Culture and network institutions in Hong Kong: a hierarchy of perspectives. A response to Wilkinson: 'Culture, institutions and business in East Asia.'

Organization Studies, Spring, 1998 by Sid Lowe

The second approach portrays culture as a 'diamond' (Griswold 1994: 15). Griswold uses the diamond metaphor to explain how social structure and culture influence one another and specifically to investigate the interconnectedness between four elements: cultural objects (symbols, beliefs, values and practices) that enable expressive interpretation of meaning and 'reality', equating to the 'social mind' described above; the social world (structural and contextual elements of economy, politics and society), equating to the 'social brain' described above; cultural creators (organizations and systems that create and distribute cultural objects); cultural receivers (the members of a culture that receive and interpret information subjectively on an everyday basis). Culture, in Griswold's schema, is a complex inter-relationship between all these elements, but most fundamentally, it is a set of elements that constitute a process. The relationship between objects and social world is described as a 'reflection' of the empirically evident social structure and its subjective expression and interpretation through objects such as values and symbols. The creation of this reflection is described as an everyday process involving two-way communication between creators and receivers using language and symbols - systems which configure meaning.

The cultural tree and the cultural diamond commonly represent culture as a complex multidimensional phenomenon within which institutions, values and behaviours are all regarded as cultural manifestations co-determined in a complex inter-relationship. These approaches provide the potential within which culture can be understood and a basis for developing a theoretical framework with sufficient complexity to do justice to its multidimensional nature. The development of this potential is unlikely to be easily achieved and requires a constructive approach involving a degree of interdisciplinary and intercultural co-operation and tolerance that is absent in Wilkinson's (1996) paper.

The principal issue when considering the synthesis of the structural and cultural aspects of action is the problem of Nadel's Paradox. Explanations of action that are limited to considerations of the structural position of relationships and their formal institutionalization ignore cultural aspects built up from subjective attitudes and attributes, typifications \ classifications and 'meaning systems'. An adequate approach requires simultaneous attention to the relational and cultural aspects of role-related behaviour, but the paradox is that the latter is qualitative and the former quantitative, and, as a result, the two appear epistomelogically incompatible (DiMaggio 1992). In other words, structural and cultural explanations are parallels, and one without the other within this duality is incoherent. The essential synergies in overcoming the paradox of the need to attend simultaneously to the structural and cultural aspects of role-related behaviour are frustrated by the paradigmatic 'aparteit' inherent, for example, in Burrell and Morgan's (1979) proposition of the incommensurability of paradigms.