Why do we like to talk about ＂cultural background＂ differences？

2026年6月16日 | admin | kyugjgh
Throughout the hot discussion about the American Factory for some time, the cultural and institutional differences between China and the United States may be one of the most concerned topics, and in many cases they are not even "one".

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Cao Dewang talks about setting up factories in the United States: American trade unions are inefficient, and I have the right to object. The Beijing News is produced by our video (ID: wevideo)
Why don’t we just let it go?
In fact, on too many occasions and in multiple contexts, we are used to understanding economic differences with cultural background. For example, a multinational enterprise can’t stand on its own feet without observing the local cultural background, and a region such as "Silicon Valley of the United States" and "Yiwu, China" can’t rise without a specific cultural background. What is more often concerned is the cultural background of a country.
What is the cultural background? When people use this word, it means that people and enterprises in this region or country have the same and unified concept and behavior, otherwise it cannot be called "cultural background". However, the cultural background is highly abstract, so people usually have to lower the level and understand the behavioral differences with more specific institutional logic.
In the traditional economic thinking, the market is considered to eliminate all cultural differences. No matter what kind of culture, there can be a market if there is demand and exchange. Such as institutional economics or behavioral economics obviously won’t agree with this judgment. They believe that cultural background and institutional environment will affect the choice of a person and an enterprise.
However, this is not the real problem. The real problem is that the cultural background of one place and one country is not single, but diverse horizontally and changeable vertically. So when we talk about it, which one are we talking about?
Mark granovetter, an American economic sociologist, has another view on this. No matter how we talk about "culture" and "system", we can’t exhaust people’s economic ways, and those cultures are like a toolbox, and people will actually take the initiative to choose which culture to use, avoid or deal with.
Mark granovetter is regarded as the sociologist who knows the economy best and is closest to the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is concerned about how the social structure, including culture, affects economic behavior and the evolution of society itself. Today, we extract some chapters of his book Society and Economy. Although it is bitter, as long as we understand it, we will understand why this economic sociologist not only values the influence of culture, but also uses "culture" cautiously.
And why do we like to talk about "cultural background"? One of the reasons may be that it is important, which will affect the economic performance of an enterprise and an economy. In fact, it is important precisely because it is not static and can be changed, otherwise it will fall into fatalism. This is also the significance of the need for constant communication between different economies.
Original author | mark granovetter
Society and economy,[America]Mark granovetter, translated by Wang Shuixiong and Luo, Jar, CITIC Publishing Group, March 2019.
01
Who has a great influence on the "cultural background" of a place or a country?
In the literature that discusses the "institutional logic" of organizations and industries, geographical space occasionally appears as the place where this or that logic is located. However, many scholars now further focus on geographical units, thinking that they are the main carriers of cultural, normative and institutional differences, which shape economic actions and also affect any industry in the region.
It is said to be a complex of rules regulating different aspects of the economy, which often corresponds to the scope of conditions that the author thinks it is applicable, and thus obtains different names.
When the scope is a certain economic sector, industry or "organizational field", these complexes are called "logic"; When this scope is a country, its customs are usually named after the "culture" of the country; But the same argument can also be made at the regional level below the national level, so we have heard about the collision and opposition between different cultures in a country, which affects the economic performance of different regions.
Italy Malaoni Institute of Fashion and Design.
Although the analysis units of countries and regions are different, the arguments are similar. Two famous examples are Italian clothing and American high technology (information technology). It is here that the unique industrial culture viewpoint which is lower than the national level or the regional level is put forward.
For Italy, the emphasis is on the unique culture and organizational ability of the "third Italy" (neither northern Italy nor southern Italy); In the United States, the emphasis is on the high-tech complex between Silicon Valley and Highway 128 (Massachusetts).
The "Silicon Valley" of the regional model. The picture shows the first season of the TV series Silicon Valley Season 2014.
Two of these relatively more successful regional cultural stories are that the network of interdependent small companies provides greater flexibility for innovation, and also saves a lot of sunk costs required for internal research and development: extensive subcontracting allows the cost to be outsourced to designers and producers with modern technical level, while the network of loyalty and trust in the region neutralizes the risk of commercial secrets being sold.
The model of "Yiwu" at the regional level. The commodity market in Yiwu, China, which rose rapidly at the end of 20th century.
But this narrative can’t explain how and why there are cultural differences in different regions, and how long this difference lasts. Regarding this persistence, regional cultural analysis is often not as persistent and firm as the analysis at the national level.
