

Rodney told CNN he takes after his grandfather, Ronald Howard, and considers himself a true cowboy.

“It’s just in the blood,” he said.

While riders might boldly declare themselves cowboys and cowgirls today, the title wasn’t always a source of pride or a term of endearment, according to historians.

There was time in history where white Americans in rodeo were called “cowhands,” Patton told CNN, while Black Americans were referred to as “cowboys.”

Patton said historically, the word “boy” had a racist, pejorative connotation. “A cowhand was supposed to be above a cowboy,” she said.

Over time, regardless of race, most people became referred to as cowboys, Patton said.

Black cowboys, like Willie “Bill” Pickett, helped create some of the most popular rodeo events that exist today. Patton said Pickett became known for his skill at taming a steer by wrestling it to the ground and biting down on its nose and lower lip.

The trademark move helped create the “bulldogging” rodeo event, now known as “steer wrestling,” where riders compete to chase down a steer, dropping off their horse to wrestle the young ox to the ground.

Despite establishing this rodeo event, Pickett was often discredited and not allowed to compete at rodeos because he was Black.

“Sometimes he would dress as a toreador from Mexico to try to be able to have his ride,” Patton told CNN.

More than 50 years after his death, Pickett became the first African American inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in 1989. Still, McClellan said despite the progress that’s been made in the sport, many Black rodeo athletes do not get the same opportunities as their White counterparts.

“It’s really given me a sense of purpose to get these stories out there, to make this known and to create equity in the rodeo space.”

The Super Bowl of Black rodeos

McClellan said he’s come to appreciate the food and fashion that characterizes Black rodeos — and the music. A mix of country, R&B and hip-hop blasts through the speakers and helps transition between the rodeo events.

“The crowd is moving and grooving in a way that you don't see at other rodeos,” he said.

The photographer said he’s also found at most Black rodeos — especially in the South — that riders aren't so much there to win as they are there to show off what they can do.

“Of course, they want to win the money and do their best, but if they do lose, it was a good time hanging out with friends,” he said. “There's a real community feel to it.”

The Roy Leblanc Invitational Rodeo in Oklahoma is the longest-running Black rodeo in the country.

“It happens every year — it's kind of the Super Bowl of Black rodeos,” McClellan said. The event starts with a prayer; what happens next is a moment that makes the competition truly unique, the photographer told CNN.

“The first thing that comes out is the African American flag, or the Pan-African flag, and somebody sings, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ ” McClellan said, referring to the song that’s known as the Black National Anthem.

“The crowd stands up and everybody takes off their hat. It’s a beautiful moment to celebrate Black culture.”

‘People of integrity’

While it is safer to remain outside of the fences, McClellan's determination to capture the thrill of the ride often takes him inside the ring — even for bull riding, which he said he’s found can be one of the most dangerous rodeo events.

“Sometimes to get the shot you really want, you got to get in there and take the risk,” McClellan told CNN. “But the minute that (the rider) hits the ground, you've got to run for your life and jump over the fence.”

There’s also bareback riding, an event similar to bull riding where the rider trades a raging bull for a bronco.

“(The rider) lays all the way back on that bronco, just sort of stays loose and flops around on the back of that horse for eight seconds,” McClellan explained. “Their hat always flies off.”

Over the last decade, McClellan said he’s fallen in love with Black rodeo culture, and the genuine camaraderie that it brings.

“I came into this culture as a complete outsider and people embraced me like family and have invited me into their homes and on their ranches,” he said.

McClellan hopes his photos accurately capture the diehard and relentless spirit of being a cowboy.

“Cowboys are people of integrity,” he said. “They do what they say, and they say what they do. They got a lot of grit.”

“These are folks that you should root for, and these are folks that you should care about.”

“ Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture "> Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture ,” published by Damiani, is now available.