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Distinct Cultures (distinct + culture)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences60%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

THE CROSS-CULTURAL IMPORTANCE OF SATISFYING VITAL NEEDS

BIOETHICS, Issue 9 2009
ALLEN ANDREW A. ALVAREZ
ABSTRACT Ethical beliefs may vary across cultures but there are things that must be valued as preconditions to any cultural practice. Physical and mental abilities vital to believing, valuing and practising a culture are such preconditions and it is always important to protect them. If one is to practise a distinct culture, she must at least have these basic abilities. Access to basic healthcare is one way to ensure that vital abilities are protected. John Rawls argued that access to all-purpose primary goods must be ensured. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum claim that universal capabilities are what resources are meant to enable. Len Doyal and Ian Gough identify physical health and autonomy as basic needs of every person in every culture. When we disagree on what to prioritize, when resources to satisfy competing demands are scarce, our common needs can provide a point of normative convergence. Need-based rationing, however, has been criticized for being too indeterminate to give guidance for deciding which healthcare services to prioritize and for tending to create a bottomless-pit problem. But there is a difference between needing something (first-order need) and needing to have the ability to need (second-order need). Even if we disagree about which first-order need to prioritize, we must accept the importance of satisfying our second-order need to have the ability to value things. We all have a second-order need for basic healthcare as a means to protect our vital abilities even if we differ in what our cultures consider to be particular first-order needs. [source]

Paying the piper: a study of musicians and the music business

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NONPROFIT & VOLUNTARY SECTOR MARKETING, Issue 4 2005
Krzysztof Kubacki
Many artists argue that treating music as a business represents a particularly insidious force in cultural life, stifling creativity and change. For them business and art are mutually incompatible and they regard the evident economic success of the music industry as an example of the shameless exploitation of our cultural heritage. This paper is based on detailed research into the attitudes of musicians across two distinct cultures. It finds strong echoes of the key criticisms of the music business which have been prominent in academic literature and in the specialist music press for more than a generation. Singled out for particular censure are not-for-profit organisations for apparently following the global recording companies down the same, profit-driven routes. The research confirms that there is a large gap between the expectations of artists and the organisations which employ them and fund their work. It is important that these expectations are understood and, if possible, bridged. For the arts to regain their place at the heart of cultural life it is necessary once more to bring the artists themselves into the picture. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Can the Discretionary Nature of Certain Criteria Lead to Differential Prediction Across Cultural Groups?

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SELECTION AND ASSESSMENT, Issue 2 2007
Oleksandr S. Chernyshenko
We examined the conjecture that relations between constructs across cultures may be susceptible to cultural moderation where the performance of the criterion construct is discretionary. This hypothesis was investigated using the relationship between personality and three performance constructs, with samples from the United States and New Zealand, two ideologically distinct cultures with respect to achievement orientation. All hypotheses were supported by results of hierarchical moderated regression analyses using bias free measures, suggesting that considering whether construct behaviors are discretionary is important when considering the merit of generalizing research findings across cultures. [source]

Mindscapes And Internet-mediated Communication

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 3 2002
John Gammack
Cultures are considered to be epistemologically heterogeneous, and it is assumed that epistemologically similar individuals exist across distinct cultures. Epistemological type is viewed as prior to, and transcendent of, nationality and culture. Identifying a shared epistemological basis for communication will be more likely to succeed in dialogical contexts where conformity to prevailing national stereotypes may fail. Two levels of communication are distinguished: explicate (here seen as conformity to social and cultural symbolic norms and conventions), and implicate (the level at which implicit, abstract communicative intention originates). Cyberspatial interactions potentially undermine normative cultural influences and permit multicultural or transcultural environments in which new codes extending from epistemological types (rather than cultural) become possible, limited only by media potential and symbolization itself. Drawing upon Maruyama's (1980) theory, implications for an alternative to the homogenization of verbal communication, and potential elements of codes for universal understandings are considered. [source]

Evolutionism and Historical Particularism at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography

MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
Sergei Kan
Abstract In the 1900s,1920s, Lev Shternberg played a major role in transforming the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography into Russia's most comprehensive ethnology museum and a popular site for visitors. As an anthropologist, Shternberg was committed to both a Boasian investigation of individual cultures (and intercultural relations) and classical evolutionism. Hence he believed that his museum had to include displays depicting distinct cultures and culture areas and a separate department illustrating "the evolution and typology of culture." The article examines his work of putting the former part of this vision into practice and the reasons why the latter one failed. [source]