Definition Of Culture Geertz
Therefore understanding culture is fundamental to the description and analysis of organizational phenomena.
Definition of culture geertz. Geertz thick description. When we say we do not understand the actions of people from a culture other than our own we are acknowledging our lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs pp. In understanding the artifact one must understand the flow of social discourse that produced it the discourse it freezes and the way it is used in subsequent social action. Thin description for geertz is not only an insufficient account of an aspect of a culture.
Culture is a memory and control device of society. A company s prevailing ideas values attitudes and beliefs guide the way in which its employees think feel and act quite often unconsciously. Geertz argues that culture is public because meaning is systems of meaningare necessarily the collective property of a group. In particular geertz is associated with heralding the interpretive turn in anthropology and steering the discipline or the sociocultural part of it at least away from research designs patterned on the natural sciences.
The culture of an organization eminently influences its myriad decisions and actions. It is also a misleading one. Thin description which is a factual account without any interpretation. According to geertz an ethnographer must present a thick description which is composed not only of facts but also.
Culture according to geertz is a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life the function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. Toward an interpretive theory of culture in ibid. In his seminal work the interpretation of cultures 1973 geertz outlined culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life 1973 89. Geertz defines culture as webs of significance a symbolic system and a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols 89 and thereby he calls for an interpretive methodology in search of meaning 5.