![]() ![]() Articulating security as a core value rather than as an obligation or a burdensome expense.Aligning security with core business goals and.Establishing an appreciation of positive security practices among employees.Recognizing that effective security is critical to business success.I hope this post will spur your own thinking about the ways culture shapes us, and the ways we use it to shape the world.Security culture is a set of security-related norms, values, attitudes and assumptions that are inherent in the daily operation of an organization and are reflected by the actions and behaviours of all entities and personnel within the organization. Security should be everyone's responsibility - from the ground up and top down. The implications however, of thinking about culture as a tool-kit that we use as opposed to culture as a web that we are stuck in, offers practitioners a new way to make sense of the complexity of culture as well as the various ways it shapes our experiences. Thinking of religious culture as a tool-kit that people use not only frees us from assuming that all religious adherents are the same, but also sheds light on the ways some religious zealots may use their religions for violent ends.Īs I said before, this is a brief summary of a much deeper conversation that is ongoing amongst cultural scholars. Instead, Reza argues that individuals often use religious scriptures and ideals (culture) in ways that may reflect other parts of their culture-politics, ethnicity, nationality, or gender. Both, Reza argues, rely on too simplistic conceptions of the way religious culture works-like a powerful web. ![]() In this article, religious scholar Reza Aslan, critiques the recent remarks from Bill Maher and Ben Affleck on the nature of Islam. A recent op-ed in the NY Times illustrates the benefits of a more nuanced view culture. I know culture is already a slippery and complicated concept to pin down, so why make it even more complex? It is undeniably easier and more practical to have a more simple definition of culture but I think the benefits of the tool-kit approach outweigh the costs. ![]() It also makes sense of our day-to-day experiences of our own cultures. The tool-kit metaphor on the other hand, allows for more complexity and representation in its conception of culture. The assumption (or implication) is that employees can learn a single set of cultural gestures, phrases, or beliefs that would represent all of Germany. Or when organizations offer training for cross-cultural work with German culture or American culture. As if all of Latino experience can be summed up with a single label. We see the effects of the “culture as a web” conception when media outlets talk about “Latino” or “Black” culture, instead of Latino or Black culture(s)-in the plural. This is admittedly an oversimplification of a very long scientific conversation, but let me highlight a few reasons why thinking about culture as a tool-kit versus a web is important, especially for organizational leaders. Although the tools in our tool-kits may vary depending on our race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion, each of us is free to use various parts of our culture depending on our life circumstance at the moment. Instead, she argues, that each of us has different cultural tool-kits that we carry around and use in our everyday choices. ![]() Swidler challenged the idea that culture exists as something “out there” that deeply affects people caught in its web. The change in understanding of culture, in sociology at least, can largely be traced back to a 1986 article by Ann Swidler, in which she argues that culture is more like a “tool-kit” than a stable web of meanings. The culture as a web metaphor has been so pervasive that this has become the standard way the public, and many organizations, define and deal with culture. The most common and influential conception of culture was something like a web of beliefs, values, and morals that affected the practices and rituals of entire groups of people. There has been something of a seismic shift in the last twenty years in the way the sciences understand culture. ![]()
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