Cultural Studies

When in 1952 American anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn analyzed the scientific literature, they found 164 different definitions of the word "culture." Since then, their number has only increased. This points to something important: culture is not a simple concept with a single meaning. It is...

For practical management, the most important thing is to understand that culture exists, that it influences people's behavior, and that it is reproduced and transmitted from person to person, from generation to generation. Understanding culture is a tool for a manager working in a complex environ...

Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871 gave the first scientific definition: "Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

Key words: "acquired"—culture is not innate; it is transmitted through learning and socialization. "As a member of society"—culture is social; it belongs to the group, not the individual. Tylor worked in the tradition of evolutionism and believed that cultures develop from "primitive" to "civiliz...

Definitions

1. Power Distance (PDI — Power Distance Index)

— the extent to which less powerful members of a society accept unequal distribution of power. High PDI (Malaysia, Mexico, Russia): hierarchy is accepted as a given, the boss doesn’t make mistakes, bottom-up initiative is undesirable. Low PDI (Austr...

2. Individualism vs Collectivism (IDV)

— the degree to which people are integrated into groups. High IDV (USA, Australia, United Kingdom): a person is self-sufficient, personal interests and achievements are more important than group ones. High Collectivism (Guatemala, Ecuador, China): a...

3. Masculinity vs Femininity (MAS)

— orientation towards competition, achievement, success vs orientation towards quality of life, cooperation, care. High “masculinity” (Japan, Austria, Venezuela): “live to work,” material success. High “femininity” (Sweden, Norway, Netherlands): “wo...

4. Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI — Uncertainty Avoidance Index)

— to what extent a culture tolerates ambiguity and the unknown. High UAI (Greece, Portugal, Japan): need for rules, structures, planning; uncertainty causes anxiety. Low UAI (Singapore, Jamaica, Denmark): uncertainty is accepted, improvisation is va...

5. Long-term vs Short-term Orientation (LTO)

— the relative importance of the future versus the past and present. High LTO (China, Japan, South Korea): planning, investments, thrift, willingness to delay gratification. Low LTO (Nigeria, Mexico): traditions, quick results, immediate rewards.

6. Indulgence vs Restraint (IND)

— the extent to which people allow themselves to enjoy life and pleasures. High indulgence (Latin America, West Africa): freedom, following desires, happiness as a goal. High restraint (Eastern Europe, Asia): desires are controlled by norms.

From 1967 to 1973, Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede conducted the largest cross-cultural study in history: he surveyed about 117,000 IBM employees in 40 countries. The question: what makes cultures different in a professional context? His data revealed four (later—six) dimensions along which cult...

For managers, this is an invaluable tool: instead of a vague “they are different,” there are specific parameters by which one can predict and manage cultural differences.

1. Power Distance (PDI — Power Distance Index) — the extent to which less powerful members of a society accept unequal distribution of power. High PDI (Malaysia, Mexico, Russia): hierarchy is accepted as a given, the boss doesn’t make mistakes, bottom-up initiative is undesirable. Low PDI (Austri...

2. Individualism vs Collectivism (IDV) — the degree to which people are integrated into groups. High IDV (USA, Australia, United Kingdom): a person is self-sufficient, personal interests and achievements are more important than group ones. High Collectivism (Guatemala, Ecuador, China): a person b...

Who are you? This question can be answered through many dimensions: profession, nationality, gender, religion, class, generation. Each of these categories is an element of identity, that is, an idea of who you are and which groups you belong to.

Cultural studies show that identity is not a given and not an essence. It is a construction formed in the process of socialization, interaction, and narrative. This does not mean it is unreal—on the contrary, identity has a real effect on behavior, perception, and decision-making. But it is chang...

How does culture "enter" a person? Through socialization—a process by which an individual absorbs the norms, values, and beliefs of their group. Primary socialization occurs in the family, up to the age of 6–7, when fundamental cultural patterns are absorbed on an unconscious level. Secondary soc...

