It is by no means new to be aware, among philosophers and cultural critics alike, that values are hard to come by. Now that the walls of the cave have turned into television screens, one image is chased away by the next one, while our sense of global responsibility dissolves into thin air even though all the fields of human action hold perspectives of responsibility within them.
Culture, like values, is a plenum and a void, a constant expectation and in the end something impossible when one looks at results and facts.
No doubt he was trying to hold historical pessimism at a distance by suggesting gain might be reached in the historical development of cultures if rationality were capable of reading through the language of mysticism, and curb the influence of those he chose to call the mystagogues, in whom he saw a danger for democracy and human dignity.
They change to eliminate reason, even, as Derrida puts it, to emasculate it, and we must, as a result, apply pressure to preserve amity, and to uphold the values of democracy. In particular, market mechanisms and the rise of global capital have impoverished some non-European nations, while Europe has, in recent years, worked to thin the immigration flux while downsizing out of their jobs the low-skilled workers of a once predominantly industrial economy that has now turned to services.
As a result, local communities have been struck, either in Europe or the United States, by being impoverished within the more glitzy context of affluence. In China as elsewhere, industrial activity has surged, while working conditions have never been worse among the former peasants driven to urban areas. Globalization may well pass for an agenda of disaster and social apocalypse, as Joseph Stiglitz has demonstrated 5.
Welfare and human rights have hardly benefited from the promise economic liberalism keeps harping on, and human development has been restricted to the rising middle-classes of China, or India, if we look at the most significant examples. Richard Rorty, meditating on social hope, has brought home the idea that globalization has been a blow to democracy.
The ideology of economic growth heralds human development, but delivers little in terms of the strengthening of local communities, both in rising nations as well as in Western ones. Might not this ideology form the most recent embodiment of some pseudo-thinking the mystagogues parade as rationality for us to kneel to?
The portmanteau word means more than it seems to say. On the one hand, the buzzword suggests that local communities may be strengthened by globalization; on the other, it suggests that local communities are shaped, in ways that cannot all be positive, by the advance of global liberalism. However, one of the unsought effects of glocalization may well be that cultural interference with distant or unknown communities might emerge from the pressure of global liberalism, by dissolving national, or even nationalist perspectives, and favouring international contacts.
Let us be cautious in this: international interaction, in the context of globalizing economic exchange, may well be no other than buying and selling, and one more version of materialism without national values being cross-fertilized. Globalization is in dire need of strengthening, not exhausting, utopian energies. If it proves incapable of effecting this, renewing utopian energies, the road down globalization may well be what one supposes it to be from recent evidence: a hurdle-race, with one winner, a few good athletes, and vast crowds of anonymous losers.
Jacques Derrida has pointed out that we need peace in culture, and that peace can be achieved when the mystagogues accept to interact with rationality. Rationality however, to him, is not an empty bottle, or an instrument by which societies may solve practical questions.
Rationality involves moral choice, and one may well suggest that the Habermas notion that utopian ideals have to be upheld is the best way to reorder, and refashion global liberalism. No doubt, the culture wars must go on, to stay the current backlash and its related traumas, terrorism East and West, the political violence within national borders and without, the religious fundamentalism which has found in globalization its ecotope, in Israel, in the Arab world, in the United States, and elsewhere, while environmental disasters from North to South take their toll upon communities.
Cultures, as a result of globalization, change, for reasons that have to do with the innate systemic risks that globalization runs through them, risks which are supra-human, but which, for that very reason, have to be identified, deconstructed, and eliminated, although we do know that this process cannot be the work of one sole generation. If, as Habermas thinks they are, utopian values are used-up, because they are targeted, then, they must be invigorated.
Intellectual clarity can help. And meditation upon what is and what is not scientific can be an asset. It is true odium has been cast on the precautionary principle by some scholars of environmental studies. In a fairly recent issue of the M. Press quarterly Global Environmental Politics, scholars Emery Roe and Michel Van Eeten have condemned the precautionary principle in matters of environmental policy on the grounds that scientific evidence is not sufficient, calling for empirical knowledge, supposed to be an index to what is and what is not scientific 8.
Is it that globalization has reshaped the image of science in academia, making us wistful once again, and inviting us to find peace of mind in a belated version of science which is reminiscent of the nineteenth century, when science was largely considered to rely on empirical observation, whatever this might mean? Empiricism and dogmatic thinking are birds of a feather flocking together. More open intellectual attitudes are necessary to face the risks of globalization upon our environment.
