“Culture” is an elusive term, hard to define and hard to talk about. Yet, culture is a potent force. It can determine the outcome of various endeavors ranging from a new system introduction to radical  organizational change attempt (see what the Dachis Group is trying with their social business design) .
Wikipedia gives three different approaches/definitions to culture:

• excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.

The culture I am concerned with has to do mostly with the third definition and partly the second.

Research on cultural issues in a business context, although far from non existent, is limited.

Back in 1980, an IBM researcher, Geert Hofstede, published the conclusions  of a global study on culture and came up with a framework for understanding and defining culture within organizations that was in alignment with earlier anthropological works.

The framework makes use of five cultural dimensions:

• Power Distance (acceptance or not of inequal distribution of power within an organization)
• Uncertainty Avoidance
• Individualism (vs collectivism)
• Masculinity (assertiveness  and competitiveness)
• Long term orientation

Explaining each one of them is beyond the scope of this post, but the interested reader can refer to Hofstede’s books: Culture’s Consequences and Cultures and Organizations .

The issues we are  interested in are the following:

• Does the broader culture affect social media penetration and adoption in a country? (Of course it does, but how and to what extent?)
• How does a company culture impedes (most often) or aids a social media strategy?
• Do online communities have distinct cultures and, if yes, what are they and how they are measured?

Social media themselves are not culture neutral. Some of the above cultural dimensions seem to befit them better: A collective culture might make social networks and online communities easy to grasp and join, while blogs and microblogging might appeal more to an individualistic one. Uncertainty avoidance could lead to lower participation and experimentation while in cases where power distance scores high,  opening and sharing could signal alarms.

But this is only guessing. Such assertions need to be supported by research data. And need lead to conclusions that will help social media practitioners consult their clients more effectively.

Although these issues seem more academic and rather inappropriate for a new media agency blog, they come up here because they play a crucial role in our efforts to help organizations is setting and implementing their strategies.  To this end, this post wants to serve as the ignition of a broader discussion that will surface cases like this one, where culture has been, if not studied, at least, taken into consideration seriously.

Otherwise, as Steve Radick put it:

If the “social” part of social media doesn’t exist within your organization or is corrupted, all you’re going to end up with is “media” – a blog with no readers or a wiki with no edits.