Culture is a way of life—behaviours, beliefs, values, symbols, attitudes, and ideas. These are learned and transmitted through imitation and communication and are part of the human heritage. It has developed as an important means of promoting survival and enhancing the security of our lives, in a progression that started with instinctive behaviour.
For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918), the concept of culture was “the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history.” Today, scholars in many disciplines have adopted the notion of cultural phenomena, including sociologists, sociologists of education, anthropologists, and historians. In the spotlight series, some of these contributors take a conceptual step further and move our understanding and investigations of culture in new substantive directions.
The term culture is complex and has been defined in different ways, ranging from the broadest to the narrowest. For example, the anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn viewed culture as behavior, but they also argued that this definition was too narrow, because it excluded things like marriage ceremonies or pottery bowls.
Alternatively, the term could be defined as “the total accumulated deposit of knowledge, experience, values, ideas, beliefs, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, and concepts of the universe that a group of people carries on from one generation to the next.” It is an abstract concept, but a useful one.
The history of cultural theory and practice is rich. It is the story of how the study of culture grew from its initial scholarly roots in anthropology to become a prominent feature of academic disciplines as diverse as psychology, sociology, history, art, and linguistics. It is also the story of how the study of culture has changed as it has been reexamined and reshaped by various perspectives and influences.
The heyday of this new cultural history was in the 1980s when the study of culture became a central focus of many social and historical studies. Since then, much research has illuminated the importance of culture for both individual and organizational behaviour and development. It is now widely recognized (and perhaps even taken for granted) that culture matters and that continued research on the influence of culture on behavior and development is critical to our understanding of human diversity around the world. This research may help us develop more effective programs and applications that are responsive to the needs of diverse populations around the globe. A key question, however, is how to best examine and incorporate the influence of culture on developmental outcomes. The six papers in this spotlight series attempt to answer that question by moving our conceptualizations and investigations of culture in new substantive directions.