Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

For the part of the world who have found it a point to notice that there is such a country as Sweden – at some distance easily mixed up with Switzerland – Sweden might appear as somewhat of an ideal state of equality, untroubled by racial riots and religious taboos.

On close encounter a different picture emerges that speaks about a state of denial that have grown into a culture of its own. In a time when globalization is increasingly becoming a non-issue, when through the Internet Syria is as close as Malmö, this phenomenon might become a problem. The problem, being that the wider meaning of the word ‘culture’ in Sweden has been obscured and cemented into oblivion so much that there are almost no words there to talk about the fact that values, beliefs, religions and various ideas about what is right or wrong are different in different parts of the world.

Defining culture

In the early 2000s when I began to prepare my research for my doctoral thesis in the field of managing across cultures and leadership across cultures, it appeared that almost every author touching upon the topic of culture had come up with a definition of their own. Already during the 1950s, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn had compiled a list of 164 definitions. The definitions spanned fine arts and humanities, pattern of human knowledge, beliefs and behavior, shared attitudes, values, goals and practices. Everything from cultivating small societies of bacteria in a Petri dish to my favourite, Geert Hofstede, who defined culture as a ‘collective programming of the mind’. It appeared that the only common ground was the agreement that there was such a thing as culture and in its broader sense all were the creations of man to fit in between them and what was given by nature to make just about any place on earth inhabitable. Thus, of course, any “culture” would vary with the places and be whatever served its purpose best at that place.

This wider definition made for three simple observations:

1. There is such a thing as culture
2. They vary with their geographical location
3. Their usefulness will vary since what is useful in one place will be plain stupid in another

What we arrive at in the most secular country in the world is however, the contradiction that the Swedes do not believe in the thesis of Greek philosopher Protagoras, that “man is the measure of all things” but would much rather go with the Old Testament’s belief in absolute truths, that what is true to one man is true to all.

When I went on in the course of my research and talked to Swedish top managers about their “management style”, asking if they felt that their ‘style’ would broadly correspond to the “Swedish culture and values” most Swedes would have it that there did not exist any particular Swedish management style, and certainly no framework of a Swedish national culture that influenced this non-existent “Swedish management style”.
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