We're going to start our journey, first of all by looking at a few definitions so we know exactly what we're going to be talking about for the rest of these videos. Sometimes when we talk about culture, people bring in the unfortunate idea of race, which in this case is not what we're going to be looking at. We're going to be looking at a little bit more at ethnicity. Now, before we even make that separation, we're also working on the basis of Macionis's definition of race, as a socially constructed concept. It might be based on biological differences, but how society decides on those biological differences as being important, or being awares, that is actually socially constructed. Now, again, at the risk of going off in the wrong direction here, we're going to bring it back around and we're going to talk about what most people are actually talking about when they talk about race, which is ethnicity. Now, ethnicity as Macionis also says, and I'm going to get this quote directly so you can set this up for the rest of the videos, it's a shared cultural heritage. People define themselves or others as members of an ethnic category based on common ancestry, language, or religion that gives them a distinctive social identity. This is what we're going to be working with. We're going to be working with ethnicity related to culture for the rest of these videos. Again, just to be clear about this, we're not going to be looking at specifically the area of race, we're going to be looking at ethnicity. When we're talking about diversity, we're talking about diversity of ethnic groups within a team, within an organization, or even in your personal life. We're going to be looking later on how to actually make that work effectively, and how to leverage diversity in your team, or your organization, or in your personal life. Now, when we're actually then talking about ethnicity, one of the key elements here, of course, is the shared culture and what is culture? Let's look then at two different definitions of what culture is, which will help us to understand the rest of the videos that are coming later. According to Schein, culture is a set of basic assumptions which are shared solutions to universal problems. Again, you have universal problems such as family, or death, or how to actually feed your family, or feed yourself. These are universal problems. But how different cultures then deals with those universal problems is what Schein would call your culture. How you deal with these situations, even organizing the way we eat in terms of who has everybody from the family is sitting around the table and you stay for two hours, or you just eat very quickly so that you can then go back to work. This is, again culturally related. But the problem, how to feed yourself is a universal problem. Now when we're looking at Harris Morrison's definition, they talk about culture of being a set of knowledge, beliefs, values, religion, and customs, which is acquired by a group of people and passed on from generation to generation. There's two very different definitions of what culture is. One, it's about shared solutions to universal problems, and the other one, it's passed from generation to generation and its values and its beliefs, and it's also related to religion and customs that we have. Together we're going to use these two interpretations for the rest of these videos when we're talking about intercultural communication, when we're talking about cultural intelligence, when we're talking about how to leverage diversity and cultural diversity on a team or an organization. The last thing we're going to look at in this particular area is that we need to be very careful of stereotypes, so we're going to be talking about prototypes. A stereotype is where you take a very simple version of another culture, and then you highlight it and exaggerate it, very often a negative aspect of that culture, and you use an exaggerated version of it, a caricature basically of the other culture. The prototypes are when we're looking at something like an essentialized category. For example, if I ask you to think of a bird or to draw a bird, normally would draw a blackbird. Most people don't automatically go to an ostrich, or a chicken, or a penguin, all of which are birds. One of the things is that very often you have one idea in your head, what you think a typical person is. Now, of course, very often that strays into stereotypes. What we're going to be doing, and a lot of these models that we're looking at, and a lot of the ways we're perceiving other cultures is that we're perceiving it from the point of view of the aggregate of all of the people in our culture like a bell curve. We've got a bell curve, and we're taking the average point in that aggregate. However, there is nobody in that culture who fits the average point for all areas. You might be, if it's a culture that's very punctual, maybe in that particular area, you are the average. You're always on time. But in another area of that culture, for example, how do they deal with conflict, you're a person instead of dealing with conflict very openly, you try to avoid conflict. In that point, you're not in the average. Again, we're always talking about when we talk about prototypes, we're talking about the average of the aggregate when we're looking at it like a bell curve, and we're not saying that every single person in that fits all of the elements of that average and that they're all the prototype. It's simply a way that we can say, on average, culture x are more open than people in culture y where people are more reserved. That's all we're saying when we're talking about prototypes. We're understanding at all points that the humans that we're dealing with are extremely complex people with many layers of culture, many layers of influences, and also their own personality and their own unique way of looking at the world. Culture and ethnicity are only some parts of what your identity is, and we're only looking at those parts in the next 8-9 videos.
