The Culture Cycle

The Culture Cycle
Author: James L. Heskett
Publisher: FT Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0132779781

The contribution of culture to organizational performance is substantial and quantifiable. In The Culture Cycle, renowned thought leader James Heskett demonstrates how an effective culture can account for 20-30% of the differential in performance compared with "culturally unremarkable" competitors. Drawing on decades of field research and dozens of case studies, Heskett introduces a powerful conceptual framework for managing culture, and shows it at work in a real-world setting. Heskett's "culture cycle" identifies cause-and-effect relationships that are crucial to shaping effective cultures, and demonstrates how to calculate culture's economic value through "Four Rs": referrals, retention, returns to labor, and relationships. This book: Explains how culture evolves, can be shaped and sustained, and serve as the organization's "internal brand." Shows how culture can promote innovation and survival in tough times. Guides leaders in linking culture to strategy and managing forces that challenge it. Shows how to credibly quantify culture's impact on performance, productivity, and profits. Clarifies culture's unique role in mission-driven organizations. A follow-up to the classic Corporate Culture and Performance (authored by Heskett and John Kotter), this is the next indispensable book on organizational culture. "Heskett (emer., Harvard Business School) provides an exhaustive examination of corporate policies, practices, and behaviors in organizations." Summing Up: Recommended. Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.

How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate

How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate
Author: Andrew J. Hoffman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2015-03-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0804795053

Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.

Culture Matters

Culture Matters
Author: Lawrence E. Harrison
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2000
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780465031764

Prominent scholars and journalists ponder the question of why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is more divided than ever between the rich and the poor, between those living in freedom and those under oppression.

American Material Culture

American Material Culture
Author: Ann Smart Martin
Publisher: Winterthur Museum
Total Pages: 446
Release: 1997
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN:

The fourteen essays in this volume provide an important cross section of new research on the current state of American material culture scholarship. From Tupperware to stuffed owls, modern dolls to colonial portraits, the subjects that the authors study demonstrate that things provoke and sustain human dramas.

Kids

Kids
Author: Meredith Small
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2002-10-08
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0385496281

To what extent do our parenting practices help or hinder our children? As parents, how much influence do we have over what kind of people our children will grow up to be? In the follow-up to her critically acclaimed Our Babies, Ourselves, Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small now takes on these and other crucial questions about the development of preschool children aged one to six. While Our Babies, Ourselves explored the physical and cultural preconceptions behind child-rearing and offered new clues to parenting practices that might be detrimental to a baby's best interest, Kids delves even deeper. Unraveling the deep-seated notions prescribed in most parenting books, Kids combines the latest scientific research on human evolution and biology with Small's own keen observations of various cultures for a lively, eye-opening view of early childhood in America. Small not only reveals how children in this age group socialize and absorb the rules that underlie the societies they live in; she also explains the extent to which parents enhance or hold back the emotional and psychological growth of their kids. In her engaging style, Small blends memorable accounts from her own experiences raising a preschooler with fascinating findings from her pioneering cross-cultural research, which spanned the country as well as the globe. Covering myriad aspects of the miraculous process of human growth, Small breaks new ground on topics such as why childhood is the optimum time for acquiring language skills; how children absorb knowledge and learn to solve problems; how empathy, and morality in general, make their way into a child's psyche; and the ways in which gender impacts identity. Underlying each chapter is an illuminating discussion of how the roles parents assign children in America shape the self-esteem and self-image of a future generation. Rich with vivid anecdotes and profound insight, Kids will cause readers to rethink their own parenting styles, along with every age-old assumption about how to raise a happy, healthy kid.

The Culture Map

The Culture Map
Author: Erin Meyer
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1610392590

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

Beyond Human Nature

Beyond Human Nature
Author: Jesse J Prinz
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2012-01-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1846145724

In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.

Creating Cultures of Thinking

Creating Cultures of Thinking
Author: Ron Ritchhart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2015-02-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 111897462X

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the individual and the group forward into a lifetime of learning. This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment. With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout this book, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is not about just adhering to a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work.

Measuring Culture

Measuring Culture
Author: John W. Mohr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231542585

Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes? Measuring Culture is an essential point of entry for both those new to the field and those who are deeply immersed in the measurement of meaning. Written collectively by a team of leading qualitative and quantitative sociologists of culture, the book considers three common subjects of measurement—people, objects, and relationships—and then discusses how to pivot effectively between subjects and methods. Measuring Culture takes the reader on a tour of the state of the art in measuring meaning, from discussions of neuroscience to computational social science. It provides both the definitive introduction to the sociological literature on culture as well as a critical set of case studies for methods courses across the social sciences.

How People Learn II

How People Learn II
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2018-09-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0309459672

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition was published and its influence has been wide and deep. The report summarized insights on the nature of learning in school-aged children; described principles for the design of effective learning environments; and provided examples of how that could be implemented in the classroom. Since then, researchers have continued to investigate the nature of learning and have generated new findings related to the neurological processes involved in learning, individual and cultural variability related to learning, and educational technologies. In addition to expanding scientific understanding of the mechanisms of learning and how the brain adapts throughout the lifespan, there have been important discoveries about influences on learning, particularly sociocultural factors and the structure of learning environments. How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures provides a much-needed update incorporating insights gained from this research over the past decade. The book expands on the foundation laid out in the 2000 report and takes an in-depth look at the constellation of influences that affect individual learning. How People Learn II will become an indispensable resource to understand learning throughout the lifespan for educators of students and adults.