Culture

By Stephen Downes
Dec 24, 2021
Transcript of Culture

Uneduted

Hello everyone. Welcome back to ethics analytics. And the duty of care on Stephen Downs. We're in module eight, and this video is about culture. Now, I should probably say that I can't cover all of culture. One short video, I'm not even going to try probably a better title for.

This would be topics about culture, with respect to ethics. But I like, I'm, like, short precise titling. Now, this is where our topic, as a whole ethics analytics. And the dually duty of care is going to intersect with culture. So that's what I'll name the video.

All right, back to the camera view. So, I'm gonna begin with a few perspectives on what culture actually is. Now, this is just to frame our discussion and not to be authoritative about it. There are all kinds of ways we could define culture. So I've got a few here.

One is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion cuisine, social habits, music, and arts. Another way of thinking of it is shared patterns of behavior, and interactions cognitive constructs, and understanding that are learned by socialization. A third is a way of life, of a group of people.

The behaviors beliefs values, and symbols, that they accept generally, without thinking about them, I've got a diagram here of the cultural iceberg, focusing on that. On the top, the things that are pretty easy to recognize in a culture, language dress, folklore, food, holidays etc. But then the implicit parts of cultures that we don't talk about for.

Don't see so easily, family, roles biases, interpretations values. Competitiveness, work ethic thought, patterns, personal space, etc. Etc, Part of that, I don't have a slide for this. But part of the reason why I wanted to talk about culture especially is because, you know, as we read through people, like Thomas Kuhn and Emir, Lakatos, we have this sense that any academic discipline any science is in itself.

A culture we don't usually think of culture in that sense doing usually we think of cultures as you know nations or people's or faiths or language groups or whatever, but there is a culture of philosophers. The reason culture of data scientists there is a culture of biologists and actually even subcultures and all of those cultures and I want to keep it in mind because as I'm talking about culture I'm not just talking about our social groups that we meet in our towns.

And in our villages I'm talking about the social groups as well, that we need in our professional life or our academic life or our scientific life. And these are the cultures that are probably going to be more relevant when it comes to ethical considerations, with respect to. I am analytics.

So moving on with respect to cultures we we can draw distinctions between various aspects of these cultures. So here we have basically from OECD distinction between three aspects of cultures. First of all, the material socialists subjective aspects of cultures that is the artifacts that we see touch feel taste.

Whatever. The second aspect are what they call the social institutions of the group. Now, I think institutions is probably the wrong word but it might include. For example, language, communicative conventions, full core religion, etc. Some of them may be institutions. Some of them might not be a belief system, like a religion.

Can be institutionalized, but is not necessarily institutionalized. And that's also the case with things like language. Then third the things I guess thought are definitely not into institutionalized the beliefs values discourses and practices that group members commonly use as a frame of reference for thinking about and relating to the world.

So we might start that as well and some or worldview, right? Or we might in a manner of George Lake off, think about as a frame, but it's a perspective or a context, a way of seeing the world in the case of science and academic disciplines, it's what sort of things we think of as problems, what sort of things are acceptable is solutions, what counts as evidence.

What's important? What's not important? All of that sort of thing. So culture gets used to lot especially in the field of digital media, online, learning, schools generally, academic analytics. So you have, well, I've titled this, like, culture of this culture of that we hear about, for example, a culture of innovation.

And this is from a disc article, happily entitled moving past the tyranny of innovation. But you know, I mean things like not working in silos not being or being driven by data, things like that count as an innovative culture, I'm going to be head wavy because it doesn't matter to me.

What an innovative culture is similarly up here. Leaving in ethics of collective, intelligence talks about a culture of hospitality and there are all kinds of cultures that we could talk about. And so we these are the way to think of these. I think our adjectival, right? So we're not defining a culture that is the culture of innovative people.

All right, what we're doing is, we're taking some culture, say a culture of people working at some company or a culture of a people in a country and saying, what would it be for us to describe that culture as innovative? And so an innovative culture would be more focused on collaboration and cooperation and innovative culture would be more likely to look at the data and evidence.

So we so we think, right? So, and that makes sense that we've talked about culture, so you can define a culture by what it is. You can talk about properties of culture. So what I'm doing here is I'm kind of acknowledging that we can have collective nouns that we call cultures that cultures can have properties like being innovative or whatever and it's going to follow to some degree that cultures can have the sorts of properties that we would associate with ethics, but just like, no person is inherently ethical or unethical.