Doubt, in particular, may be protective, in this respect. Without it, scientific thinking can be stultified. Science cannot be independent of general interest and social respect, and requires critical detachment to shelter us from the systemic dangers inherent in its objects of inquiry and the applicability of its fundamental findings. In scientific knowledge as well, the culture wars loom large, though they tend to be overlooked.
These wars may lead both ways: to cultural changes that will crush social hope, and to cultural changes that will uplift a sense of community and cooperation. Human thinking involves systemic dangers, and one therefore has to rethink thinking in different terms, which has been the task of modern philosophy.
Perhaps we might suggest at this point that cultural change involves the thinking of rationality in secularized terms. This means that technology may well lead us astray, tethered as it is to scientific knowledge which we tend to view as total, whereas any inquiry into the results of science tends to demonstrate that science is provisional, and that its propositions will sooner or later be refined, or redefined, and that intellectual inquiry, whatever its field, rarely comes to conclusions that will never be reworded, or revised.
Knowledge is an ongoing process, and if we keep this in mind, we secularize science, instead of projecting it onto the higher plane of superior frozen truths. Science, like any other human adventure, unfolds through time, and taking this into consideration helps science respond to social needs. Behind his eulogy of democracy as a condition and an effect of economic and political liberalism, one finds an attempt to define the nature of rationality as the mainspring of social hope.
It is striking, when reading John Rawls, to realize the extent to which rationality is assessed in conjunction with its effects upon social organization, which yields workable political conceptions of justice.
The use of cultural rituals and sagas also helps to make change more palpable to an organization. A powerful culture protects the organization from the environment changes and confers to its values the stability necessary to the long term survival.
These organizations can adapt rapidly to the encountered changes, finding in their values the necessary force to resist. Cultural strategy is a field of practice that centers artists, storytellers, media makers and cultural influencers as agents of social change. Like all strategic practices, it requires goal-setting, a theory of change, an understanding of audience, and a commitment to meaningful evaluation and learning.
Speaking of benefits a cultural transformation will bring a company, the main ones include: Building a better work culture: Creating a better work culture is at the core of a culture transformation, which can help with every aspect of your company from employee retention to productivity.
It builds bridges between groups and peoples, it creates peace, and it is a significant economic player. It is the matrix of people and of humanity, and globally the most powerful engine of change and integration. A society where each individual is accepted as equal and feminine values are given just as much importance as masculine values.
The Problem: Cultural Dysfunction Cultural dysfunction is what creates the symptoms we see manifested such as inequitable practices, opportunity gaps, and increased discipline data.
If we only address the symptoms of cultural dysfunction, we will not heal our cultural relationships and realities. Social change is way human interactions and relationships transform cultural and social institutions over time, having a profound impact of society. These changes occur over time and often have profound and long-term consequences for society.
In a nutshell, it may be said that social change refers specifically to alterations in social relationships among people in groups, whereas cultural change refers to change in material and non-material cultural elements both. More recently, Starbucks has found it very difficult to become established in France despite the fact that it is becoming successful elsewhere in Europe.
In contrast, some cultures are extremely open to some kinds of change. Over the last two decades, the Peoples Republic of China has been rapidly adopting w estern technology and culture in everyday life. This can be seen in their wide acceptance of everything from cell phones to American television shows and fast food. McDonald's has already established of their restaurants in China and soon will be adding more. KFC fried chicken franchises have been even more popular.
There are KFC outlets throughout the country with more than in Beijing alone. In , the Chinese government made the decision to require all children in the ir country, beginning with the 3rd grade of elementary school, to learn English.
This will very likely accelerate w esternization. China is far from being unique in experiencing a revolutionary rate of change. It is now abundantly clear that we are in an accelerating culture change period all around the world regardless of whether we try to resist it or not.
It is driven by the expansion of international commerce and especially mass media. Ultimately, what is driving it is our massive human population explosion. The number of people in the world now doubles in less than half a century. Anthropology began its study of this phenomenon, during the late 19th century, largely from the perspective of trying to understand how manufactured things , such as tools, are invented and modified in design over time. It became apparent that there rarely are entirely new inventions.
Most often, only the function, form, or principle is new, but not all three. Those principles were well known to the ancient Greeks more than 2, years ago.
By the 's, anthropologists began to realize that ideas , tools, and other artifacts generally are not invented or changed in isolation. They are the product of particular cultural settings. Cultures are organic wholes consisting of interdependent components. Inventions often occur in response to other cultural changes. Likewise, inventions potentially can affect all cultural institutions.
Beginning in the 's, for instance, televisions in American homes affected how and when members of families interacted with each other. Less time was available for direct conversation. The size of houses in more affluent areas of the U. As a consequence, family members often have their own rooms and become even more isolated from each other.
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