A key feature of primary socialization: it occurs before the formation of critical thinking. The child learns the "rules" of the world literally, without doubt. That is why cultural patterns absorbed in childhood are especially persistent and difficult to change—even when an adult intellectually ...

Definitions

Eye contact

— in Western cultures, direct eye contact is a sign of honesty and engagement. In Japanese and many Asian cultures, prolonged direct gaze is aggression or shamelessness; politeness is to look down or slightly to the side.

Silence

— in Finnish business culture, a pause in conversation is normal and even respectful (a person is thinking). In American culture it is an awkward silence that must be filled. An American in negotiations with a Finn may say too much just to fill the ...

Cultural empathy

— the ability to see a situation through the eyes of another culture, without rejecting it. This does not mean agreement—it means understanding the logic.

Explicit confirmation of understanding

— especially in negotiations between LC and HC cultures, it is necessary to explicitly verify understanding: “Let me make sure I understood correctly…” Do not assume that words mean the same to both sides.

Managing expectations

— at the start of interaction, explicitly discuss cultural differences in approaches to time, hierarchy, decision-making. This requires vulnerability, but prevents conflicts.

Communication is not just the transmission of information. It is a cultural act, based on shared assumptions about meaning, context, and the rules of interaction. When these assumptions differ, not only does misunderstanding arise—cultural conflict emerges, because each party interprets the other...

Edward Hall in 1976 introduced a fundamental distinction which has not lost its relevance: high-context and low-context cultures. This distinction explains a vast number of cross-cultural conflicts in business.

In low-context cultures (LC — Low Context): the USA, Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands — communication is direct and explicit. Meaning is contained in the words themselves. “No” means “no.” “I like the idea” means “I like the idea.” Rules, contracts, and instructions are written in detail pre...

In high-context cultures (HC — High Context): Japan, China, Arab countries, Russia, Mexico — meaning is conveyed indirectly, through context: tone, pauses, relationships, situation, nonverbal signals. “It may take time” means “no.” “We will consider it” means “no.” A direct refusal is impolite an...

When a person encounters a culture different from their own, several reactions are possible. The first and most common is ethnocentrism: evaluating other cultures by the standards of one’s own. The second is stereotyping: simplistically generalizing the characteristics of all members of another c...

Ethnocentrism is not the same as racism or xenophobia. It is a cognitive mechanism: perceiving one's own culture as "normal", "obvious", "correct", and evaluating other cultures from the perspective of deviation from that norm. This happens automatically, unconsciously.

William Sumner (1906), who introduced the term "ethnocentrism," showed that this phenomenon is universal. Every cultural group considers its customs the best and looks at the customs of others with suspicion or contempt. This was evolutionarily adaptive: in small groups, trust toward "one’s own" ...

In global business, ethnocentrism remains one of the main causes of failure in international projects. An American company implements an "open door" policy (any employee can approach the CEO directly) in its Russian branch — and is surprised that the system does not work. From the point of view o...

Globalization is usually discussed in economic terms: world trade, transnational corporations (TNCs), financial flows. But it also has a cultural dimension, which is no less important: the spread of ideas, values, lifestyles, and consumer practices across the world. McDonald's in Moscow, Korean d...

The key question: what happens to cultures in the conditions of intensive global interaction? There are three competing answers: cultural homogenization, cultural hybridity, cultural diversity (or even clash).

The thesis of homogenization: globalization leads to a "McWorld" (Barber, 1995)—a homogeneous, Americanized global consumer society. The same movies, the same music, the same brands—from Tokyo to Nairobi. Local cultures are displaced by "global" (in large part—American) mass culture.

Data: American cinema takes up about 65–70% of box office receipts in most countries of the world. English is the working language of science, business, the internet. Youth subcultures around the world consume similar musical content.

