The Elements of Culture: Grant McCracken and Hofstede’s Onion

In my previous post, I outlined why it’s important to track emergent changes in culture. Ever since I heard Grant McCracken speak in London at the end of May 2010, I’ve been thinking about how his definition of “fast” and “slow” culture fit with other descriptions of culture that I use, particularly Hofstede’s Onion model and how the combination might help us understand how cultures evolve. On the day, my instinctive response was that if I think of a national culture and take Grant’s definitions as read, then important parts of Hofstede’s Onion refer to elements that make up what may be called “very slow” culture. (The speed referred to is the rate of change in the category.)

On reflection, however, I think there’s a little more to it than that. This post is an attempt to work it out, comments and ideas are very welcome!

Grant’s model, outlined in his book, Chief Culture Officer, makes for an easily sketched diagram:

Now let’s look at a diagram of the layers of Hofstede’s Onion. I’ve flattened it to make it easier to put the two together further on.

I’ve marked the two ends Surface and Deep culture to compensate for removing the “onion” visual device, which automatically placed “Values” at the heart of everything.

It’s also important to aware of some terminology clashes between the two models here. Just about everything mentioned in the McCracken diagram could fall into the “Expressions” range in the Hofstede model. Further, when people use the Hofstede model they use the word “Values” in a very specific way, meaning the measurements of values using the independent axes of the Hofstede model. The McCracken model talks more about the way those “Values” are expressed in ideas that have social currency, than an abstract measurement of values.

As I mentioned at the beginning, my first instinct was that the two models come together in a very easy way – Fast culture could over towards the Surface end of the Hofstede Onion and Slow culture to the Deep end. I still think that’s an acceptable starting point, but I believe by engaging with some of the finer details we can gain a better sense of how cultures change.

To understand that, it’s worth emphasising that the depth of an element in a cultural scheme and how quickly it changes are not completely parallel. Some symbols are overnight sensations which gain 15 minutes of fame – the latest song. Others last longer – the Coke bottle. Some rituals are a matter of a few years, others last generations.

The values of a society, as measured by models like Hofstede do not seem to have shifted much anywhere in the world in the last 30 years. The way these values are articulated in ideas (the form most often unearthed by ethnographers) shifts around a little more and can be approached less obliquely than the abstract values from a measurement model.

I’d diagram it like this, Hofstede elements in brown, McCracken ones in gold, my thoughts on change in black:

(click for larger version)

Some of the constant rush of fast culture expressions survive and become part of slow culture. My current guess is that expressions that last long enough come out of values and ideas, but can also reshape them for new times:

In any culture, the majority of expressions come out of the existing values of that culture, but some come from “Imported” values. In a national culture, these are expressions imported from other parts of the world. In a corporate culture, these are very often ideas picked up from other companies, particularly competitors, and quite a lot of the time they come with the tag “best practice.” Some expressions are short-lived (and “imported ones” are more likely to skate across the surface) and wither away. Some others last longer and become part of the deeper culture. A few of these may be powerful enough to slowly reshape the underlying values.