Introduction
Culture is the basis for the vast majority of human thought and behavior, along with whatever is produced from these. Culture distinguishes and helps to define the human, just as the wings of the bird or the fins of the fish serve to separate and distinguish these animals. Whereas for other members of the animal world adaptations or adjustments to the physical environment are, for the most part, the result of biological adaptation and inherited physical characteristics, adaptation for humans goes well beyond their biological inheritance. Humans create, learn, and use culture to respond to environment, control it, and even change it. Culture represents that unique ability of the species to gain significant control over aspects of the natural environment and even their own biology, within which the cultural capacity is grounded. Culture is used by people to create the socio cultural environment, to which they must also adjust or adapt. This socio cultural environment can overlie the natural environment (Banks, 1996). Culture exists in the natural environment, creates the socio cultural environment, and is also used to adapt to both those environments. It is used by humans as the mitigating factor between themselves and the environment, to respond to the limitations or problems imposed by the environment that directly affect their survival. No other animal has this capability, and no other animal has created culture (Ali, 2003).
Regardless of where they may be located, all humans have culture. This means that at least on one level, all humans are basically the same not necessarily equal but similar in that they all create and use culture for the same basic purpose. At the same time that culture can be used to characterize humans as a group distinct from other animals, it is also used to differentiate between groups of humans. Because culture represents the primary means by which people live and adjust to the problems and conditions of their environments, it also represents the end result of choices made by them from among all the alternatives that are available to solve their problems, given the particular circumstances in which they find, or create for, themselves. In the context of adapting to particular environments, culture is inextricably tied to change. Within all cultures there must be some provision for coping with new conditions or problems that arise in the natural and socio cultural environments, both of which are always in a state of flux. The ability to change is an essential process if a culture and the people who share it are to survive. Human groups unable to meet the challenges of new circumstances are not likely to survive, nor will their cultures (Darder, 1995). Change has always been an aspect of human culture, but now it means very different things than it did in the past: in the kinds of changes experienced, the circumstances by which change is made necessary, and its scale. In the earlier periods of human history change was not always as apparent as it may be today. But as culture developed, and as humans increasingly affected the physical and socio cultural environments through their activities and accomplishments, change became much more extensive and occurred with greater frequency (Davis et al., 2004). Human culture is deemed as unitary amongst countries and certain individuals. The paper wants to know if the extent that people can assume that cultures are unified and homogenous simply because they coexist within politically determined national boundaries. The paper will also determine what implications this has for the use of national cultural frameworks to understand organizational behavior.
Discussion
Human cultures being unified and homogenous
Human culture is a complicated mixture of interactions of various causal mechanisms. Some features may be explicable with relatively simple assumptions. Other features are not so easily explicable because they are more culturally or environmentally sensitive. Human cultures also are historical entities, changing over time, but they also carry with them vestiges of their past. For these reasons, it is plausible to suggest that the mechanisms by which cultural change occurs may be analogous to biological processes (Dean, 2000). Transmission of information occurs, whether it be encoded in genes or ideas. Thus, another resource that biology offers is a theoretical structure from which to build analogous models for cultural change and stasis. The analogical strategy acknowledges from the outset that the relation between the two domains is one of similarity, not identity, so that such an investigation illuminates the differences between biological and cultural processes, as well as the similarities. Because human beings are both just another species and a particularly highly developed one, an isolationist stance of scientific division of labor is unwarranted. No doubt the sophistication of human cultural capacity is impressive and requires special attention a task the social sciences like anthropology, sociology, and psychology fulfill (Allen & Skelton, 1999).
Indeed, issues such as the evolution of social intelligence, language, nonverbal communication, and human social institutions, or the ecology of human behavior, call for interdisciplinary interaction. Each of the features involved has some parallels in other organisms, but the combination and degree of exaggeration of these features indicates that the ways in which humans are unique are crucial to the explanations of their behavior. Thus far, interdisciplinary cooperation is the exception. Mutual ignorance, at worst and analogical transfer of biological concepts, at best, still dominates the situation (Edgar & Klein, 2002). Attempts to explore human cultural phenomena that transgress the boundary of a single social or biological discipline are rare. Thus, recent evolutionary theory from sociobiology and population genetics attracted attention because of their various claims to answer questions relating to the development of human culture, social behavior, the development of social institutions, and their transformation. Within the social sciences, such attempts reflect a minority position at best and passionate rejection at worst. Apart from anthropology and psychology, there are only a few sociologists who seriously consider human biological design to play a constitutive role in the current designs of human societies. The idea of a single, unified culture encompassing the whole world has a long and relatively undocumented history. An inventory of the various historical dreams, visions and speculations about a global culture would have to include at least those of: the imperial projects of the ancient world empires such as China or Rome; the great proselytizing world religions and the communities of faith established around them (Maasen et al., 1997).
