4.9 Introducing the Force of Interest

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

98 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

98 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Culture-Driven Team Building

Behind the success and failure of teams lies team culture. But what exactly is culture? How and why does it contribute to success and failure? In this course, you learn how to recognize aspects of team culture of which most people are typically unaware. It is often these seemingly unimportant aspects that have the greatest effect on the outcomes of group tasks. Your recognition of them enables you to form, join and lead teams more effectively. You also come to appreciate the role of ritual and symbols in the daily operation of teams, as well as in situations of change and crisis. Knowledge of the ideas and information in this class enables you to be a better team player and a more effective team leader.

From the lesson

Effecting Cultural Continuity and Change

In this unit, we will examine inertia, change, and metaculture, introduce interest as a force at work on the motion of culture as well as provide a conclusion to the concepts covered in this course.

4.1 Culture in Time4:48

4.2 The Inertial Forces5:08

4.3 Habit and Drift5:02

4.4 Inertia and Change: An Ancient Egyptian Case, Part 15:40

4.5 More on Reflective Culture or Metaculture as a Force4:31

4.6 Inertia and Change: An Ancient Egyptian Case, Part 24:37

4.7 Inertia and Change: An Ancient Egyptian Case, Part 36:00

4.8 Secret to Successful Cultural Change4:56

4.9 Introducing the Force of Interest4:47

4.10 Interest at the Interface between Different Inertial Patterns6:20

4.11 The Conditional Motion of Culture5:35

4.12 Conclusion5:39

Meet the Instructors

Greg Urban, Ph.D.
Professor
Anthropology

Let me articulate the secret to successful culture change this way.

The new culture must appear to grow organically out of the old culture.

It must be new enough to be recognizable as different but also

sufficiently similar that its relationship to the old culture can be sensed.

That principle is a shorthand for what we discussed in our previous lecture.

We added that the description of the change

also affects how people understand it, and therefore how they reason about it.

Now, this is all fine and good.

But you may have sensed that we have left something important out.

We've talked about three kinds of force that effect the motion of culture.

The inertial, the entropic, and the reflective or metacultural force.

But none of these seems to include what we identified as crucial to

team success in unit three of this course where we focused on symbols and rituals.

There we saw that symbols of a particular sort, condensation symbols had efficacy

in the world because they were capable of calling up feelings and emotions.

In the case of dominant symbols,

those feelings were then attached to the idea of the group.

In the scheme of four great classes of force operative on the motion of culture

I'm presenting you with here.

Ethics and

emotions fall under the fourth class which I'm going to call simply interest.

I mean interest in the sense of being attracted to the culture or

alternatively being repulsed from it.

Interest is a hugely important force in the emotion of culture and

it is in my view essential to all of economics.

Laws of supply and

demand are ultimately grounded in the interest people have in commodities.

The realm of affects and emotions is a complex one.

I can't get into the complexities in this class.

Insofar as they affect the motion of culture though,

we can really think of feelings and

affects as propelling the motion of culture or alternatively as inhibiting it.

A particular hairstyle for

example might get propelled because of the interest in it.

In fact around the turn of the millennium some of my students conducted a project in

which they talked to hairstylists at beauty parlors.

It happens that at that time there was a popular style called the Rachel cut.

You can see examples by doing an Internet search.

The name came from a hairstyle

worn by a character in a television show called Friends.

Now I admit I have never seen the show however I have seen photos

of the character in question whose fictional name was Rachel Green.

The actress portraying her was Jennifer Aniston.

Apparently, according to the stylist, woman would bring in

photos of the Rachel Green character with the characteristic haircut and

ask to have their hair cut in just that way.

Turns out, this actually annoyed many of the stylists since they would try to

explain to the client that a haircut should be appropriate for

a particular facial structure which by implication the client just did not have.

Still, this kind of application of the hairstyle was all the rage.

We can say that the positive interest people had in the Rachel cut was

an element of culture, as an element of culture rather,

was a force propelling it through the world.

An example of negative interest might be that regarding horse meat

as a food appropriate for humans, we discussed earlier.

We talked about this actually way back but

I think about it in unit one of this class.

Here we can put it in a context of interest in the context of interest in

the motion of culture.

In the US, there's a widespread antipathy to the thought

let alone the practice of actually eating horse meat.

The antipathy inhibits the motion of cultural practice into the US,

although horse meat is eaten in many other countries around the world.

And yes, that's horse meat sausage you're looking at here on the screen.

According to the 2008 Alberta Horse Welfare Report,

the country in which by far the most horse meat was consumed was China.

Interestingly China's followed on the list by Mexico,

a neighbor of the United States, in fact one sharing a border with us.

The report mentions that the United States is listed as quote having

zero consumption of equine meat end quote.

Now, there's a cultural border for you.

In addition, of course, to a social one.

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