Social Media in Business

SOCIAL MEDIA

AND ITS ORIGINS

REVIEW OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND DEFENCE

Social Media and its Origins

1

REVIEW OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND DEFENCE

Social Media and its Origins

2

This review was predicated on two elements: first, it was a cultural review; second, it

examined the issue of social media and Defence. This section of the report explores both

concepts.

1.1 WHAT IS CULTURE?

The word ‘culture’ is commonly used to denote many varied aspects of society,

sometimes without much thought about the meaning of the term. Definitions developed

by researchers give some insight into what ‘culture’ might mean for an entire society, or

groups within that society, such as Defence.

The published research of Geert Hofstede, who surveyed the cultural attitudes of more

than 116,000 IBM employees in 50 countries and three regions, is regarded as seminal,

particularly when scholars assess how national culture affects workplace culture (Mead

2002:39). The principal purpose of his analysis was to differentiate between the assumed

‘shared’ values held in organisations and the ‘unique’ values that could be identified as

belonging, instead, to national cultures (Mwaura et al. 1998:214).

Hofstede argued that culture can be regarded as ‘the collective programming of the mind

which distinguishes the members of one group from another’ (1984:21). Later, he added

that culture can be ‘mental programming … patterns of thinking and feeling and potential

acting’ (Hofstede 1991:4).

Many others have also provided definitions of ‘culture’. For example, Hoebel and

Frost say culture is an ‘integrated system of learned behaviour patterns which are

characteristic of the members of a society and which are not the result of biological

inheritance’ (1976:6). Ferraro (2002:19) argues that it is ‘everything that people have,

think, and do as members of society’. Samovar and Porter (1991:51) describe culture:

as the deposit of knowledge, experience,...