When you think of culture, what may come to your mind is high culture, literature, the arts, ballet, and all of these do fit in to the broad view of culture we're taking in this class. Whatever people socially learn from others and socially transmit to others. But the idea of culture as cultivated tastes for the high arts and for learning also contrasts with the anthropological idea that everyone has culture, that we wouldn't be humans, certainly not the kinds of humans we are, without it. In this last video of the first unit, I'd like to take a closer look at the idea of high culture and its relationship to culture. Earlier, we talked about culture as cultivation, how humans are shaped, or cultivated by other human beings. There developed a view of high culture as what you acquire by going to elite institutions, especially at that time, Cambridge and Oxford Universities in Europe. Correspondingly, people who did not attend elite colleges lacked culture. This view was quite widespread that many, even the majority of human beings on the planet had no culture at all. The word culture itself had an elite ring to it. Indeed, I myself, during my travels in interior Brazil, heard people say that the indigenous tribes near them did not speak a language. Instead, it was claimed, they only emitted animal grunts. Now, this was completely false. In fact, many of the native languages of central Brazil, as well as other parts of the New World, exhibit a grammatical complexity that rivals and even surpasses many or all of the European languages. But what was true then and is still true today is that people have a tendency to value some elements of culture, for example, certain ways of dressing or speaking, over other ways. They believe that some culture is better than other culture. This latter observation led anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu to develop the idea of culture as a scarce commodity that people seek to acquire. For instance, there might be certain ways of speaking, certain uses of words, or certain intonation patterns, certain accents that mark high status within a group. This is true, for example, in American English, of the postvocalic r sound, as in the expression fourth floor. If you listen carefully to how I say it, you can hear the r. Fourth, fourth floor. One of the marks of high status British English during the 19th century and even today was the dropping of that r so that it sounded like this. Fourth floor. Individuals aspiring to high status in the big cities of the east coast of the United States during the 19th century imitated that upper class British style. They regarded the style as fashionable. Gradually, the coveted way of speaking spread to the lower classes who imitated the higher forms of speech. Everybody was speaking fourth floor, although now you may know it as fourth floor. However, the situation changed dramatically in the US at the end of the 19th century and especially during the period between the First and Second World Wars with the spread of radio announcers. The US chose a standard way of speaking for radio and later for television broadcasting that included the postvocalic r. The result was a shift in in-group high status speech in the United States towards the use of the r after vowels. Now in some of the east coast cities, like New York, the higher status, the more likely people are to use the postvocalic r. The lower the status, the less likely. In this way, Bourdieu argued culture can be a form of capital. It is like money, having the right culture can mark higher social status. Why is this important for understanding the culture of teams? The answer is that in most large teams, and even in many of the smaller ones, there tends to develop differences in culture that correspond to differences in in-group status. Sometimes the high status markers correspond to differences in material wealth, such as a large corner office for a high ranking corporate executive. But the differences can be more subtle. These days, for example, one status marker for many Silicon Valley millionaires and even billionaires is the hoodie sweatshirt. There are other markers of Silicon Valley status that are part of embodied culture or what we have been calling habitus. They can be readily acquired only if you regulate interact with those who have that high status. Now, you've learned about teams and you've learned about team culture. You appreciate that much of culture is outside of our awareness, part of what we do and experience on a daily basis. You've learned that culture is what enables a team to function as a team. It couldn't function without it. It furnishes the preconceived routines and the we intentions that enable the coordination. In the next unit, we're going to look at cultural boundaries and at attempts to cross those boundaries. The tools you'll acquire in that unit will enable you to more effectively adapt to new teams and to understand better what might go wrong in that process.