We'll come back to that. So also no culture is inherently ethical or unethical. So, the question of culture and ethics is something like, what would it be to call something and ethical culture or a culture of ethics? Okay, Well TMS go. It might be a culture of global citizenship and it draws out three dimensions of this.

First of all, to acquire knowledge, understanding a critical thinking etc, etc. Second a social emotional component, which is to have a sense of belonging to a common humanity, sharing values and responsibilities empathy solidarity, and respect for differences in diversity. And then third to act effectively in responsibly at local national and global levels for a more peaceful and sustainable world.

And we might think and then I, I am among those who think I would say that this is, you know, a pretty good, ethical kind of a culture. But you know, I also recognize my own humility that other people might think differently. You know, it's one thing I think to say this is an ethical culture and another thing to say, we have defined what it is to be an ethical culture, and I think we were going to run into all of the same problems that we had.

When we're talking about ethics, generally way back in the previous units, the previous modules, you know, for example, you know, values and responsibilities, empathy solidarity, etc. These are sort of like parts of virtue ethics. Sort of like, parts of a day ontological point of view. You know? I mean, we go back to max meber and he's looking at this or followers of his looking at this.

And where's the prosperity here? You know, we see peacefulness, sustainable world, that's wonderful. Where's the prosperity? Where's the wealth? Whereas the growth and that's a very different perspective on this the consequencialist perspective,

So we can say that this is a definition of an ethical culture, but not the only one, here's a different perspective. This is from OECD and we would expected a different perspective. They define it in terms of what they call global competence. So they're not even going to say that it's ethical but I think we can take it as that because competences good, right?

So what do they say? Global competence is the capacity to examine local global and intercultural issues to understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others, to engage in, open appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development. So here's our profit growth collective, well-being, and sustainable development.

There's an aspect here of virtue. There's an aspect to your obviously of competence, which, you know, I mean, might be traceable to virtue. It doesn't say that we're required to do these things. I just says that we can do these things. So again, you know, this, this is a account of what might be called an ethical culture or, you know, at least an ethical competence was probably not definitive.

UNESCO is very specific in defining. What it thinks a global common good is through its sustainable development goals or SDGs and this is very much a consequence approach. Number one is no poverty to no hunger, good health, quality education, gender equality, clean water clean energy, good jobs and economic growth innovation and infrastructure reduced not eliminated, but reduced inequalities sustainable cities and communities responsible consumption.

Protect the planet life below water, which is kind of an oddball life on land and peace of justice, 14 and 15 life below water and life on land. Don't really have the same status as objectives the way no hunger or good health do. Except in the obvious sense that there should be life.

Underwater. Still these can be thought of as guiding us toward an ethical culture as well. What's interesting in all of these is there is this sense that first of all culture can be ethical and that there's this definition of globalness, right. It does get away from the dual ethics theory.

That was talked about in the first video and towards this idea that there's one single integrated global society. And sometimes that becomes very specific when we talk about, for example, with the atesical culture of global citizenship, you know, sense of belonging to a common humanity, sharing values and responsibilities, somebody looking at that might really might say, you know, but really seems like an assimilationist point of view where we all have to share the same values and share the same responsibilities.

And that points to, I think a pretty fundamental distinction that we need to draw between three things. The first thing is teaching, people about what some particular culture is, or should be by teaching them about existing and valued artifacts, behaviors and attitudes. And that's what we've seen in these three preceding accounts of an ethical culture, right?

The attempt to teach people what it is to be an ethical culture, what properties a culture would have to have in order to be considered. Ethical where ethical is an adjective, the second thing and this is mentioning the OECD definition, but not so much. In the UNESCO definitions teaching, people how to value and respect the difference between cultures.

And that's different. That's not the same as teaching about your own particular culture, or some particular ideal culture. It's a recognition and endorsement of the idea that there might be multiple cultures and that they might have a relatively equal stance from the perspective of value. Good. Ethics, etc. And we have triangle by and then third.

I'm where I really think as they say, the rubber meets the road teaching, people how to contribute to a culture through the creation and fostering of artifacts, behaviors and attitudes. And there's no need for that other rant there. I don't know why it's there. Okay. I said it's the 24th of December and I'm lurching finish line here.

