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TopCulture, Multiculturalism, And Corporate Culture
Culture represents one of the most controversial and polysemic concepts in all of philosophy and anthropology. Regarding this concept, Williams (1976) wrote the following statement:
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought (p. 25).
Therefore, faced with this conceptual complexity, we realize that to progress in a logical way, beginning with the etymological meaning of the word culture is important.
The English word culture stems from the Latin term cultura (to cultivate and/or honor). However, hermeneutics as a tool of interpretation indicates that the terms inhabit, cultivate, honor, and care converge toward conceptions of the meaning of life, or giving life force to something. To live is to act in an environment that has already been in a static state; to cultivate is the act of causing something to thrive through production; to honor is to adorn, embellish, or show respect to someone or something; and to heal means giving life in the pure sense to a person or an organism that is threatened by anti-life forces (Renaud-Grignon, 2017).
The sociological point of view put forward by Lévi Strauss is that culture refers to what a community can share in terms of laws, religion, values, and other aspects, so culture clearly represents a factor of unification and an agglomerating link in social communities. This may therefore be threatened by multiculturalism, which is the simultaneous existence of several cultures in the same locality or company. The conflict caused by differing values, religions, and rites coexisting in a common space has been termed “culture shock” (Lin Canchu, 2006).
In companies, multiculturalism is two-dimensional: internal and external. It is internal when the company faces a heterogeneous group of personnel (e.g., ethnic or religious differences) in which case the culture sought by the company aims to reduce or eliminate differences and create a common cultural framework that revolves around shared values. External multiculturalism comes from outside the company when its values are in total or partial contradiction with the dominant social values. To deal with this issue, companies may establish a culture of the highest common denominator to reduce the negative effects of values, which may not converge in its interest (Nongo & Ikyanyon, 2012).