Many scholars point out that the country as a whole has a unique culture, which strongly affects economic behavior and institutions. If "cultural differences" have such effects, then we should push our discussion of rules and other mental structures to a higher level of social organizations.
At this higher level, we will have to pay attention to the complex aggregate of a series of such ideas beyond the specific individual rules again-we express it as a national "culture" and to a certain extent, it is a condensed aggregate of ideas.
Economic theory does not explicitly make room for cultural differences, but predicts that as long as the market is allowed to function unimpeded in a society, as long as such economic conditions are given, the same results will be achieved.
The screen of the documentary "The Corporation 2003".
For example, when studying economic practices such as corporate governance, people will see this view. Although some analysts predict that due to "path dependence" (part of which is determined by culture), the differences that can be observed in experience will persist; Other analysts believe that this difference will disappear because the market principle will converge to an optimal form, which cannot be changed by cultural differences.
Interestingly, the hostility of convergence theorists to "different, coherent and powerful cultures determine the outcome" is shared by sociological analysts, although the reasons are different.
For example, Ann Swidler (Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley) pointed out that "the mainstream model used to understand the influence of culture on action is fundamentally misleading. It assumes that culture shapes behavior by providing the ultimate goal or value of behavior, so that behavior is oriented, thus making value the core decisive factor of culture. "
On the contrary, she believes that culture is "a symbolic medium carrying meaning, including beliefs, ritual operations, artistic forms and etiquette, as well as informal cultural practices, such as language, gossip, stories and routines in daily life", and she points out that all realistic cultures contain different and conflicting symbols, rituals, stories and behavioral guidance.
Therefore, it is not so much a "unified system that pushes actions in the same direction" as it is "more like a’ tool kit’ or a’ program list’ … actors choose different segments from it to construct an action route". What we should expect is that "what we actually observe is active and sometimes even quite skilled cultural users", not "cultural puppets".
Therefore, although the rational choice and market-based view put aside the strong cohesive culture to completely downplay its importance, cultural theorists intend to understand culture as a powerful and complex influencing factor, which has a background and decisive role in the behavior of actors with special problems to be solved.
02
Without understanding the "institutional logic" of a country, enterprises are doomed to failure?
The national cultures that people usually assume are so abstract that the mechanism of linking them with actual economic practice is not obvious.
One way to deal with it is to portray the whole country as having a unique "institutional logic". However, unlike the usage of organizational institutionalists who study specific industries, the "institutional logic" here refers to a trend that is more abstract than any specific economic practice, but compared with the abstract national cultural survey, it is more obvious and simply connected with such economic practices.
For example, economist Mauro Guillen believes that countries have different "organizational logics" which can provide guidance for "how to build economic organizations". They pointed out that in some countries, it is normal to raise business capital through family relations; In other countries, this is usually considered as an inappropriate and excessive request. Such "logic" is "the product of historical development, deeply rooted in collective understanding and cultural practice, and has strong adaptability in the ever-changing environment".
They regard this ability as a form of national comparative advantage, and argue that this framework can explain why some countries are more successful in specific industrial efforts, while others are not.
While the automobile assembly in Spain is highly developed, there are also reflections on the automobile industry. The picture shows the Spanish documentary Sobre Ruedas: El Sueo del Automó vil 2011.
They analyzed South Korea, Taiwan, China, Spain and Argentina (all four places have a large number of automobile industries), and thought that the different institutional logics in these places explained why South Korea and Spain were strong in automobile industry assembly, why Taiwan, China and Spain were outstanding in automobile industry components, and why Argentina was in a worrying situation in both aspects (the situation in 1999 was mentioned). They believe that institutional logic is very important here, and assert that if government policies ignore institutional logic, they are doomed to failure.
This view of the "logic" of the national system involves how private enterprises tend to think about the organization of companies and industries in certain countries. It also suggests how policymakers will contact, interact with and provide support to major industries, and shows that failure to follow the prevailing national "logic" is likely to lead to economic failure.
Cover of Frank Dobbin’s economic sociology work Building Industrial Policy in English (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Chinese translation (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2008).
Frank Dobbin, in his book Building Industrial Policy (1994), put forward why countries are likely to follow their own national logic, because this logic shapes the way policy makers think. He analyzed the national policies of France, Britain and the United States in the stage of railway industry configuration from 1825 to 1900, and showed that this was actually a comparative study under controlled conditions, because railway technology was the same in all countries, but each country was very different when it entered this industry.
