4.3 Habit and Drift

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來自 University of Pennsylvania 的課程

The Power of Team Culture

129 個評分

University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

129 個評分

課程 1（共 5 門，Specialization Culture-Driven Team Building）

Behind the success and failure of teams lies team culture. But what exactly is culture? How and why does it contribute to success and failure? In this course, you learn how to recognize aspects of team culture of which most people are typically unaware. It is often these seemingly unimportant aspects that have the greatest effect on the outcomes of group tasks. Your recognition of them enables you to form, join and lead teams more effectively. You also come to appreciate the role of ritual and symbols in the daily operation of teams, as well as in situations of change and crisis. Knowledge of the ideas and information in this class enables you to be a better team player and a more effective team leader.

從本節課中

Effecting Cultural Continuity and Change

In this unit, we will examine inertia, change, and metaculture, introduce interest as a force at work on the motion of culture as well as provide a conclusion to the concepts covered in this course.

4.1 Culture in Time4:48

4.2 The Inertial Forces5:08

4.3 Habit and Drift5:02

4.4 Inertia and Change: An Ancient Egyptian Case, Part 15:40

4.5 More on Reflective Culture or Metaculture as a Force4:31

4.6 Inertia and Change: An Ancient Egyptian Case, Part 24:37

4.7 Inertia and Change: An Ancient Egyptian Case, Part 36:00

4.8 Secret to Successful Cultural Change4:56

4.9 Introducing the Force of Interest4:47

4.10 Interest at the Interface between Different Inertial Patterns6:20

4.11 The Conditional Motion of Culture5:35

4.12 Conclusion5:39

與講師見面

Greg Urban, Ph.D.
Professor
Anthropology

We ended the last lecture with the observation that habitual inertia resists

change.

We used the example of accents in speaking to illustrate this.

But truthfully, we could have picked any one of a great number of examples.

Take the particular side of the road on which one drives.

In America we drive on the right side of the road.

But in Great Britain, India, Australia and

many other former British colonies, people drive on the left side of the road.

I experienced the habitual inertia of driving

when I visited New Zealand a couple of years ago.

I had to be vigilant in making turns especially right turns.

I think I did pretty well with that.

Though my daughter may disagree and I do admit that I had to stay really focused.

I had to use my mind and think about it.

But what I did incredibly poorly with were the turn signals and windshield wipers.

Because the steering wheel is on the right side they revered the position of the turn

signals and windshield wiper switch.

On American cars the turn signal is on the left hand side of the steering wheel.

On New Zealand cars like British vehicles it's on the right.

So almost every time I went to make a turn

I activated the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal.

The truly amazing thing though is how totally embodied that habit is.

It is so embodied that I say I tried to think

in preparing this lecture about which side the turn signal is on in my car in the US,

I couldn't be sure I actually knew.

It seems to be something I never really brought to my consciousness.

Okay, so you're probably getting the idea that there is a principle here.

I've articulated this principle of inertia in my own research as follows.

Culture in motion tends to stay in motion at the same rate

unless some other force acts upon it.

Although they rarely articulate the principle,

anthropologists have long assumed and there would probably be

little point am I telling you about this in a class on the power of team culture

unless there were other forces at work as well and of course there are.

In particular, in addition to the inertial forces, they are the entropic forces.

They are typically been discussed in anthropology under the term drift,

cultural and linguistic drift.

What does that mean?

It means that when culture gets copied from one person or

one group to the next, it doesn't necessarily get copied precisely.

Changes can be introduced.

They can be largely random changes, though we'll talk about other kinds later.

Lets look at this in terms of the diagram we used earlier

to describe the transmission of the cultural element of cutting

the end off the roast before baking it.

We're using the same diagram here but this time I've put a block

arrow beneath the transmission from the mother to her daughter.

This indicates the operation of entropic force.

I've also put a little slash through the transmission line and

an apostrophe after the cultural element, cutting the end off the roast.

So the cultural element is not absolutely fixed.

It's subject to random change.

Incidentally, entropy refers to the tendency towards disorder or randomness.

For example, in mass media communication models, there may be static in the signal

that is transmitted and the static interferes with the message received.

You probably had such an experience with telephone calls when

the reception is poor, especially using cellphones.

In any case, the result is a learned cultural element

that differ somewhat from the transmitted element.

In the case of the roads, maybe the result is cutting off more less to the end.

The changes can be small but over time, the changes may accumulate.

This has been studied in detail for languages.

We know that language is always changing, but

we can't necessarily perceive the changes.

When speakers of the same language become separated into two groups with little or

no contact.

The languages tend to gradually drift apart, as in this diagram.

After a thousand years, it will difficult for

speakers of subgroup A to understand speakers of subgroup B.

After about 2,000 years the languages will be distinct and

largely unintelligible like, say, Spanish and French.

Still they retain many similarities which trained linguists are document.

Indeed they're able to document them up to about 6,000 years of separation.

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