Clotaire Rapaille, The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do

Abstract

There is a question we must ask when we think about Clotaire Rapaille’s latest book, The Culture Code. Is he the best French observer of American culture since De Tocqueville or is he some kind of a super-slick snake-oil salesman who has charmed, and maybe hoodwinked, the heads of some of the biggest corporations in the USA and elsewhere? On the back cover, Warren Bennis has written a blurb describing the book as “astonishing.” He writes that it is “filled with profound insights and ideas that have enormous consequences for today’s organizations. If you want to understand customers, constituencies and crowds, this book is required reading.” That is very high praise from a distinguished scholar. But blurbs are not necessarily the most accurate description of a book’s contents or value. The cover of the paperback is most instructive. There is a photograph of the world, with a large keyhole on it and a key that, we must assume, helps “unlock” secrets of interest to us all. That key is what Rapaille calls a “culture code,” which he defines as “the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing—a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country—via the culture in which we are raised” (p. 5). There are, he suggests, three variations on the unconscious: Freud’s individual unconscious, which guides individuals; Jung’s collective unconscious, which guides all human beings; and that one that is of most interest and utility to Rapaille, a cultural unconscious, that is based on cultures, and more distinctly, generally on national cultures. He explains that “there is an American mind, just as there is a Frenchmind, an English mind, a Kurdishmind, and a Latvian mind. Every culture has its own mind-set, and that mind-set teaches us about who we are in profound ways” (p. 27). It is these mind-sets that generate the codes, the action principles based on each distinctive cultural unconscious. Rapaille explains that traditional surveys and other means of gauging public opinion are not helpful. He offers five principles that guide his research. First, “You can’t believe what people say.” This is because, he explains, people often give you answers to questions that they think you want and because “most people don’t know why they do the things they do” (p. 14). He says he adopts the role of “the professional stranger” who needs help from people to find out why they do what they do. His second principle is that “Emotion is the energy required to learn anything” (p. 17). Emotions, he argues, are the keys to learning and to being imprinted. Most of this imprinting is done while we are children, which is when we absorb the important codes in our cultures. His third principle is “the structure, not the content, is the message,” (p. 19) and he mentions the work of Claude Levi-Strauss in this regard. Thus, when Clotaire examines statements written by participants in his discovery sessions, he is looking for structural phenomena, or themes. For example, in doing research for Chrysler, he discovered that common to the statements was the sense that automobiles play a major role in giving Americans their identity. This leads to his fourth principle which is that “There is a window in time for imprinting and the meaning of the imprint varies from one culture to another” (p. 21). For most people, the imprinting of things that are most central to our lives is done by the time they reach the age of seven. For Rapaille, as for Freud, the child is the father of the man. Soc (2008) 45:316–318 DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9083-7