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This study examines how national culture shapes the income-driven adaptation to climate change. The area of how culture could explain cultural adaptability towards country-level climate change in the current literature is underexplored. Using the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework, this study investigates the influence of household lifestyle and consumption patterns on climate change adaptability across different cultural societies worldwide. Fifty-three countries were probed to determine how the cultural differences of each country define household consumption patterns linked to climate change adaptability. The findings show that cultural orientation does condition income-driven adaptability while controlling for clean energy transition and carbon intensity for institutions. This study integrates the EKC with climate adaptation, showing that non-sustainable income practices are motivated through cultural differences.
This chapter seeks to examine intellectual streams that have shaped Ngugi’s poetics and what such contexts mean for Ngugi’s radical poetics. Is there a linear relationship and how has Ngugi shaped radical poetics on the continent when it comes to issues such the language of publishing and the decolonisation project? It argues that some of the shifts in Ngugi’s aesthetic and political ideology are linked to Ngugi’s tenure at Leeds University. His exposure to the works of Marx and Fanon and the influence of a group of African scholars at Leeds, and exposure to the radical scholar Arnold Kettle, marked a major shift in Ngugi’s aesthetic and ideological practices. Reading Fanon, in particular, must have transformed Ngugi’s views on a number of issues, ranging from violence for liberation to the nature of neo-colonialism. Fanon’s ideas on the nature and role of the national bourgeoisie, and his notion of the ‘native poet’ as the custodian of national culture, find echoes in Ngugi’s fiction and essays.
Recent studies find that Western-style professional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries are weak and unsustainable. Most of these NGOs developed strong dependency on foreign donors for funds, and did not develop local network of support. This study is conducted to understand the lack of effectiveness of NGOs in Kazakhstan and to test popular sentiments toward NGOs. The interview with local and foreign social science experts and public figures confirm that NGOs in Kazakhstan are weak and unsustainable. The explanations of institutional ineffectiveness lay in disconnect with local traditions, low visibility of NGOs, and unsupportive government. Survey of general population suggests that people in Kazakhstan know very little about NGOs and do not appreciate their utility. We explain the inability of civil society organizations to reach out to local people by cultural mismatch. By using the Hofstede national culture model (Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1984), we argue that local culture is in striking dissonance with the culture of donor countries, which created the NGO agenda in Kazakhstan.
Expanding the horizons of constitutional practice further, this chapter shows how the meanings and implications of the Cambodian Constitution – and particularly the mandate it gives the state to protect Cambodian culture and tradition – have been shaped by artists, filmmakers, and performers. The chapter begins by introducing the reader to the Ministry of Culture’s ‘Code of Conduct for Artists and Performers’, which was introduced in 2016. Then, drawing on interviews with a number of artists from around Cambodia, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Culture, I suggest that the Code of Conduct represents a profound and widely shared anxiety about the meaning of modern Cambodian culture and national identity. In negotiating this fraught terrain, Cambodian artists explain how they have either directly challenged or avoided the regulations. In so doing, this disparate group has elaborated its own interpretation of the Constitution, and offered its own definition of the ideas of ‘national culture’ and ‘good traditions’ contained therein. The result is both a micro-level account of constitutional contestation and an exploration of how art, culture, and constitutionalism intertwine, as the artists in question effectively shape the meaning of the Constitution from below, and thus effectively become constitutional actors themselves.
This chapter argues that the relationship between sound and sense is to be historically understood, and that cultural soundscapes emerge from the accrued meaning that historical actors give to items that may have been there since a long time, but were not previously considered as relevant. The specific case to be discussed here is the practice of collecting (and publishing) ballads: as ballads acquired a new cultural meaning, collective popular interest incorporated them as an active element of the contemporary soundscape. Changes in the way of conceptualizing history and development, in perceiving the divide between oral and written culture, political events and a refashioning of the values attributed to ideas of naturalness and simplicity have all been crucial factors in the process of attribution of meaning to ballads. As cultural identity came to be defined by sounds and music, ballads acquired a new meaning and – of course – this process did not leave the genre unharmed: ‘elite minds’ selected and purged the material that was destined to represent marks of Britishness and proceeded towards the ‘civilizi+L10ng’ of ballads.
