Basic Anthropology Question

I have a question that has been rattling around in my head for a while. Based on my, admittedly limited, understanding of the concept the US and most Western nations are individualist societies but the militaries that serve them (the ones I have worked with anyway) tend to be more collectivist in nature. That is natural. Military members have to be able to depend on each other absolutely. The group must act as a group and individualism must necessarily be suppressed. The mindset of an average military member with regards to group dynamics tends to be very different than the mindset of the average civilian, at least in my, again limited, experience. I saw this especially when I have worked on inter-agency projects. I noticed that the other agencies had more a corporate culture, and hence more of an individualist culture. As a result, the military members and the inter-agency partners we were working with sometimes had difficulty understanding each other to some extent. Each existed in a culture that was totally foreign to the other.

Now, assuming that I have not totally misunderstood the concepts, I was wondering if there had ever been any studies on the subject, specifically studies that would be available online and are not too dense or technical for a layperson to understand.

Thanks.

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I noticed that the other agencies had more a corporate culture...

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Could you clarify what you mean by a "corporate culture"? I only ask because...
- organizational culture differs dramatically from corporation to corporation
- trends in types of organizational culture have shifted over the recent years as corporations have changed from more hierarchical models to flatter structures
- one of the hallmarks of a profession, to include the profession of arms, is "corporateness" - at least according to Huntington

The term corporate culture as I have always heard it refers to a culture where the members of the group are in direct competition with one another for advancement. It is not enough to be good at your job. You must be, or more accurately, appear to be, better than your peers. In this type of culture, the needs of the group are subordinated to the needs (ambition) of the individual. At its worst, this would create a climate that is adversarial or even hostile as individuals compete for advancement.

This is a foreign concept to many military members who have never been in that environment. I cannot speak for the other services but in the Army you do not really compete against your peers for advancement until you become a Staff Sergeant and even then you are not really competing against your peers, but rather against whatever specific criteria the promotion board is looking for within the constraints of whatever quota is in place at the time. In order to get promoted, I do not necessarily have to look better than my peers. If we all meet whatever the board criteria are then we all stand to get promoted, depending on the quota of course. There is no benefit to making my peers look bad in comparison to me either since I am not competing with them directly. If I do not meet the board criteria then it really does not matter how much better I look than my peers, I still will not get promoted. For those of us in the military, the group must come first and the needs of the individual will be subordinated to the needs of the group.

I am sure that that is a gross oversimplification but that is how many of us were brought up to view "corporate" culture. That view has been fueled, in part, by horror stories from those who had experience in the corporate world prior to their military service and partly by our interactions with our inter-agency partners.

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Originally Posted by Uboat509

The term corporate culture as I have always heard it refers to a culture where the members of the group are in direct competition with one another for advancement.

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That is also a common misperception of the officer corps.

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Originally Posted by Uboat509

... that is how many of us were brought up to view "corporate" culture. That view has been fueled, in part, by horror stories from those who had experience in the corporate world prior to their military service and partly by our interactions with our inter-agency partners.

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In the case of the officer corps, it is fueled by barracks lawyers and movies.

The sources where you've gotten your views are probably more reliable than the barracks lawyers and movies, so there might be something to it. Hopefully MarcT weighs in!

this:

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from Uboat509
... the group must come first and the needs of the individual will be subordinated to the needs of the group.

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because, in what group of two or more persons, does this not hold generally true ?

E.g., Schmedlap and I form a law partnership (that would be a real pip). If our common needs become subordinated on a regular basis to the unique needs of him or me, the partnership is not going to last long and is not a partnership.

That being said, the needs of the group may in fact require non-subordination of the individual. E.g., in the Schmedlap-JMM law partnership, the "group" would probably have some general "guidelines" as to conformity; but in the area of legal discussion, the needs of the "group" absolutely require non-conformity internally. Each partner has to be free to tell the other why his legal argument sucks.

The promotion discussion is interesting and may apply to some corporations. Today, where employment continuity is no longer the norm, I suspect that fewer corportations have the number of slots open where they could apply the Army way (all qualified are promoted).