The utopian global visions of early socialists such as Saint-Simon; the various movements dedicated to establishing world peace; the ideas, beginning in the nineteenth century, of enthusiasts for artificial international languages such as Esperanto; and many more. These ideas clearly differ from each other in all sorts of ways. But two things unite all these visions. First that they all approached the idea of a single global culture with enthusiasm, and second that none of them came anywhere near to seeing it achieved (Hutcheon, 1999). The ideas of a global culture in the air today-in the intellectual and critical discourses of the past are different. They are not, in the main, visionary or utopian ideas. Rather they are speculations that arise in response to processes that people can actually see occurring around them. These processes, which are generally referred to collectively as globalization, seem to be tying all-nations, communities, individuals-closer together. It is in the context of globalization, then that current discussions of an emergent global culture assume a different significance from earlier speculations. It is not only that the current social, economic and technological context makes a global culture in some senses more plausibly attainable-a concrete possibility rather than a mere dream. It is also that this very sense of imminence brings with it anxieties, uncertainties and suspicions. Talk of a global culture today is just as likely, probably more likely, to focus on its dystopian aspect, to construct it as a threat rather than a promise. To grasp its close relation to the processes of globalization and to distinguish it from earlier traditions of thought, this part shall refer in what follows to the idea of a globalised rather than global culture. A globalised culture refers specifically to the way in which people, integrating the general signs of an increasing interdependence that characterizes the globalization process with other critical positions and assumptions, have constructed a pessimistic master scenario (Boyd & Richerson, 2005). The unification of human culture is an old and persistent practice that hasn’t gained its goals due to the differences in culture and the factors in the environment. A unified human culture will be good to reduce or eliminate discrimination and racism but it cannot easily happen due to political boundaries.
Culture and Politically determined national boundaries
Cultural studies have been a sustained effort to transform the object of studies in the humanities. For example, in English departments, cultural studies has challenged the predominance of the governing categories of literary studies in the interest of producing readings of all texts of culture and inquiring into the reproduction of subjectivities. Pressure has been placed on disciplinary boundaries and the methods that police these boundaries, and modes of interpretation and critique have been developed that bring. In addition, the lines between high culture and mass culture have been relativized, making it possible to address texts in terms of their social effectivity rather than their inherent literary, philosophical, or other values (Longman, Pinxten, & Verstraete, 2004). Cultural studies, is the result of the combination of the introduction of theory and the politicization of theory enabled by these social and institutional changes. However, the postmodern assault on master narratives theory has responded to the discrediting of both structuralism and Marxism in a conservative political environment by redefining the term politics to mean the resistance of the individual subject to modes of domination located in the discursive and disciplinary forms that constitute the subject. This has opened up the possibility of a new line of development for cultural studies (Giroux, 2000).
The one in which the local supplants the global as the framework of analysis and description or one in which re description replaces explanation as the purpose of theoretical investigations. Given that cultural studies are constituted by opposing theoretical discourses that, taken separately, are both necessary but limited, some kind of conceptual transformation or epistemological break is clearly needed. Postmodern cultural studies views subjectivities as the effects of local experiences, and it sees them as the result of individualized constructive processes that escape social determination. The argument that economic and cultural processes have interpenetrated one another to the point where the distinction itself is no longer useful therefore supports another argument that, on the surface, seems quite different but actually shares the same logic of indeterminacy that the production of subjectivity is an exclusively cultural matter, which cannot really be explained but only described in a sympathetic and affirmative manner (Hands & Siapera, 2004). Cultural studies must deal with this challenge to reconstruct civil society, in particular the contending public spheres in which cultural practices are channeled and evaluated. The very fact of the emergence of cultural studies is implicated in this new conjuncture. Cultural studies pretend to account for this process of disarticulation and re articulation from every possible perspective and according to an ornnivalorizing transdisciplinarity, nevertheless remaining as the privileged site of deterritorialization. Cultural studies, of course, takes interest in the crises of national identities unleashed by globalization processes throughout the world and according to new paths of influence, but the asymmetry of what traditionally has been characterized as imperialism continues to inflect these new but still unequal paths of influence between center and periphery (Carter, Donald & Squires, 1995).
