Cultural Hierarchies Research Articles

What (Who) Is Moderate Islam for? Malaysia's Ontological Security Seeking in the Post-September 11 Global Order

Abstract The popular yet ambiguous idea of moderate Islam has been treated with either interest or indifference in international relations. The interest hinges on hopes of Islamic reformism, whereas the indifference originates from a cynical view that sees moderate Islam campaigns as driven by political opportunism. These viewpoints conceptualize the idea of “moderate Islam” as exegetically rooted and seek to measure state actions based on that. This article argues that “Islamic” signifiers in the foreign policy narratives of Muslim states are better understood from the postcolonial subjectivities of their producers, who are most aware of uneven global cultural hierarchies. It demonstrates that elite Muslim narratives of moderate Islam are less about religious reformation as they are about ontological security seeking. This need for ontological security seeking by Muslim state elites stems from the historical stigmatization of Islam that is exacerbated by the Global War on Terror. Using the case of Malaysia, I highlight how discourses about moderate Islam in foreign policy operate through two mutually reinforcing discursive strategies: image building and image differentiation. Through historical and discourse analysis, I argue that both strategies contain a stigma-correction motive as they worked to craft this image of Malaysia being an exemplary “moderate” Muslim state.

Influence of Organizational Culture on Construction Firms’ Performance: The Mediating Roles of Innovation and Marketing Capabilities

Local Ghanaian construction firms have been accused of underperformance due to inadequate resources and capabilities, lack of market information, poor managerial skills, and other external factors. While construction firms may be unable to control external challenges, how they mobilize internal resources to confront them may be crucial for their performance and survival. An emerging consensus is that how organizations use their resources to respond to externalities is related to their organizational culture (OC). We contend that the unique contribution of organizational culture to firm performance (FP) may diminish in the absence of appropriate firm capabilities. Drawing on the resource-based view and capability theories, we attempt to investigate (a) how the types of OC influence FP and (b) whether innovation and marketing capabilities mediate the link between types of OC and construction firm performance. Results of partial least squares structural equation modelling show that clan, adhocracy, and market culture have significant positive association with FP, while hierarchy culture is negatively related to FP. Furthermore, innovation and marketing capabilities demonstrate a combination of full and partial mediation effects on the link between OC types and FP. Thus, the results direct senior managers’ attention towards the significance of soft assets in construction firm performance outcomes, signaling a shift from a purely technical and rationalistic approach to a more adaptable and humanistic approach. It implies that while emphasizing cultural values, managers should also give priority to these two capability dimensions.

KIN: a method to infer relatedness from low-coverage ancient DNA

Genetic kinship of ancient individuals can provide insights into their culture and social hierarchy, and is relevant for downstream genetic analyses. However, estimating relatedness from ancient DNA is difficult due to low-coverage, ascertainment bias, or contamination from various sources. Here, we present KIN, a method to estimate the relatedness of a pair of individuals from the identical-by-descent segments they share. KIN accurately classifies up to 3rd-degree relatives using at least 0.05x sequence coverage and differentiates siblings from parent-child pairs. It incorporates additional models to adjust for contamination and detect inbreeding, which improves classification accuracy.

The Analysis of Organizational Culture for Improving Corporate Performance at PT. XYZ Discreet

PT. XYZ Discreet is a subsidiary of a State-Owned Enterprise (BUMN) in the manufacturing sector which was founded in 1983. PT. XYZ Discreet contributes to defense & security needs and various industrial products that help in other fields such as transportation and commercial explosives. Organizational culture is essential in determining the success of achieving company goals. Therefore, every company must know what type of culture they are running and what kind of culture is preferred at PT. XYZ Discreet has yet to assess the current and preferred corporate culture. As is well known, BUMN companies and subsidiaries have a new corporate culture, BUMN AKHLAK. Based on an assessment conducted by ACT Consulting, the value of implementing AKHLAK BUMN at PT. XYZ Discreet is not maximized or gets a C value (37.7). The purpose of this study is to provide recommendations for the preferred corporate culture based on survey results. The research methodology used is quantitative data by distributing questionnaires using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) to employees of PT. XYZ Discrete. The survey results show that at PT. XYZ Discreet has a current culture Hierarchy culture, but the survey results also state that employees prefer Clan culture as their corporate culture. In other words, they support the culture with kinship, openness, loyalty, mutual trust, and agreement in every activity. From the results of research that has been done at PT. XYZ Discreet, this cultural transformation can be assisted by a bottom-up approach; leaders should have more understanding of employees, the transformation of leadership style, and forming the agent of change for corporate culture. These things aim to improve internal capabilities at PT. XYZ Discreet.