Large lawfirms have long had a different situation in that they recruit for a large attrition rate, and can easily end up with too many qualified associates for a limited number of slots. How they handle that problem varies; and once was the subject of a formal sociological study, Edwin Smigel, The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional organization man? (1958), which should have been required reading for anyone going to one of the large firms.

As to "biglaw" and its lawyers, you might be interested in this 2010 piece, Biglaw Attorney Turned Psychotherapist Analyzes the Legal Profession, by a guy who started at the same law firm as I (but 30 years later). We have different takes on our respective experiences (different time, mostly different people - maybe the reasons; but definitely I would describe a different culture than he does). I expect that the same applies to any two corporate (or military) careers separated by a time distance.

Marc will probably have quite a bit to add on comparing the military to the corporate world since that has been the subject matter of a number of studies.

Regards

Mike

Joseph Soeters has written about and conducted empirical studies on this. One interesting obversation he has made - uniformed folks from different countries often have more in common than uniformed personnel have with civilians from their own countries.

I'd start with Anna Simon's ethonography, The Company they keep: Life inside US Army Special Forces. Anna's a Harvard grad, NPS professor, and married to a retired SF NCO.

Next week, I'm meeting with a retired chaplain that is going to introduce me to some other works by combat veterans of trench warfare during WWI and the front lines of WWII turned pastors, philosophers, and sociologists. I'll repost when I have the specific titles and authors.

v/r

Mike

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Originally Posted by MikeF

I'd start with Anna Simon's ethonography, The Company they keep: Life inside US Army Special Forces. Anna's a Harvard grad, NPS professor, and married to a retired SF NCO.

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I have been meaning to read that one since I got out of the Q but I just never seem to get around to it. I think I will go put it on my Amazon wish list.

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Originally Posted by Allon

One interesting obversation he has made - uniformed folks from different countries often have more in common than uniformed personnel have with civilians from their own countries.

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This does not surprise me at all. I suspect that it may even be truer in Western nations where military service is becoming more and more unpopular and fewer people even know someone who has served, much less served themselves.

I read Starship Troopers a couple years ago and it got me to thinking about this very thing. I'm not at all comfortable with any sort of requirement for military service to gain full citizenship but I have been toying with the idea of some sort of service to gain full citizenship, or perhaps some other benefit. This service would have to be in one of the five broad categories that I see as being oriented toward service to the nation. Those categories are military, law enforcement, emergency services (firefighters, paramedics etc.), teachers (k-12 in particular) and some government jobs (Foreign Service officers, Peace Corps etc.). All of these categories are about service to something bigger than one's self. None of them are jobs you go into to get rich. All of them are vital to the nation. I honestly don't think that it would be such a bad thing to require some sort of service in order to gain the benefits of full citizenship. But then that is a totally different discussion topic.

Sorry for the delay on chiming in - I've been cleaning up stuff after a conference :wry:.

Uboat, it sound to me like the collectivist-Individualist dichotomy you are using comes out of Geert Hofstede's work. The model he has come up with is generally aimed at producing models of national culture, and it is based on 1960's style anthropology (which he readily admits, BTW).

When we look at "cultures" of any type, defining what level we are looking at is crucial for a whole slew of reasons. So a national culture can be quite different from an organizational culture or a corporate culture.

One of the key differences is how a particular sub-national group organizes particular activities and how that organization is both accepted (and validated) at the national level and constructed as a separate "role cluster" (sorry, I'm using a lot of technical jargon here :o). Put simply, certain tasks get grouped together and the people who perform them are allowed, and sometimes required, to act in ways that are different from the general social norms.

Usually, the decision to organize in a particular way evolves out of a) the groups' experiences with performing those tasks and b) the more general social perception of how well those tasks are performed. Think of it this way, you rarely see changes in organizational cultures until there is a failure crisis which calls the social legitimacy of the group performing them into question (Andrew Abbott goes into this really nicely).

Getting back to your specific question about inter-agency stuff, you might want to look at some of the material on cross-cultural communication. The simplest way to get some decent communications going across different organizational cultures is to treat a joint team as a project team and then use a series of team building exercise to construct a team culture.

Cheers,

Marc