In France, political actors believe that only the state can effectively coordinate and promote new industries such as railways; In the United States, the federal government respects the authority of local governments, and Washington is also the "arbiter of free markets"; In Britain, national sovereignty is considered to belong to elite individuals, so industrial policy firstly protects individual companies through laissez-faire principle, and secondly actively responds to market monopoly and political forces.
Dobbin believes that the political history and tradition of each country is the root of the concept of industrial policy. We can call these traditions "political culture" of countries, or in other expressions, "institutional logic" of these countries, which can be traced back to the historical environment.
Main railway route map of France.
In France, as Alexis Tocqueville pointed out, the French Revolution is far from being a dramatic turning point in French political history, but can be regarded as a continuation of "French political and economic centralization" introduced by Bourbon monarchs. Heuristic central planning can be regarded as the follow-up to the enlightenment philosophy and the continuation of the "grand college education" in which French higher education is concentrated into elites. They have long dominated political and economic life.
In Britain, political history is created by a group of dignitaries who cling to power at any moment in history. In the United States, however, the political history was created by the combination of 13 independent colonies, each of which was jealous of the privileges of the combination, and then established a federal structure, which faced great difficulties in centralization.
03
No matter the cultural background or the system logic, we can’t tell the whole story.
Institutional logic and cultural understanding can be even more abstract and detached from perception than in these cases. For example, Richard Biernacki, a historical sociologist, investigated the textile industry in several European countries in the 17th-19th century, and concluded that Britain and Germany actually conceived the types of labor goods in quite different ways.
Richard Bernadski’s work "The Structured Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914" (The Fabrication of Labor) is a book cover.
For Britain, this is measured by the materialized labor of workers who sell products in the market; For Germans, it is the actual amount of labor, measured by the actual labor time allocated to the factory.
In his view, this obvious subtle difference, though implicit but quite clear, is expounded by many economists and insiders in these two countries, which has a wide impact on factory practice, not only on the workshop organization methods such as supervision and salary in the two countries, but also on the larger factory environment in the two countries.
European factories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Although Bernadski’s case study is about the textile or knitting industry, he thinks that the difference about how labor is conceived runs through the whole economy.
I think that if this is correct, then the two different frameworks for thinking about labor are more conceptual and cognitive than prescriptive and normative. They are not mental structures that shape the idea of how things should be done, but operate indirectly, which is completely different from the typical practice of taking "norms" as "prohibitions" in most documents about norms.
They have their own reasons for influence. If you imagine labor in a certain way, it is more natural to organize salary and supervision in a way that conforms to this concept. So the driving force is not "what is morally appropriate", but "what is cognitively consistent", which is a very important difference, because it requires a very different set of views to understand economic results.
In addition, although Bernadski’s viewpoint was proved by the practice of a single industry, it also got rid of the industry as an analysis unit and shifted to the cultural analysis of the whole society, expanding the impact of cultural assumptions on economic activities. In this case, other key issues are how much this cultural pattern will change over time, where they started, and whether the unique cognitive and cultural history of a society will change the process of their appearance, persistence or disappearance.
By moving away from the separate concrete system, getting rid of the system that simply tells people what they should or should not do, turning to a more complex cultural structure, turning to a cultural structure that affects "how we view our options and how to encode our daily experience data", we break free from determinism, making "whether there is a simple and direct relationship between related mental structures and behaviors" more problematic, and opening the way to consider people’s initiative.
Any proposition about how cultural patterns or frameworks affect actions needs to include a more detailed discussion on how this causal relationship works and how certain it is.
This leads to a completely different proposition from the psychological "moral dilemma" experimental conclusion, which is imposed by psychologists on those who undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. There is a clear outline and definition between the two possible choices of such a dilemma, while moral issues are at the forefront and center, just like the famous "Trolley Problem" focused by moral philosophers and psychologists.
Image source: lisalarsonwalker.com
Although individuals are likely to encounter some such simple situations in their daily economic life, most actual decisions are more complicated and have subtle backgrounds. In this regard, the ensuing uncertainty is "which set of rules is appropriate". This brings us back to the field of action put forward by pragmatic psychologists and philosophers, where people try to find out the problems to be solved, the available tools and decision-making procedures, and develop together with the upcoming situation and keep pace with the times.
Although the institutional logic or economic and cultural views at the regional or national level have their value, our enthusiasm should be eased by the following considerations: how decisive they are, and to what extent they turn a blind eye to the role of active agents-these agents may be able to create a "policy and structure" that seems unreasonable to well-informed actors and does not match what they think is "logic or culture".
Author: mark granovetter
Integration: Luo Dong
Editor: Xu Yuedong Proofreading: Zhai Yongjun
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