Way back towards the beginning of unit one we talked about what teams are. And I mentioned the philosopher John Searle's idea of we intentions as opposed to I intentions. In this concluding video for unit two, I want to come back to the idea of we and it's relationship to cultural boundaries. The actual use of the pronoun we by members of the group is important to the creation and maintenance of group boundaries and group identity. If you stop and think about it, the we produces an automatic contrast with the they or not us. And the we-they contrast marks a defining line between people. Indeed teams are defined as teams by the existence of that we-they boundary. Let's recall that Searle was talking about we intentions. Remember the dance troop or even the individual's pushing the stalled car that have to think about themselves as cooperating and coordinating. They act as if they were in fact a single person. That is how they are able to accomplish collective goals. What we need to add to the idea here is that people when they form part of the team not only think about themselves as a we, they can also speak of themselves by the use of collective pronouns. People can learn to refer to a group of which they are part by the pronoun we. As you'll recall, culture, at least as we are using the word in this class, includes socially learned and socially transmitted ways of speaking. Part of the power of team-culture is to create the idea of the team, and usages of the word we can contribute to that creation. A really famous instance is the we in the one paragraph, the preamble, to the constitution of the United States, which begins, We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union. That preamble dates back to 1787, but it is a we that Americans still have today. A similar we occurs in the constitutions of other countries around the world. The 1950 Constitution of India, for example, begins with these words, We, the people of India, having soundly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic and it goes on from there. The 1988 Constitution of Brazil, translated into English reads, We the representatives of the Brazilian people. And there are many many other examples. Won't be hard for you to find them if you look. The point here is not that usage of the pronoun we is the only way to create an individual's sense of the group as a single actor. There are plenty of other ways as well as we'll be seeing. The point is rather that teams are in their very essence cultural constructions. One more point before we close this unit, the legal idea of the corporation. The legal idea recognizes the group as a collective actor. A corporation in fact, according to Merriam-Webster, is a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person. In fact the word corporation comes from the Latin word corporare, which means to embody, to put into one body or to form as one body. Legally, this is done by the process of incorporation. The result is that the corporation can do things like own property, or borrow money. Think about that. It's not an individual, it's a collectivity that owns property and borrows money, and the corporation can be sued in court. So now you've learned about how cultural differences give rise to cultural boundaries. And you've also learned about how those boundaries can be crossed, but also how they can be resisted. And you've learned that teams themselves are constituted by cultural processes, such as the use of we and even the act of legal incorporation. To grasp the power of teams however, we have to know more about their ability to motivate. Teams have to able to tap into emotions. How do they do that? The answer we will be given in the next unit, is that they make use of symbols and rituals.