In the 1930s and 1940s, a group of German philosopher-emigrants (who fled Nazism for the United States), known as the "Frankfurt School" or "critical theorists," developed one of the sharpest and most controversial analyses of mass culture. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert...

Their main question: how did it become possible that "enlightened" European societies produced fascism? The answer they developed: The Enlightenment contained the seeds of regression — through instrumental reason, which transforms everything (including people) into a means for achieving goals. Ma...

In "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer introduced the concept of "culture industry" (Kulturindustrie). They deliberately rejected the term "mass culture" to avoid the illusion that culture "spontaneously" arises from the masses. No: culture is produced industrially, accordi...

Mechanism: standardization. Hollywood films, pop music, "entertainment" reading — all are produced according to standard formulas. The hero encounters a problem, overcomes it, is rewarded. Melody A-B-A. Happy ending. The viewer knows what to expect — and that's exactly what satisfies them. The cu...

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was a Canadian media theorist whose phrase "The medium is the message" became one of the most quoted and least understood expressions in the history of the humanities. He wrote aphoristically, non-linearly, provocatively—deliberately, believing that the form of writin...

His key contribution: analyzing how media technologies (not just their content) alter perception, thinking, and social organization.

The standard view of media: a neutral channel delivering content. Television delivers news, a book delivers knowledge, a phone delivers voice. Content is important; the channel is neutral.

McLuhan overturns this: the medium itself is already the message. The electric lamp has no "content," but it transforms night into day, changes the possibilities of social life, alters the perception of time. Television, regardless of what is shown, changes family structure (everyone sits in one ...

In post-war Great Britain, researchers at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) drew attention to a phenomenon that the dominant culture tends to ignore or condemn: youth subcultures—Teddy boys, Mods, Rockers, Punks, Rastafarians. Their question: what do these cultural pr...

A subculture is a group within a broader culture, distinguished by specific norms, values, practices, aesthetics. A subculture does not necessarily oppose the dominant culture (as a counterculture does)—it may exist in parallel, occupy a “niche.”

Dick Hebdige, in “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” (1979), proposed analyzing subcultures through the concept of “bricolage” (borrowed from Levi-Strauss). Bricolage is the creation of something new from improvised materials: subcultures take objects from the dominant culture and re-signify them....

Subcultural style is a “noise” in the system of communication of the dominant culture. It is a way of saying: “We are other. Your symbols do not work for us the way you want.”

Definitions

Level 1: Artifacts

— what is seen, heard, and felt upon entering an organization. Physical space (open office or separate offices?), dress code, language (how do people address each other?), rituals (how are meetings conducted?), stories, symbols. This is the most vis...

Level 2: Espoused Values

— explicitly formulated values, norms, rules, mission. This is what the organization “officially” says about itself: “We put the client first,” “We are innovative,” “We respect diversity.” Espoused values may or may not correspond to real behavior. ...

Level 3: Basic Underlying Assumptions

— unconscious, self-evident beliefs that determine behavior. This is the deepest and most influential level. Basic assumptions — about human nature (are people intrinsically motivated or not?), about power and hierarchy, about risk and mistakes, abo...

The phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is attributed to Peter Drucker. Whether or not this is true, the idea remains accurate: even the most brilliant strategy will not be implemented if the organizational culture contradicts it. McKinsey investigated the failures of transformational in...

Edgar Schein (1928–2023) — one of the founders of the field of organizational culture — developed a model that remains the most useful for practical application.

Schein proposed three levels of organizational culture, differing in their visibility and accessibility to conscious analysis.

Level 1: Artifacts — what is seen, heard, and felt upon entering an organization. Physical space (open office or separate offices?), dress code, language (how do people address each other?), rituals (how are meetings conducted?), stories, symbols. This is the most visible level, but the hardest t...

“We sent our best manager to head the new office in Dubai—and a year later he requested a transfer, and the office ended up in crisis.” This is a typical story of international management. Technical skills and success in one cultural context do not guarantee success in another. Managing in the UA...