Youth, meritocracy and cultural hierarchy in the New Nepal

ABSTRACT This paper explores Nepali youth expectations about political equality in the ‘New’ Nepal following the promulgation of a constitution in 2015. It discusses the outcome of seven deliberative youth assemblies held across the country in 2018 and 2019, in which youth debated their priorities for the governments at the local, provincial, and federal levels. These assemblies revealed that youth were committed to a conception of meritocracy that prioritizes individual achievement over cultural ascription as a basis for social and economic justice. Current efforts to introduce equity through ethnic, caste, and gender reservations were seen as useful instruments to achieve this equality but also distrusted as they appeared to contradict meritocratic principles or as tactics to sustain Nepal’s existing cultural barriers.

Becoming Other: Cannibalistic Translation as Liminal Transformation

Combining the translation theory of Haroldo de Campos and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s analysis of Indigenous metaphysics, this essay argues that the metaphorical consumption or cannibalization of texts through translation highlights the role literary influences play in expanding and transforming global literary networks. An understanding of how translated texts consume the source text in the process of their transcreation reveals a rhizomatic exchange and circulation of literature that destabilize at once traditional power structures and conventional translation binaries that give precedence to questions of originality and fidelity. Specifically, attention to rhizomatic literary influences acknowledges the inherent power dynamics and inequalities within postcolonial literature. A cannibalistic view of translation brings into focus these implicit power imbalances while also offering translation as a means to subvert and transform language and cultural hierarchies. Cannibalistic translation recognizes translation as a liminal process of becoming other that transforms not only the source and target texts but also the translator, readers, and literary networks, a process that reverberates through the dialogical relations connecting them all. By drawing on Viveiros de Castro’s works on Indigenous Amazonian ontologies, this article demonstrates ways in which the cannibalistic translation theory of the de Campos brothers can continue to be refined.

«ПЕРИФЕРИЙНАЯ СТОЛИЦА» ИЛИ ОБЩЕСОЮЗНЫЙ ЦЕНТР? ВЕКТОРЫ КУЛЬТУРНОГО РАЗВИТИЯ СВЕРДЛОВСКАВ 1940–1980-Х ГОДАХ

The paper examines the process of forming a cultural center of national level in Sverdlovsk, that is, a stable community of cultural actors working in one city and producing art which is measurably famous across throughout the country. The authors state that such cultural center arose in Sverdlovsk in the 1930s–1960s based on the acquired status of a “peripheral capital”, with Pavel P. Bazhov became the first Sverdlovsk literary figure possessing national popularity. Although local art and literary workers enjoyed certain popularity in the 1940s–1950s, it remained within a strict hierarchy of culture and was aimed at producing a “quasi-ethnic” Ural specificity. However, due to the socio-economic change of the 1960s, which led to the rapid growth of intelligentsia and bureaucracy (mainly in the fields of science, technology, planning, and projecting) in the city, Sverdlovsk cultural actors started to pursue innovative strategies, based on fashion, humanism, environmentalism, and historicism, to satisfy the growing non-market demand. Thus, in a planned economy, for the emergence of a national cultural center, not only stably funded cultural institutions were required, but also the presence of scientific and technical non-market demand, which would allow one to go beyond the strict hierarchy of cultural centers in a centralized Soviet system.

A decision framework for cultural and creative products based on IF-TODIM method and group consensus reaching model

Along with increasing the emphasis on cultural attributes, product design is not only satisfied with the realization of function and appearance, but also considers the embodiment of human emotion and social style. As a result, the number of creative product based on cultural style is increasing. However, existing product decision studies do not consider this style-oriented product- ranking problem, ignore the influence of cultural style and fuzzy decision-making environment on the limited psychological behavior of decision makers (DMs). Decision is a worthwhile research topic in order to facilitate ranking for cultural and creative products (CCPs). Therefore, this paper provides a decision framework based on intuitionistic fuzzy TODIM (IF-TODIM) method and group consensus reaching (GCR) model to fill this gap. Benefit from the theory of intuitionistic fuzzy set, IF-TODIM method can deal with the limited psychological behavior of DMs and the fuzziness of decision environment. This method bases on CCPs characteristics and cultural hierarchy theory (CHT) to select the decision criteria, and applies IF-TODIM method to quantify the relationship of DMs’ preferences and establish the dominance matrix for the alternatives. Furthermore, the GCP model is introduced to improve the group consensus of DMs, and the modified overall dominance matrixes are adopted to determine the alternatives scores and ranking results. The new Chinese style decorations are used as a case study to demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of the proposed method. Moreover, comparing with IF-TOPSIS method are further to verify its effectiveness and superiority.

