Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Negotiating a National Agenda for Development: The Role of Culture

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

'Culture is the software of the mind' Geert Hofstede.

They don't teach that at UWI to our peril.

The GG is a linguist. She, like the proverbial blind men of India, can only perceive one dimension of culture: 'What you do and how you do it; what you say and how you say it.'

Nonetheless, to dwell only on this latter part or visible part of our culture is to ignore the fundamental driving forces behind our ingrained backwardness. In other words, what is holding back our development,

The limitations of our experts in this geographic region is what keeps us going round and round in circles.

The other two dimensions of culture especially the most difficult part 'the hidden assumptions' which lie below the surface driving our behaviours has to do with the 'software of the mind'.

The metaphor here is the operations of software in computer systems. It takes over and turns things off and other things on.

If follows that if culture is being discussed without any reference at all to the cultural dimensions of two of the world's most renowned experts manely,
Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars, we are left beret of any true understanding of what makes us as a people tick.

It is like not knowing or understanding your personality.

We can go on kidding ourselves as much as we will, but we will remain forever trapped in our state of underdevelopment.

The visible part of our culture is just one-third part of how we ought to analyse culture.

This pattern will persist however, once our so-called experts continue to expatiate on their limited areas of knowledge, as being the end all or be all of the subject matter.

It's a disservice. It is hollow. But who cares? In the land of the blind (saint), St. Lucia, the one-eyed man is King.

June 7, 2012 at 2:38 PM

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