Did you see the difference, right? And this is a really common thing that I've seen in a lot of the discussion, not just of culture, but of ethics generally, the difference between people trying to tell you what ethical is what is, you know, what kind of MAI would be an ethical AI as opposed to what you need to do in order to build and ethically AI kind of a bad analogy there but but you get the idea or or what you need to do in order to come to an understanding of what it is to be an ethical AI how to define your own ethics if you will.

And there really is a big difference between these two

This gets complicated when we realize that culture and learning are integrated and that, just as a culture can be ethical where it's an adjective, a culture can be a learning culture where the learning part is an adjective. In other words, being a learning culture is a kind of way being a culture.

There's probably many more objectives that can describe cultures, but real just with two for now. And this is tricky because culture or something that were creating and yet culture is something that seems to have these properties independently of what we create.

So let's think about how we create a culture. So from Catherine, Lombardozi, we got culture as a socially constructed phenomenon. Okay, it exists in a relational space. That is how we interact with each other and is formed in the values. We espouse the beliefs, we carry the actions. We take and in the stories we tell.

And in all of those other things that we talked about in the first few slides of this presentation, the main thing here is that it's something we create now. I want to put in a bit of a bracket in a side here, because I think this is relevant for the future, and this aside is the distinction between something that we construct intentionally and something that we grow.

And I've talked a lot about this distinction in other contexts, especially with respect to learning and development. Generally because there's a certain school of thought that depicts learning as a form of construction that we are, quote, making meaning when we're learning. So it's an intentional act where deliberately building models or pictures or concepts or ideas or values or structures or objectives or goals, what anything that can have meaning, right?

With some antipathy. But I don't see it that way. I see it as something that grows independently of our intentions. People are learning all the time, whether they plan to or not. It's something that can be affected by what we do but learning isn't to make something. It is to become something to develop one self to grow like a muscle, nobody would ever talk of.

Well, I'm going to construct a muscle. I mean, maybe sometimes you might use that as an expression, if you're a bodybuilder and your time was shaping your muscle or something like that, but even then, you know, you're not going to do muscle installation or I feel like that right.

You're growing a muscle and similarly, you're growing and learning. And I think with room for me to be wrong here, that culture is something that is grown as well. It is formed in the values and the beliefs etc, etc. But it's not like we take those and deliberately build this artifice.

Sometimes we build cultural institutions, but may actually formalize these things and we can be dragged up the stairs that I've been talking about. But I think most of what we think of is called culture is stuff that happens further down. It's it's more in the, the informal, the practices side of thing and that comes out with the two ways of thinking about culture that llama lumbar doesi talks about the traditional Edgar shine, like, definition, that speaks of culture as a pattern of shared basic assumptions versus the culture that is found in a petri dish, where culture is understood as the growth produced in that environment.

And a pattern. Interestingly, I think it's the sort of thing that we grow. There's a an open culture today, there's a video about murmurations.

But the memorations in this case aren't actual murmurations of self-organizing starlings that are memorization like patterns that are actually pre-planned and very carefully choreographed. Now, some kinds of patterns can be like that but mostly patterns that we see in the world are patterns that grow not patterns that are created.

So I think both of those are actually talking about the same sort of thing, but also the difference is between the shared basic assumptions versus the growth. And culture could be talked about as something, some way in which we are all the same, but the petri dish thing. I think is more along the lines of thinking of culture as something that grows and develops and these connected as they've cornea would say he's rise thematic.

So let's think about this, Doug Thomas and John C, Lee Brown talking about a new culture of learning, talk about informal, unplanned, interaction oriented activities. And they say, for example, when play happens within a medium for learning much like a culture in a peach dish that creates the context in which information, ideas and passions grow.

And so they say, the new culture of learning actually comprises to elements. The first is a mass of information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything. The second is abounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within those boundaries.

And my thought about this is it sounds all hot like they're talking about the petri dish and not the culture. And that's, I think the difference between the formalism and the and the non-formalism, the formalism is talking about the environment, the structure, the organization, how to build things like petri dishes, but the messy bits aren't that.