Cross-cultural management is a managerial discipline that studies how cultural differences affect managerial practices, and how to manage effectively in culturally diverse contexts.

An effective leadership style is not universal. What is considered a “good leader” is shaped by culture.

In the USA and Australia (low PDI, high IDV): the best manager is a “coach,” a mentor who develops the autonomy of subordinates, delegates responsibility, and is open to feedback. An “open-door policy” is the norm.

Why does Silicon Valley produce so many innovations? Why is Israel a "startup nation"? Why does Scandinavia have a high level of social trust combined with a high level of entrepreneurship? The answers are not only about capital or education—they are tied to cultural conditions that either encour...

Experiment: In the US, entrepreneurial failure is an experience and a line on the resume. "Failed, learned, will try again." In Germany or Japan, a startup failure is a social stigma, which can close doors for years. Different attitudes toward risk and failure create fundamentally different innov...

Research shows that several cultural dimensions are critically important for innovation:

Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI): Low UAI correlates with innovation. Cultures that accept uncertainty create conditions for experimentation. High UAI creates a need for rules, planning, predictability—which limits willingness to take risks. However, high UAI can be an advantage in certain types...

17th–18th centuries: the first coffeehouses open in London. This is not just a place to drink coffee — it is the first public space open to any paying man, regardless of origin. Aristocrat and merchant sat at the same table, read the same newspapers, discussed politics, philosophy, business.

Jürgen Habermas called this the "birth of the public sphere": a space between the private home and the state, where citizens discuss common affairs through rational argumentation. English coffeehouses were the first version of this space. Lloyds of London began as a coffeehouse for sailors and in...

French literary salons of the 18th century — another form of public intellectual space. They were managed by women — "salonnières": Madame de Pompadour, Madame Geoffrin, Madame Necker. This is an interesting detail: women deprived of political power created informal networks of intellectual influ...

The "philosophes" — Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau — gathered in salons, discussed Enlightenment ideas, prepared the "Encyclopédie." This is not an academic environment — it is a secular public culture in which ideas are spread through personal contact and reputation, not through univer...

Romanticism (late 18th — mid-19th century) is a cultural reaction to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Feeling and intuition as opposed to reason. Nature as opposed to urban civilization. The uniqueness of each nation and personality as opposed to universal principles. Spirituality...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau — the forerunner: “Back to nature,” “The Noble Savage” (who, in reality, is not quite as commonly imagined), “Émile” as education through nature. The French Revolution horrified romantic conservatives (Burke, de Maistre) and inspired romantic radicals (the young Wordsworth, ...

The concept of the “genius” is specifically Romantic. Before Romanticism, the artist was a craftsman following rules. Romanticism created the image of the artist-genius: a solitary creator drawing from the depths of their own soul, breaking the rules, suffering due to the crowd’s incomprehension....

This is a cultural construction with immense consequences. It created the cult of the “star” artist, which survived into pop culture. It devalued collective creativity and craftsmen. It gave rise to gender discrimination: the “genius” is male; a woman artist is an anomaly requiring explanation.

The 19th century was the age of the nation-state as a cultural agent. The state ceased to be merely an apparatus of coercion—it took upon itself the creation of national cultural identity through education, the press, museums, monuments, military ceremonies, and holidays.

Compulsory elementary education (Prussia—1717, France—1882, most Western countries—the 19th century) had a dual function: economic (literate workers for industry) and cultural (the creation of “Frenchmen,” “Germans,” “Englishmen” through a unified language, history, and narrative).

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (“The Invention of Tradition,” 1983): many “ancient traditions”—Scottish tartans, German Christmas traditions, the British royal ceremony—were created in the 19th century as state cultural projects.

The cheap “penny press” of the 1830s–1840s created the first mass media environment. The newspaper became the main medium of public life—and an instrument of cultural and political hegemony.