This chapter tracks the quest for ’the great Australian novel’ that would mark the consolidation of national culture occurring after World War II. It surveys major novelists from Patrick White onwards, showing the change from realist (bush) saga to modernist (urban) psychological studies to experimental ’counter-culture’ fiction, noting turns towards depicting the experiences of women, migrants and Aboriginal Australians.
This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.
This paper examines how national culture informs the sourcing of management knowledge through external consultancy. First, it hypothesises and compares the relationship between quantitative measures of Hofstede's cultural indices with adjusted expenditure on consulting in nine countries. Two cultural indices are found to correlate with consulting use – power distance (negatively) and individualism (positively). However, the disparity between our findings and prior research suggests limitations of generalisation in studies solely employing quantitative cultural indices to understand the purchasing of business knowledge. We therefore propose the use of supplementary, qualitative data with sensitivity to local contexts and briefly apply this by using secondary sources to provide historical narratives for two countries – the UK and Japan. Overall, we find and tentatively explain significant statistical relationships between Hofstede's cultural indices and adjusted expenditure on consultancy. We then draw attention to wider implications for consulting research and for practitioners involved in this context.
The final chapter addresses the following question:Why do OECD countries adopt different organizational models to govern the healthcare sector? The strategic choices made in the healthcare field, and the reasons for which a particular model is selected, can be interpreted by referring to health politics. Adopting this perspective means starting from the assumption that healthcare policies emerge from an arena in which multiple actors, the bearers of different visions and interests, confront one another in an attempt to make their demands prevail. The issue of health politics is unpacked into three fundamental components: ideas, interests and institutions. The outcome of the confrontation between different ideas and conflicting interests is strongly influenced by the structure of the political institutions operating in each individual country. In countries where political power is more concentrated in the hands of the executive, over the decades it has tended to be easier to undertake radical reforms and adopt a universalist model.
This contribution commemorates Geert Hofstede, who recently passed away, as a pioneer in the study of culture and institutions. It does so by touching on some of the details of his personal life and connecting these with his professional career. The latter was devoted to developing the paradigm of national cultures based on empirical analysis, and to relate it to organisational behaviour. Closer scrutiny reveals that four distinct phases may be identified. Hofstede first started as an ‘undercover’ engineer and next moved to social psychology. During the second phase, he developed the first four dimensions of natural culture. During the third, Hofstede connected these national dimensions to organisational ones. During the last, he added two new cultural dimensions and developed additional practical applications. Finally, the article considers the reception, criticism, and further elaborations of Hofstede's contributions.
This chapter reveals how graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum contributed significantly to the creation of an authentic national culture for Egypt during the first forty years of British occupation (1882–1922). It demonstrates that projects of modernity, nationalism, and the nahda cultural renaissance, were not only advanced by Egypt’s political and intellectual elite, but also by educational experts working within lower and middle levels of state institutions and within grass-roots movements. The resistance of elite nationalists to cultural change under British occupation was selective: they fought education cutbacks and Anglocentric policies, but accepted European critiques of Islamic knowledge and pedagogies. This increased the sociocultural value not only of the civil school capital that many elite nationalists possessed, but also the hybrid civil-religious capital of the darʿamiyya. Reform of al-Azhar was driven in part by the number of talented religious school students trying to leave for Dar al-ʿUlum and its short-lived sister school, the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi). Dar al-ʿUlum teachers and graduates contributed significantly to the revival of Arabic literature, the reform of Arabic language and how it was taught, and the rejuvenation of Islamic practice through grass-roots associations (jamʿiyat).
The article claims that the type of postnational democracy envisaged by its most outspoken advocates amounts to pouring new wine into old bottles. In order to be sufficiently lively and socially significant, such a postnational democracy would have to draw precisely on the type of cultural resources that also feed into national solidarity. In this understanding, a postnational democracy would be different from national democracy only in name.
After independence, Bangladesh underwent spectacular cultural innovation. Young statehood demanded the creation of a national culture, new transnational linkages brought novel ideas, and growing wealth among some groups found expression in new lifestyles. The delta’s culture was pulled in different directions, and clashing trends had to accommodate each other. It has been a half-century of renewed idealism and passionate soul-searching. Local political culture became more violent, and a new concern with Islamic propriety produced an intense dialogue with the liberalism on which the state had been grounded. A distinct youth culture emerged, and food and sports became important aspects of national culture.