The messy bits are something else, there are thing that grows. So what are they? What is it? Well, I did a presentation. And number of years ago where I tried to capture this, I talked about the design of the move can interaction and all of that. So what are the cultures of learning?

They are what we do. What? We model? What we share, what we create or cooking a culture is us but it isn't quite that culture is us and all of our artifacts thought of as a whole is a messy messy, petri dish of stuff and we focus when we focus on the different properties of a culture on the petri dish.

All right? So when we're talking about and ethical culture, or a learning culture, we tend to talk about the structure in which that culture is going to grow and pretend almost that that's the culture. But that isn't the culture. That's the structure in which the culture grows and there can be good structure for growth and bad structures for growth, but it's distinct from the culture.

The culture is what grows and that is what we do in those environments and with those environments.

When we talk about AI in analytics, we need to also make this leap from culture, broadly, generally conceived, to the culture of organizations that make these things or use these things. Because very rarely are we ever involved in a discussion about individuals using AI stocks going to become more and more important over time?

And I'll talk about that in the bed, but mostly right now we're talking about organizational cultures. So here we have some more cultural properties. Right? Flexibility independence, interdependence and stability. And these are to me again. Elements of the petri dish but we kind of tried to make them elements of the culture.

So we say, well, no, it's a flexible culture, it's an independent culture, the people need to be flexible. The people need to be independent cetera and I'm not really clear about that.

It's this petri dish kind of thinking that gives us a statement like this and organizations culture is based on values. Derived from basic assumptions about the following human nature. The organizations were relationship to its environment, appropriate emotions and effectiveness. So, presumably the argument here is, if you constructed an environment where these four things were addressed, that would tell you what the values are.

And I don't agree. I don't agree that tells you what the thinking of the petri dish designer is but artifacts have a habit of being used in ways other than they've been designed. Yes, you can try to create an architecture of control, which almost is what an organizational culture is.

But it doesn't follow that having achieved that control, you have also achieved an ethical outcome. It's just a mechanism for control. The question of what the ethics are is left. Undefined.

Appropriate emotions, for example, what emotions should people be encouraged to express? And which one should be suppressed? Does not sound like the framework for creating ethics at all. It may well be that people choose to express some emotions and not express other emotions. But there's a difference between them choosing to express these and a culture or a structure, or as I've been saying a petri dish that encourages or suppresses these sorts of expressions.

OECD says organizational culture drives ethics, I say ethics drive organizational culture and that's a really big difference. Trevino Nelson Wright culture is complex and multi-system framework that must be aligned in order to encourage ethical behavior.

Again, I say ethical behavior.

Is what must align, the complex and multi-system framework. Still the culture. I think we could say reflects the ethics, right? It doesn't create the ethics. It reflects the ethics. So that's why we can point to things as indicators of the ethical or unethical aspect of an organizational culture. What things?

Well we have listed here Formal elements including the official communications of executives. The internal policies and codes of conduct training, programs, employee selection systems, as well as systems for managing performance and goal. Setting. These are very revealing about the ethics of our corporation, but they don't exist in dependently of the people in the corporation who are creating them.

Similarly, informal elements include norms of daily behavior. Rituals that help members understand the organizations identity and its values. The myths and stories, people tell about the organization and the language people use in daily behavior. These reflect the ethics of the organization but the organization the organizational culture does not define them.

No, to be sure. We can probably point to an interplay happening here because people are influenced by culture. We can all think of some of these companies that are based on what has come to be called a broke culture. And, you know, the ethics of the people who founded the company, led to that organizational culture being a broke culture, and then the bro culture, feeding back in to the behavior of the people in the company, how they talked to each other, how they communicate with each other, how they work with respect to customers etc.

But the culture isn't, what drives the ethics, the ethics is, what drives the culture. And I think that's a really important point.

This is a thing from ethical systems, talking about different ways cultures organizational, cultures can be ethical or unethical. The negative elements, which would be ethically bad. I guess are unfairness, abusive manager, behavior, selfish orientation, lack of awareness, fear of retaliation. Whereas on the positive side, you have organizational, trust?

Ethical leadership benevolent orientation, empathy, efficacy. And speaking out the argument here is you end up with a better organization with these positive elements to take this all the way back to max beverage, doesn't it? Being ethical is good for business, but you don't get that without the people in the organization being trustworthy being, ethical being benevolent being empathetic and being efficacious and, you know, and I don't you know, I don't want to build this picture of culture that is reductionists who its individuals.

