In this video segment, I want to pursue the metaphor of culture as cultivation, with which we ended the last video. If we think of cultivation in the case of plants, the word means something like to improve the growth of by expending labor and care. Things like watering and feeding it and pruning it, putting it in the sun and so forth. We cultivate plants to make them grow to be more like what we would like them ideally to be. Probably every society on the planet has also cultivated its children. Trying to make them more closely conform to the kind of people that culture wants them to be. Giving them some kind of instruction or discipline. This can even take the form of directly modifying the bodies of people through cultural practices. One of the well known examples is the practice of foot binding in Imperial China. Upper status young girls would have their feet bound up so that they wouldn't grow. And in fact they got deformed and appeared very small and misshapen. But the ideal of beauty in Imperial China was for women to have small feet, which meant that the ancient Chinese considered this a cultural marker of beauty. Ear piercing is another example of such a practice. It's been common, at least until recently in the Unites States and other countries for female children to have their ears pierced. Many of them have them pierced at birth. It enables them then to wear earrings and the earrings are similarly thought to enhance the beauty of the person. Of course, there are also repetitive practices that shape and develop muscles. For example, to improve running, jumping, throwing and the like associated with sports teams. Although repetitive practices, if any of you have gone to a health club, are also used to shape the body and make it appear more attractive. The last example of shaping our body through repetitive practice makes clear that culture as cultivation is important for team performance. Soccer players may engage in repetitive weight training to improve their running and kicking. They of course also engage in repetitive exercises to improve dribbling, passing, shot making. The same is true of virtually every other sport. Performance in sport depends upon cultivation of the body. You can perhaps readily appreciate that in the case of sports cultivation serves the purpose of improving the teams performance. Schools, of course, cultivate our bodies and our minds. Hence they are institutions for the transmission of culture, of ways of acting speaking, thinking and reasoning that the group wants to promote or foster. They also typically promote the value and goals of the group. Schools produce the kinds of cultured citizens a country wants to have, Teaching them for example about the country's history and government. Inculcating proper ways of speaking, providing them shared artistic and literary references. Schools of higher education also give rise to professions, engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, business managers. The professionals in turn carry the culture they acquire in the institutions of higher learning to various other teams such as corporations, hospitals, and law firms. Despite drawing on individuals who have already acquired various kinds of culture, many teams, especially business enterprises, feel a need to do their own cultivation. Large corporations in fact now often have their own schools, such as Hamburger University for McDonald's. JetBlue U for JetBlue Airways Corporation, General Electric's Crotonville, Motorola University, and MGM Grand Hotel's University of Oz. Even smaller businesses typically have some type of training program for their new employees. The program provides them with the additional culture specific to that team. JetBlue, for example, has a mandatory two-day orientation for all the employees. And actually there are about 1,500 of them per year. The two-day training is about the culture of the team. Mike Barger, who founded and ran the university for many years, will tell you that the culture of JetBlue is what differentiates them from other airlines. The words he chooses are safety, integrity, fun, caring, and passion. He also says that they want to make sure that everyone knows what they are trying to accomplish. The university tries to instill what we were calling we intentions as opposed to I intentions. Of course two days is not sufficient to inculcate more than a general orientation to the kind of culture JetBlue wants to promote. A culture, as Barger calls it, of warm professionalism. Pilots, for example, have an additional eight-week course. They only hire pilots at JetBlue who have already have been pilots elsewhere so they already know how to fly planes. For example, they may have been with other airlines or they may have been flying in the military. At JetBlue, the pilots learn about the specific characteristics of the planes they will be flying for JetBlue and they train in flight simulators. The company uses only two types of plane, the Airbus 320 and the Embraer 190. So the training focuses on how to fly these planes. It focuses in short on transmitting the culture that being part of JetBlue adds to already cultured beings. So, now you know more about culture as cultivation. We'll turn next to a fascinating phenomenon that actually we are typically unaware of our own culture, even though it's all around us.
