Why does culture matter

Zappos further streamlined its process by completely eliminating job postings. In keeping with the culture, the company created its own social network called Zappos Insiders. If you want a job there, you need to sign up and ask for an interview. The very process they are using to bring people into their organization connects to their culture and either attracts or repels people. Why not pay attention to culture and activate a business lever that costs you nothing? This free lever can help you to increase productivity, innovation, creativity and more.

Cultural understanding is desirable for all of us, but it is essential to leaders if they are to lead. Culture is your secret sauce. Did you know that Southwest Airlines was not the first low cost airline to focus on fun? Your culture will not eat your strategy for breakfast and lunch or dinner, but it is the accelerator or roadblock to your success. The culture was not amenable to the changes he wanted to make despite his success at Target and Apple.

Care for your culture and beware, it can bite! Recently, I worked with a leadership team that was struggling to get various teams aligned. They were embarking on a culture initiative to more clearly define their culture and understand how work gets done, people get managed and money gets spent.

The leadership worked to define and align the management system for the entire organization and have already seen people feel empowered to get work done rather than focus on rules. With all the effort and energy spent measuring the employee engagement, little has changed. Culture is a better measure and the right focus for leaders to deliver business results.

Culture trumps engagement because it provides a more complete picture of the organization. Donna Brighton is an expert in organizational culture and change.

We obviously have human rights problems regarding women, religious minorities, and so on. But I suggest to you that culture is integral to human rights problems in the United States, in Washington, D.

American resistance to economic and social rights as human rights is a cultural construct. We should not focus on non-Western societies as culturally problematic, but instead should think in terms of how that problematic manifests itself in every society. We have to take culture seriously, so that what we say at these meetings and what we do as human rights activists has resonance, relevance, and efficacy in producing changes in our respective societies.

We lack resonance in our communities because we are perceived as representing an alien cultural construct, so-called human rights.

We should be raising questions about who speaks for culture, whose vision and definition of the boundaries of the normative content hold, and what the policy implications of human rights are. The premise here is that cultural norms and institutions are not only open to change over time, they are also subject to differing interpretations at any given point in time.

In fact, American culture, to the extent that one can speak of any national culture, is being contested at this very moment. The debate about culture and its relevance is about agency, it is about representation, it is about legitimacy—and none of these is a foregone conclusion. Civil and political rights are integral to any claim about the relevance of culture, because the very people who speak in the name of a culture need the concept of civil and political rights in order to defend their right to speak for their culture.

The interdependence is crucial; every claim that is made on behalf of a culture is embedded in a claim about civil and political rights. Violations of civil and political rights in the name of culture are indefensible. The question of Asian values is not whether there are Asian values or what their relevance is to human rights in the abstract; rather, it is whose understanding of Asian values is taken seriously.

One of the challenges before us is how the human rights movement is to cope with culture. What I have seen, among both activists and scholars, is a reticence to engage the cultural issue because of a fear of opening the door to relativism. But in doing so we are conceding our inability to relate to our cultures and communities meaningfully in order to transform the thinking about what the culture stands for and what the cultural priorities and issues are.

Download Citation Data. Benhabib, M. Jackson, and A. Bisin, editors, Handbook of Social Economics Vol. Does Culture Matter? Share Twitter LinkedIn Email. Working Paper