The Weimar Republic (1919–1933) is one of the most productive and tragic cultural periods in history. Democracy born out of defeat in war, economic instability and hyperinflation—and an incredible cultural flourishing.

Bauhaus (Bauhaus, 1919–1933)—a school of design and architecture founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. Its program: synthesis of art and craft, “the beauty of function.” Furniture, typography, architecture, theater—everything must be functional and beautiful. This is not just a design school—it is...

Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Most of the faculty emigrated—to the USA, USSR, Israel, Switzerland. They spread its principles around the world: Mies van der Rohe in the USA, Gropius at Harvard, Josef Albers at Yale. Bauhaus lives on in the architecture, typography, and industrial desig...

Berlin’s Weimar culture—cabaret, expressionism, “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit). Cabaret is a form of political satire sharply criticizing bourgeois hypocrisy and political instability. Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret” (1972) is an image of this world.

Theodor Adorno formulated the most radical thesis concerning culture after the Holocaust: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." This is not a literal ban on poetry. It is a question: How is culture possible after an event that demonstrated that "civilization" can create death on an indus...

German classical culture—Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Bach—did not protect Germany from Nazism. Concentration camp officers listened to Wagner in the evenings. This destroyed the naive belief that culture "humanizes."

Adorno and Horkheimer ("Dialectic of Enlightenment," 1944): Enlightenment itself carries within it the seeds of barbarism. Rationalization, control over nature, instrumentalism—the logic, when taken to its limit, becomes destruction. This is one of the darkest and most important theses of the 20t...

Artists, writers, filmmakers were confronted with a task: how to portray the Holocaust? Several positions.

After the Second World War, the USA became not only a military and economic, but also a cultural superpower. Hollywood, jazz, rock and roll, Coca-Cola, jeans, McDonalds—American cultural products penetrated all corners of the world. This is the “soft power” of Joseph Nye: influence through cultur...

This was not completely spontaneous. The CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom—an organization that promoted Western art (abstract expressionism) as a symbol of freedom against Soviet socialist realism. Culture was a weapon of the Cold War.

American mass culture attracted people abroad—especially the youth in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Jeans and rock and roll as symbols of freedom. “Voice of America” as a cultural and political instrument.

Adorno and Horkheimer introduced the term “culture industry” (Kulturindustrie) as a replacement for “mass culture”: the former sounds accusatory, the latter neutral. The culture industry is the standardized, commercially oriented production of cultural products which create the illusion of indivi...

The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s created an influential theory of youth subcultures. Dick Hebdige (“Subculture: The Meaning of Style,” 1979): subcultures are not just fashion, but forms of cultural resistance to the dominant culture.

Style is the language of resistance. A punk with a safety pin in their cheek, dyeing their hair into a mohawk—this is a semiotic act: appropriating “indecent” symbols as a challenge to bourgeois norms. Teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads (in their original working-class version), hippies—each su...

The problem: subcultures are absorbed by the mainstream. Punk, which started out as radical, became commercialized in 3–4 years. The DIY aesthetic was sold in chain stores. This is “recuperation”—the return of resistance into the channel of consumption.

Hip-hop (New York, late 1970s) is a culture from the Bronx, which at the time was literally burning (arson for insurance payouts). Four elements: rapping (MCing), DJing, breakdancing, graffiti. This is a culture made out of nothing: using other people’s vinyl records, walls as canvases, the body ...

Homi Bhabha is one of the main theorists of postcolonial culture. His key concepts: "Hybridity" — the colonial encounter creates something new, irreducible to the colonizer's culture or the pre-colonial culture. It is not a "mixture" — it is qualitatively new, a "third space".

"Mimicry": when the colonized person imitates the culture of the colonizer — "almost the same, but not quite" — this is simultaneously both submission and subversion. The imitator is always a little "wrong," which exposes the pretensions of the original to naturalness.