Organizational Culture Mapping and Home Industry Performance in Pasuruan Regency

This study aimed to investigate the current and expected profile of organizational culture and its effect on employee performance. The research employed a quantitative approach, utilizing the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) to collect data through a survey. Total sampling and non-probability sampling methods were employed, with 184 respondents participating in the study. The analysis, conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics software (Version 24), revealed a common perception between owners and employees, indicating that the current cultural profile of the organization is dominated by hierarchy and market cultures. However, the desired cultural profile aspired to maximize the presence of hierarchy, market, clan, and adhocracy cultures. Furthermore, the study demonstrated a simultaneous and partial influence of hierarchical culture, market culture, clan culture, and adhocracy culture on employee performance. Among these, the variables of hierarchy culture and clan culture were found to have the most significant impact on IKM performance. These findings emphasize the importance of understanding and shaping organizational culture to enhance employee performance and productivity.
 Highlights:
 
 Current and expected profile of organizational culture: The study explores the current and expected cultural profile of Pia Japanan IKM, identifying the prevailing culture as hierarchy and market, while aiming to maximize hierarchy, market, clan, and adhocracy cultures in the future.
 Influence on employee performance: The research reveals a significant impact of hierarchical culture, market culture, clan culture, and adhocracy culture on employee performance, with hierarchy culture and clan culture identified as the most influential variables for IKM performance.
 Quantitative approach and sampling: The study employs a quantitative approach, using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) for data collection through a survey. Total sampling and non-probability sampling methods are utilized, with 184 respondents included in the analysis.
 
 Keywords: Organizational culture, Hierarchy culture, Market culture, Clan culture, Adhocracy culture.

The Hierarchy of Influences Model, National Culture, Human Development, and Journalism Influences

This study examines how social systems level variables may help shape broadcast journalists’ perceptions of the forces influencing their work. We combined Worlds of Journalism Study data with Hofstede's cultural orientations to consider how the levels of the hierarchical influences model may coalesce. In six analyses across four levels, culture was significantly correlated with perceived influences. Our findings support the belief the social systems level is the hegemonic level on which the other levels rest.

Symbolic Violence of Women in Bhayangkari Institution

Bhayangkari organization becomes interesting and relevant to be researched in the perspective of gender, bhayangkari is a cohesive organization, this organization consists of the wives of soldiers and wives of POLRI civil servants who are attached to the culture of the military hierarchy that is still strong. In addition, bhayangkari consists of women with heterogeneous cultural, educational and social status backgrounds. The military hierarchy system of authoritarian leadership, seniority and juniority, and personally targeting surveillance is still a culture within the Bhayangkari organization. This research methodology examines how symbolic violence occurs alive as the wife of a polri member (Bhayangkari) the subject of this study is the administrator and the member of the Bhayangkari organization is a woman, case studies this article focuses on looking at the systems and structural roles performed by Bhayangkari members. The theory of symbolic violence is applied to explain how women are controlled and victims of patriarchal oppression in this organization.
 The study found that women in Bhayangkari were proud to be controlled and suppressed under the normative role of organizations with patriarchal cultures. This is reflected in the way they are active in the organization and totality in carrying out the work program. Furthermore, the special behavior was carried out to gain the prestige and pride of bhayangkari women. Finally, the study concluded that Bhayangkari women were unaware that symbolic violence practices occurred in their organizations. They don't realize that Patriarchal culture has controlled them and defined them as victims of symbolic violence. In this study is to perform data analysis techniques starting with qualitative analysis of the results of interviews, then doing an in-depth interpretation of the relationship between theory and facts that occur. Here also includes quotes (direct quotations) from informants. The issue of gender, especially in women, has become quite an important issue to study, especially looking at the number of demographic bonuses to come.