Cultural studies, as it has been institutionalized, may have been born in England under the impulse to valorize and legitimize popular culture but political solidarity with the working class has been displaced, especially in the United States, as the focus of interest has shifted to the mass media, consumer capitalism, and identity politics. Today this latter image of cultural studies is quickly disseminating itself around the world like the Cocacolization of yesteryear. The only difference is that cultural studies is extending its global reach according to a marginocentric logic, that is, extracting academic value from all that can be taken to be marginal hence the fad of making use of such labels and phrases as marginality, in the margins, crossing borders, and so on in the titles of many books and essays in cultural studies. Modern politics and the culture industries have produced something worse than a phantasmatic public sphere: a culture against the people (Dienst & Schwarz, 1996). The cultural field has not offered any effective forms of resistance, especially if we focus on literary works that say nothing to illiterate or barely literate masses or television programs aimed at markets and not people. There is little regard for the ways in which cultural processes are inextricably part of the power relations that structure the symbols, identities, and meanings that shape dominant institutions such as education, the arts, and the media. Nor is there the slightest attempt to theorize how the political character of culture might make possible a healthy and ongoing engagement with all forms of pedagogical practice and the institutionally sanctioned authority that gives them legitimacy (Katz, 2000). Culture can be unified by the use of politically determined national boundaries but it cannot stop culture from adapting newer ideas from outside forces. It cannot prevent the mingling of ideas and opinions on issues that relates to culture. The national boundaries cannot prevent the spread of ideas that relates to culture especially if there is some sort of human interaction that happens between different cultures. Such kind of interaction usually happens in an organization.
Organizational behavior
The direction of behavior of the organization as a whole, and of each of its components, depends on the template or charter and the decider subsystem of the organization. These are the sources of purposes and goals toward which organizational behavior is directed. To act properly as components of the organization, individual members and groups must be guided by motives that are based on the organization's purposes and goals. What are far more important, from a behavioral perspective, are habits (Ingram, 1995). Much of the day-to-day behavior is controlled by habits. This means that one does not have to consciously think about his/her behaviour it comes almost automatically. Driving is a common example of behavior that is largely under the control of habits. These habits have to be learned but, once acquired; one can carry out the required behaviors almost without thinking about them. It is not uncommon, for example, for someone to arrive at work having little recollection of the actual journey. Nevertheless they have arrived without incident. The behaviours of stopping at traffic lights on red, turning at certain landmarks, etc. have been so well learned that they happen almost automatically. They have become habitual. Habits are, of course, very useful. Having to think about how one is going to behave takes time and effort because thinking is costly (Tracy, 1994).
For behaviors that are routine it is highly efficient to have them controlled by habits. As has been mentioned, it appears that attitudes only influence a small part of behaviour. Research suggests that the situations in which attitudes do predict behavior is when the behaviour is novel. People are then likely to consult their attitudes, to decide how they ought to behave. Repeat behaviours, on the other hand, are likely to become habitual. At an organizational level it is perhaps worth noting that customer habits are particularly important for organizations that rely on repeat business. Habits that lead people to return to the same record store or supermarket, for example, may be very profitable for the organization concerned (Cox & Makin, 2004). To achieve a better understanding of organizational behavior (OB), one must study organizational misbehavior as well. Organizational misbehavior (OMB) is defined as acts in the workplace that are done intentionally and constitute a violation of rules pertaining to such behaviors. Traditional Organizational behavior models emphasize normatively desirable behaviors under constructs such as satisfaction, attachment, motivation, commitment, leadership, development, redesign, and enrichment and neglect issues such as indifference, undermining, jealousy, abuse, exploitation, insults, manipulation, lying, betrayal of trust, malice, misinformation, pilferage, harassment, conspiracy, sabotage, and so forth. Even less blatant manifestations of misbehavior, such as white lies, arm twisting, incivility, and buck passing are almost ignored. There is no compelling evidence, however, that the former type of constructs better describe the complex realities in work organizations (Barrett, et al., 2002).
The intention to misbehave and the decision as to which form of misbehavior one will engaged in is assumed to be influenced by two independent, yet possibly intertwined, forces: an instrumental force reflecting beliefs about personal interests, and a normative force reflecting internalized organizational expectations. These two forces are a function of one or more antecedents acting collectively or separately at varied organizational levels individual, task/position, group, and organization. In other words, OMB comes with a hefty price tag and these costs determine, to a large extent, the type, timing, and scope of the intervention to be used by management. The integrative model of OMB posits four key points of intervention along the OMB process through which the organization may act to lower the probability of OMB occurring thus minimizing costs and other negative consequences. These four action levers differ with respect to their focus and, hence, call for different kinds of interventions. One important implication derived from this perspective is that one should think of OMB management not as a linear, but as an iterative process. Furthermore, the organization may apply a preventive strategy or responsive strategy (Vardi & Weitz, 2004). The key issue is to what extent the intervention succeeds in lowering the level and frequency of the misbehavior. In other words, do the interventions succeed in altering the behavioral patterns of its target population so that the frequency and severity of OMB are decreased? To cope with OMB, one must be familiar with the dynamics of this phenomenon. That is, management needs to understand why employees intend to misbehave or be aware of different processes, in varied levels and settings that lead certain individuals to engage in specific forms of OMB. Management should also be aware of the forces that influence the intention to misbehave, and what possible expressions and costs are to be expected. However, one must keep in mind that there are possible beneficial as well as adverse consequences of the interventions designed to control these behaviors (Gibb & Williams, 1993). Organizational behavior and misbehavior can be affected by factors in the environment. Organizational behavior can also be changed by culture.