This contradicts the naive view of "cultural purity." There are no "pure" cultures — all cultures are historically hybrid. The attempt to preserve "purity" is a political project, not a cultural reality.

Cultural globalization is not a one-way Americanization. Non-Western cultural industries have created their own global players. Bollywood (Indian cinema) — the largest film industry by the number of films produced. K-pop (Korean pop music) — a global phenomenon, BTS with an army of fans on every ...

"Cultural wars" are political conflicts surrounding values, identity, and cultural norms, rather than purely economic interests. The term gained popularity after James Davidson Hunter's book ("Culture Wars", 1991): a fundamental divide between "orthodox" (supporters of traditional values based on...

In the USA: abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, education (what should be taught in schools), the role of religion in public life, immigration. In Russia: traditional values vs. liberalism. In Western Europe: multiculturalism and Islamophobia, questions of colonial legacy.

"Identity politics" is politics based on the shared identity of a group (racial, gender, sexual, religious). Arguments in favor: groups that have been systematically discriminated against need collective political power to protect their interests. Arguments against: it fragments political coaliti...

Francis Fukuyama ("Identity", 2018): identity politics are a reaction to real grievances over recognition. But it often leads to "leftidance" — competition in victimhood. A genuine response is to create a common civic identity that includes, rather than displaces, particular identities.

Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “meme” in “The Selfish Gene” (1976)—a cultural analogue of the gene: a unit of information that spreads through imitation. An idea, motif, practice that is reproduced and evolves. The internet meme is a concretization of this idea: an image or format ...

But an internet meme is not merely “viral content.” It is a form of folk creativity, modern folklore. Like old proverbs and tales, memes: express collective feelings in a compact form; are easy to remember and reproduce; adapt to new contexts; are transmitted horizontally, without hierarchy.

“Distracted Boyfriend,” “This is Fine,” “Drake Pointing”—these formats carry culturally specific meanings that Generation Z perceives instantly. For elders, it’s an opaque code.

In the past, cultural intermediaries were editors, curators, publishers, TV channels. Now—algorithms. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter/X, Spotify—cultural platforms that determine what the audience sees.

Herbert Simon predicted the "attention economy" as early as 1971: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Today this is an obvious reality. Every day, 330 million tweets are created, 500 hours of video per minute are uploaded to YouTube, 4 billion likes are made on Facebook. Att...

Tim Wu ("The Attention Merchants"): the history of advertising is the history of colonizing attention. Newspapers of the 19th century, television of the 20th, the internet of the 21st—every medium built a business model on selling someone else's attention to advertisers. "If the product is free—t...

Shoshana Zuboff ("Surveillance Capitalism"): the business model of Google, Facebook, and the like is not just the sale of attention. These are "predictive products": user behavioral data is transformed into behavioral predictions, which are sold to advertisers. This is a new form of capitalism ba...

"The Dory Effect"—a decline in the ability for prolonged concentration. The average length of YouTube videos viewed was shrinking year by year, until the algorithm learned how to hold attention longer. Books compete with video games, television series, TikTok for the same attention.

ChatGPT writes poetry, Midjourney draws pictures, Suno creates music, Runway makes videos. This raises radical questions about the nature of cultural creativity. If a machine creates “convincing” art—is it art? What happens to the professions of artist, illustrator, copywriter?

“Diffusion models” (Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Midjourney)—AI systems for generating images—are trained on billions of images from the internet without artists’ permission. This has led to court cases (Getty Images vs. Stability AI) and a cultural polemic: is this “inspiration” (as with a human ar...

AI music: clones of the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, generated by anonymous users. The music industry is in panic—because this threatens the very foundation: the uniqueness of the artistic voice.

The internet promised “disintermediation” (removing intermediaries) and the democratization of culture: anyone can publish books (Amazon KDP), music (Spotify Direct), videos (YouTube), art (NFT). This has come to pass—and has created new problems.