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman

<i>Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms</i>, by Kira Thurman

Inspirational Insights: The Problematic Vernacular

Abstract Although many disciplines dropped the use of “vernacular” in the 21st century because of the term’s connotations of primitivism, classism, and marginalization arising from 19th-century colonialism, the term has risen in usage among folklorists and ethnologists in the early 21st century. Three distinct streams of usage are identified and analyzed for their nuanced meaning: linguistics, religion, and architecture. Folkloristic and ethnological usage is traced to concern whether ‘vernacular’, despite its problematic historic context, is preferable to ‘folk’ as a modifier of areas of inquiry, many of which are into fluid, non-objectified categories such as belief, faith, and play. A rhetorical shift coinciding with social change from analog to digital communication is apparent to binaries of official/unofficial and formal/ informal in cultural analysis. A further and possibly fringe development has been an ideological strategy represented by the compound term ‘stigmatized vernacular’ that embraces rather than repudiates cultural hierarchy. The evaluation of the problematic adoption by 21st-century folklorists and ethnologists of ‘vernacular’ is that it reifies the very problems that the users intended to resolve.

What Do They Know of Cricket, Who Only Cricket Know?": Classical and Colonial Knowledge in C. L. R. James' Beyond a Boundary

Part sociological analysis of race and class in colonial Trinidad, part autobiographical Bildungsroman, Beyond a Boundary is the cricketing memoir of Trinidadian intellectual and anticolonial activist C. L. R. James (1901–1989). We argue that it offers a good site for thinking through the position of the racially minoritized intellectual entangled in neocolonial logics of cultural hierarchy and identification. We examine James' use of ironic narrative voice to instrumentalize the colonial values encoded in the "Spirit of Cricket." Beyond a Boundary therefore re-imagines the scope of knowledge-making, be it in cricket, art, or indeed Classics, beyond traditionally naturalized hierarchies of race and class.

Paradoxes of democratization: social-liberal reformism, education and citizenship in West Germany after 1968

ABSTRACT Historians largely agree that the social-liberal reforms in the Federal Republic of Germany constituted a major contribution to transforming the country into a more participatory democracy around 1970. Responding to the demands of protesting youth, so this narrative goes, the coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the Free Democratic Party engaged in a flurry of reforms all aimed at equalizing access to an active and engaged democratic citizenship. By taking a closer look at how these social-liberal reformers addressed young people through school reforms, this article instead emphasizes the paradoxical legacy of these reforms, which has thus far been neglected in the historiography. This article thus probes the connection among the federal, regional and local initiatives to use schools to engage young people in the democratic process, with a particular focus on the markedly different reforms in the West German state of North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) and in West Berlin. Through these reforms, policymakers and experts not only attempted to offer youth more opportunities for active participation, but also to control carefully how they made use of their citizenship. Moreover, these educational reforms exposed the fissures inherent in a class-based and multi-ethnic West German democracy. Although social-liberal reformers intended to equalize access to democratic citizenship, they nonetheless also reified cultural and political hierarchies between the middle and lower classes, as well as between ethnic Germans and immigrant children. Ultimately, these endeavours shaped West German democracy largely through their unintended consequences. While in NRW, these reforms contributed to the rise of a liberal-conservative opposition, in West Berlin, these policies gave rise to a Left-alternative movement that each defined democratic citizenship in their own ways.

Integrated Sustainable Development of Culture into Tourist Map Design: A Case from Foshan, China.

As the fourth pillar of sustainable development, culture is widely recognized as contributing to human wellbeing. The distinctive culture of cities is an important driving force for attracting visitors to destinations for tourism consumption. Since historical cities have important cultural and historical values, the design of their tourist maps needs not only geographic positioning and artistic aesthetics, but also a systematic design method to present the connotation of regional cultures, so as to enhance the local cultural identity of hosts and the cultural cognition of visitors, and to drive the local tourism economy, improve the regional environment, promote cultural transmission and inheritance with the help of tourist map design in terms of cultural sustainability, which ultimately achieves sustainable development of human wellbeing. Taking Foshan, a national historical city, as an example, combined with the cultural gene and the cultural hierarchy theory, this study analyzes and summarizes the regional culture of Foshan from three aspects: material cultural gene, intangible cultural gene and spiritual cultural gene. This study also comprehensively presents the geographical information and historical or humanistic characteristics of the city through direct translation, narrative translation, and metaphor translation, which provide theoretical support and practical guidance for the integration of regional cultures into tourist map design.

