Cultures
The question of what a culture is sounds like it shouldn’t be that difficult. We usually think of culture as an identifying group to which people belong. It usually refers to a religion, or ethnic group, or maybe even a country. The intuitive definition of culture has its roots in anthropology with the idea of identifying people with shared … Keep Reading → history, background, and quite possibly, biology. Then we pick up a magazine and read terms such as “organizational culture” or “culture of fear” and things get a bit murky. Clearly the definition for culture goes further than the anthropological context. In this context the word culture is much more of a sociological phenomenon that describes the shared experiences of a particular group. The ties that bind the group together may be in part physical, as in the case of an ethnic group, or they may be conceptual as in the “culture of fear” example. In all cases though, it is these aspects of common thought and/or experience that form the culture.