It's, you know, a culture can be a thing. You know, he can be a thing in itself that has properties and and therefore could be thought of as a thing that acts, a thing that has causal efficacy. But it's not the sort of thing that has these properties in and of itself.

The properties the qualities of a culture or any organization are inseparable from the acts taken by the people who are a member of that culture, you can't have one without the other.

And we see this to a degree when we talk about, you know, in the world of AI and analytics things like a culture of data governance. So here this is a just an example from a blog post, titled building a data culture, strong quote unquote, maybe they mean, ethical data culture, typically encompasses, the following components, accessed a high, sorry, access to quality, and trustworthy data, high levels of data literacy, cross-functional collaboration, clearly defined roles and responsibilities adoption of technology and data citizens, who feel empowered to make critical decisions based on data.

That culture is instantiated in the individuals or more accurately again the hacks of the individuals who are a part of that culture, you know, quality and date, and trustworthy data. As we have seen is into thing in itself, you know, you don't go out there and you pick from the stock of quality and trustworthy data and has to be made, has to be collected.

Preferably ethically. It has to be cleaned, sorted, organized, labeled, etc. Same with data literacy, which is a property of the people of an organization. It's hard to characterize. An organization is being data literate or not without talking about its people etc. So but mostly is what I want to say about culture and it might not seem like a very strong point, it feels a little weak to me now.

Even this I'm saying it's on being honest here. But you know, there's a lot of writing in our field and especially with respect to ethics and analytics about organizations, organizational culture organizational values, almost as though they're separate and independent them from the people who create them. We need to be careful about this back always and forget exactly where it was but we were talking about the idea of autonomous AI engines and the question of responsibility and one of the things we talked about is whether we could separate the responsibility but an AI has for its own autonomous actions from the people who own the AI or created the AI or who run the AI.

In other words, hold the AI alone. Accountable and dismiss the accountability of the rest of the people involved. And our first reaction is to say, well, we would never do that, that would be crazy. That would be absurd. But we come into talking about cultures and especially organizational cultures.

Although the discussion is not limited to that and we have exactly that kind of talk where, you know, again OECD culture drives ethics, right? And so we have this thing, but it's set up as it's own, independent entity, a corporate person if you will, that is responsible for the ethical or unethical actions of the members of the culture.

In this view isn't limited to our treatment of organizations. A lot of the the conflicts that we have in the world are based on it where the unethical actions of a member of one culture, one country say or one, religion are felt to reflect on the entire culture. And we blame the entire culture for the actions of that one individual and we say silly things like, you know, this person's religion may be them on ethical, which is the sort of thing that we saw.

When I introduced this section about these single mode and dual mode ethical systems. Right? It was exactly that sort of effort. We know that, you know, intellectually like at least that this is wrong, I mean collective punishment is the war crime. We know that because you're punishing individuals as though they were you're punishing a culture as though it were the actor of some kind of activity.

But responsibility and and therefore punishment, belongs, not to organizations, it belongs to individuals, that's why there are laws for example in this country that allow that, if a company is found to have broken the law, the company can continue on. If the people in the company, usually the executives and the directors of the company are separated from the company and how to account themselves.

In some way, We've actually seen instances of that, It was the cause of a great controversy earlier on in the Trudeau administration. So we have that sense. But we have this tendency to blame collections of things for the actions of individuals. And this goes back to the theory of change.

That Julian started talked about where we we depict these as these great conflicts between systems of, but they're not points of interaction between systems or points of interactions between people who have different backgrounds and different cultures. And I think that how we need to regard these things and that's how we can reconcile a theory of change.

And the theory of individual acts, you know if change only occurs from the collision of great systems, then the role of the individual in such a case, is to be the sand that is ground down to dust in between them. All right, maybe I'll want to come back and redo this section, maybe not but, but I'm not really going to change the overall conclusions here.

I think I might want to express them better, but that's basically what I want to say. You'll see more of this. What I do the sections on citizenship and democracy. We'll get to this a little bit more pointedly, so I'll stop this video for now. I'll be back the next video in just a couple moments my time, your time whenever you get back to my next video, I'm Stephen Downs.

This is ethics analytics and the duty of care.

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