Logistics Aspect of Organizational Culture and Normative Commitment in Electric Energy Supply Chain

Abstract Companies are increasingly aware that employees are an important factor in success, so they pay more and more attention to them. Because of that, organizational culture and normative commitment are also included as extremely important factors. The research includes a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature and at the same time obtaining and analysing data from practice through a survey. The research focuses on employees from the logistics departments in the supply chain of electronic component production and supply. Group of companies across Europe were included in the survey (Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia and Ukraine). The research demonstrates the realization that the types of classification of organizational culture have different effects on direct and indirect normative commitment. Gender differences were also found. The research-based on the calculated average mean values shows the classifications of organizational culture and normative commitment. The latter follows the organizational culture with minor deviations. The order of classification of organizational culture follows the current economic situation, where according to the studied criteria, the first is a culture of the market. The research shows that men’s rate of normative commitment is better than women’s, while in organizational culture the situation is exactly the opposite. One of the most significant findings is based on the Pearson correlation coefficient with the SPSS program was found that, according to the classification, Hierarchy culture has a positive effect on indirect normative commitment.

New forms of distinction: How contemporary cultural elites understand ‘good’ taste

Taste is a subject of longstanding academic interest. The question of how cultural interests and preferences are socially stratified is at the heart of the sociology of culture. This article adds to this literature by examining the tastes of a specific social fraction, those working in cultural and creative occupations ( N = 203). The analysis finds that, in keeping with existing quantitative research on changing cultural hierarchies, cultural workers are open and eclectic in their expressions of taste. They are reflexive, able to play with, and question, ideas of taste alongside conceptions of artistic or cultural legitimacy, connecting their understandings to broader questions of social division and distinction. At the same time, this ‘emerging’ form of cultural capital is a new dividing line, substantiated by modes of consumption, depth of appreciation, and willingness to articulate commitments to engagement with culture. These distinctive tastes of cultural workers matter because, as creators, commissioners and curators of what ends up on stage, page and screen, cultural workers’ tastes shape the cultural hierarchies of which they are a part. In the context of cultural and creative industries, we can expect that these new forms of distinction will serve to create group identities, providing yet another way that cultural elites are socially closed, in addition to well-known exclusions based on demographics such as race, class, gender, age or disability.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE SHARING: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM CROATIA

The paper aimed to investigate the influence of organizational culture types on tacit knowledge sharing in medium and large enterprises in Croatia. For research, organizational culture is differentiated according to the typology based on the Competing Values Framework. In the theoretical part, the basic concepts and open questions related to the issues of the subject research are systematized and analyzed. The empirical part of the paper presents the results of a survey conducted on 14 medium and large companies in the Croatian economy. A total of 492 knowledge workers were surveyed in these companies. Multiple regression was used to assess the research model. The results of the research showed that organizational culture significantly influences tacit knowledge sharing, where the mentioned influence can be positive or negative, depending on the culture type. More precisely, it was found that clan and adhocracy cultures have a positive, and market culture has a negative impact on tacit knowledge sharing. However, no statistically significant influence of hierarchy culture on tacit knowledge sharing has been proven. The results of this paper have significant theoretical and practical implications.

From Agent to Subject: Panoptic and Post-Panoptic Surveillance in Contemporary Eastern European Television Series

There has been an increasing number of locally developed but globally distributed Eastern European quality television series during the last decade. Almost all of these products are concerned with the region’s troubled past, using state socialist regimes as contemporary allegories of nationalism, populism, surveillance and social control. These series merge classic spy culture of the Cold War era with new ideas of capitalist surveillance technologies and highlight patterns in which Cold War aesthetic and generic themes have reproduced themselves in contemporary culture. In this paper I present the relationship between narrative representations of social control and the relationship between postcolonial symbolism and post-socialist cultural hierarchies by analyzing television series such as 1983 (Netflix, 2018) and Hackerville (HBO, 2018). First, I introduce the paths to quality television in Eastern Europe and identify possible connections between Cold War and contemporary generic templates, various modes of surveillance, and recreations of these procedures in popular media. I then consider the difference between traditional panoptic power techniques and post-panoptic surveillance technologies by examining notions of social control and context, with an emphasis on vulnerabilities exposed in layers of social order and representation.