Organizational behavior and culture
Organizational behavior is essentially concerned with what people do in organizations. Since the subject matter is behavior, it ought to lend itself to a scientific approach. But it is necessary to keep in mind that when people are brought together in organizations, they behave differently. To hold this idea in sharp focus it is useful to keep the basic psychological process in mind perception, emotion, and action. In organizations, people see the world differently than they do as individuals; they experience peculiar feelings, and act or behave in strange ways (Moingeon & Soenen, 2002). Organizational behavior is a rather nebulous field of study, and it is silly to consider it as if it had a specific intellectual jurisdiction. It can be described as romantic in the sense that its principles are difficult to define in scientific terms, and its boundaries are indistinct. The distinctive feature of organizational behavior is that it focuses on human behavior, a commodity which can be observed, measured, and objectively analyzed. But it is important to keep in mind that it is about structural observation of behavior. Although the constructs are sometimes difficult to delineate in the literature, researchers and theorists tend to reserve the term culture to refer to deep-seated, perhaps even preconscious beliefs and assumptions, which are shared by most or all members of an organization and work to exert influence on the corporate climate through the establishment of values and norms (Fine, 1995).
In other words, corporate culture is seen to lie behind climate. Climate is nearer the observable reality of the workplace than is culture, and unlike culture, climate tends to be local and group-specific and is very much influenced by a project leader's style. Corporate culture is viewed more as an organizational-level factor than a product of interpersonal relations. Yet, at their very core, these powerful shared meanings that drive workers' and managers' thoughts, motivation, and behaviors are constructed and perpetuated in the interpersonal arena. Corporate leaders can and do play a major role in establishing central themes and the ways that “things are done around here. The different realities experienced by different cultural groups point to the significance of the level of analysis in my definition of multicultural organizations (Schneider & Smith, 2004). Most of the work on diversity in organizations focuses on the interpersonal level. That focus is apparent in several different approaches. Some perspectives begin their analyses at the interpersonal level, broadly defining diversity in terms of individual differences. Even though the definition of diversity includes groups that could be defined as cultural categories, for example, gays and lesbians or the differently-abled, they are defined more narrowly, as individuals who have a particular lifestyle or physical impairment. Other approaches use cultural examples in defining and discussing diversity, but do not continue to work at the cultural level in analyzing organizational behavior and culture. All of these approaches to cultural diversity focus primarily on interpersonal interaction; the proponents of these approaches advise organizations and their employees to work to ensure that individuals become more sensitive to the interaction styles of others (London, 2001).
Focusing on the cultural level of analysis does not preclude developing interpersonal sensitivity; in fact, such sensitivity is critical in helping employees begin the process of transforming organizations. It does, direct the attention to the cultural influences that shape both individual and group behavior, and to the ways in which organizations are culturally created (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003). Working with culture as the unit of analysis also provides a way to construct a theoretical perspective on organizations and organizing that can accommodate a multicultural work force Certain cultural artifacts typical of an organization, such as a very informal work environment associated with open-space offices, may very well be at the heart of the organizational identity experienced by its members (Kelly, J & Kelly, L 1998). Organizational behavior is affected by culture because the way one acts in an organization can be due to the culture and traditions. The effect of culture in organizations can be used to understand further the relationship between a unified culture and a politically chosen boundary,
Conclusion
The unification of human culture is an old and persistent practice that hasn’t gained its goals due to the differences in culture and the factors in the environment. A unified human culture will be good to reduce or eliminate discrimination and racism but it cannot easily happen due to political boundaries. Political boundaries can cause more dissection than unity because people tend to protect their boundary than engage in sharing of cultures. Culture can be unified by the use of politically determined national boundaries but it cannot stop culture from adapting newer ideas from outside forces. Such kind of interaction usually happens in an organization. Organizational behavior and misbehavior can be affected by factors in the environment. An environment with high standards of morality may mean a better organizational behavior. An environment with less focus on morals may mean more occurrences of misbehavior. Organizational behavior can also be changed by culture.
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