Independent Bangladesh now set to building a new national identity. The prevailing mood was that the inhabitants were Bengalis first and Muslims next. The new society should be ordered in accordance with principles that had been developed in the West and could be adapted to local circumstances: democracy, socialism and secularism. The Bengal delta’s regional culture and language became Bangladesh’s national culture.
We introduce and explore the notion of hegemonic dividend in the context of a country which does not have hierarchy attenuating means such as legal measures to protect workforce diversity. This paper explains the consequences of two hierarchy enhancing ideologies on workforce diversity in Turkey; meritocracy, an ideology that privileges merit, and ‘biat’, an ideology of subservience to the structures of power. We illustrate how these two ideologies operate as a duality, as meritocracy vanes with dire circumstances for workforce diversity in nation-branding efforts of Turkey. Drawing on Bourdieu and Gramsci, we illustrate hegemonic dividend in the increasingly hegemonic system in which journalism, as a state apparatus, is embedded in Turkey, where privileged few are sustaining and advancing their positions of power by appealing to and submitting themselves to the revisioned nation brand. We focus on the news industry as it commands a special position of power in terms of creating, modifying and controlling the discourses of a nation brand. We argue that failing to protect and promote workforce diversity with hierarchy attenuating measures exposes nation branding practices to discriminatory and hierarchy enhancing ideologies that negate efforts to achieve humanisation and democratisation of work.
This article explores the role of the numbered treaties relative to the continuity of the settler colonial project in Canada. Although the treaties are often invoked to characterize the federal government's commitment toward strengthening or renewing its relationship with Indigenous peoples at a symbolic level, there remains a disjuncture between the “nation-to-nation” depictions of treaties and the complex political relationships that Indigenous peoples have called for since their signing. This article explores the inconsistent ways in which treaties have been taken up within Canadian legal and political institutions, arguing that the incoherency surrounding treaties promulgates the notion that treaties are being implemented while simultaneously obscuring, distorting and minimizing the rights of Indigenous peoples in practice. It demonstrates that the failure to engage with treaties as the locus of Indigenous peoples’ distinct political relationship with the Canadian state functions to continually produce conditions of colonization and dispossession through the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction as affirmed in treaties.
The interwar years are relatively understudied by intellectual historians of Eastern Europe. This is especially true of the study of the region's radical left-wing cultures, where attention has tended to focus on the Marxist revisionists of the post-war decades. As a period typically identified with political repression and economic crisis, the years following the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II are assumed to hold little interest to the intellectual historian. However, throughout Eastern Europe, the 1920s and 1930s saw the growth of rich left-wing cultures that engaged with a diverse set of ideas from Western Europe and the Soviet Union, and adapted them to their local conditions. This article explores the development of leftist ideas during the interwar period by examining three prominent figures from Yugoslavia's literary left: the Croatian modernist Miroslav Krleža, the Montenegrin critical realist Milovan Đilas, and the Slovene Christian socialist Edvard Kocbek.
This article presents primary data from the GLOBE study in Pakistan and compares them with secondary data from the 61 GLOBE societies, in an effort to increase the interest of scholars of cross-cultural management in Pakistan and also provide a practically useful overview for businesses. Results based on data collected from 152 middle managers using the original GLOBE research instruments indicate that Pakistani society exhibits high power distance and in-group collectivism but low assertiveness and gender egalitarianism. The results also indicate a desire to create a more egalitarian society; however, people appear to treasure the lack of assertiveness and high in-group loyalty. In light of these findings, the authors offer implications for management in Pakistan, in accordance with cross-cultural management literature. In-depth research within Pakistan, as well as comparative cross-national studies, are needed to develop a deeper understanding of the impact of the culture on human resource practices in Pakistan.
In the context of a competitive knowledge-based economy, the knowledge provided by a firm's founders is one of the most important measures of success. This paper aims to identify the role of national culture on a founder's knowledge practices in a modern organisation. Using data collected from 258 Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMES) in the Spanish and UK telecommunication industries (130 from Spain and 128 from the UK), we propose three knowledge management practices to be analysed; namely transfer, transformation and open-mindedness. This paper provides evidence that while Spanish SMES are more positively associated with higher levels of transfer and transformation of knowledge, UK SMES are more positively associated with higher levels of open-mindedness. Hence, this study serves as an important contribution to the small amount of literature currently available in this field by examining different practices that can be explained by the cultural characteristics of both countries.
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