[MUSIC] Hello, welcome back to the week five of the course, Understanding Russians, Contexts of Intercultural Communication. And this week we will devote to discussing communication with Russians in corporate and organizational discourse formats. Let's remember how we understand the cultural characteristics of an individual. When we were discussing various metaphors of culture, one of most pertinent to those people who live in the modern world in big cities and belong to many cultural groupings so to say. We can express this or graphically show it, how it is done on this slide, the idea of this cultural self awareness because there are cultures that we understand as part of our personalities. So we're talking about not just cultures but cultural self awareness with individuals. So, it can be shown in kind of this flower if you want or diagram where various sectors of this picture show our different belongings, the variety of what is considered to be cultural making of an individual. There is an individual cultural profile which consists of the inner circle which is made by ethnicity, gender, social class, professions, corporate culture in which this person functions. Education, religion, family, regional differences, the group of friends with whom we share our values, our attitudes, our practices. And then if we look at this outer circle made out of five sectors, we see all the same ideas but grouped in more, in clusters that will really define different types of cultures or cultural formats in which most of the population who live in the global world function. This will be national culture, and it will determine much of what we are family culture. The host culture if we are talking about traveling to another place and living there and working and getting education there. And then to other cultures that are this yellow and red, reddish-purple, purplish color which are more close to the topics we discuss now. These are functional culture and organizational culture. Because they determine our behaviors, our cultural makeup that is related to professions, to activities and to our functioning in society within organizations and in society in general. We're mostly interested today about functioning within organizations. Organizations are a very important concept for many fields, sociology, socio-psychology, political studies, communication as well. Because communication is a social thing as we know. Organizations are important for individuals. Not only because we work in organizations, we entertain within organizations, we get education within organizations. But also because organizations in their various formats, be it public organizations, private organizations, corporate world, educational world, academia, other types of organizations, they actually make our society. They make this the backbone, the skeleton and various bones, various ribs on which the whole body of the society is built. And organizational culture's something that we'll discuss in a second what we understand by organizational culture. But organization cultures will also reflect national cultures. Within this organizations exist because they are part of this society. They make the society, as I said. Another thesis that I would now even state exactly as a thesis for today's lecture that national culture in itself has its core features. We discussed it in quite detail, core features that cannot be really changed, such as values. And also vectors for its development, because culture is a dynamic concept, a dynamic organism we could say. Well, we also have discussed it. So, these core features and vectors of development cannot be really changed, even if the right changes in national cultures. And all the studies show that changes within natural cultures happen, but do happen really slowly. And usually they only happen if the vector of these changes is compatible with the core values. So the vectors of the changes is compatible with the core vectors of the development of this national culture. Nothing will happen if the changes that sort of this society faces are absolutely opposite to the track on which this culture was going for centuries maybe. But then this is where the organizations come into the light onto the scene. It is through organizations and their new cultures that national cultures may be transformed. And here it's a very important idea, and in a way, it's a very optimistic idea. It gives us hope that even if we are caught within certain history of a culture or a nation, if there is something that we would like to change because change is absolutely necessary for the people and for the societies in which we live. Well what then is an instrument that can influence and probably change in the desired of course only direction our culture? Because you cannot find these cultures within the culture itself. It's new organizations that may come. And through their new organizational cultures, exactly because people spend so much of their lives within organizations getting education, working, working for their living, entertaining, many other aspects. Church, culture in terms of movies, theater, museums, all this is within organizations, and these organizations have their cultures. So, exactly because we do spend so much time within organizations that the culture, the organizational culture that exists there, that imposes certain rules of behavior, attitudes, certain procedures and polices on us. This is the instrument that may possibly have some impact on national culture, especially if the core vectors coincide. So, now how we understand organizational culture because this is not the central concept for us now. We are not here discussing the theory of management. But still, the idea of organizational culture can be seen from very different perspectives, depending on what you're interested. Whether it's effective management, or you're interested in the history of organizations, or how these cultures interact, and so on. And so, at least the culture concept in organizations is used in four different ways. One is associated with problems of managing companies which are distributed across the globe, each located in a different national culture. So this is where culture comes into place in organizational culture is to be kind of compared or mapped or I don't know, worked within the national culture in which these organizations, global organizations, are now spread in terms of process, services, I don't know, distribution. The second concept of the culture within organizations will be related to the attempts of the management to integrate people coming from different ethnic groups, people with different ethnic cultures, into a workforce in one plant, in one enterprise. This is also important for organization to prosper to make people with different ethnic, national, and other regional cultures into a workforce working for one organization. Like making them a crowd exactly the workforce of this specific organizations, and a lot of special efforts is spent on doing this. Again, this is not exactly what we're going to discuss in the detail, but it's important to understand. The third aspect how the culture concept is used in organizations, it's more about informal concepts, attitudes, and values that prevail among the workforce. Not the official procedures, policies, missions, tasks, but some informal, something like grapevine, something that actually glues people together. And then the fourth aspect of the culture concept is exactly the opposite, the former organizational values and practices that are imposed by management as a glue to hold the workforce together. Typical, uniforms, some ideas, like mission statement that make people working in the same place, in the same location, to be a team, a collective, to make a team and to make them produce collective effort that will bring some positive results. So these four different ways to understand the culture concept, they of course overlap a bit. But mainly they show us that we can look at the organization from the point of view of its tasks, or from the point of view of the people who work there, or from the point of view of the global situation of putting various organizations around the globe. And in all these aspects, from all these angles, the concept of organizational culture is important enough to spend money, resources, and time or specialists on it. [MUSIC]
