Manifestations of Community Culture

Photo by Jas Min on Unsplash

As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, I’ve been trying to answer some fairly existential questions about what makes a community a community. What is it that binds a seemingly random selection of people together as a group, when an equally random selection of people mashed together around the same shared interest does not? Why should one person choose to be part of a community and another equally probable candidate decide not to?

Its my belief that what makes a community successful and meaningful is that it takes its cultural considerations seriously and significantly. Those communities that I’ve been part of that I value the most are those that I have felt a strong and accessible sense of belonging towards – ones where I feel like I’m part of something that matters. I am grateful and benefit from those who were there before me, and in turn I have a responsibility to care for the community for those who join after me. The next question therefore has to be – what actually creates that sense of belonging?

There are two considerations that any community (and any leader for that matter) should concern themselves with when looking at forming and growing its culture – the things that you do and the things that you believe. There are many books on this subject and I love them all (especially Belonging by Owen Eastwood, which I am currently re-reading), but I am particularly fond of Hofstede’s Manifestations of Culture model, which is (badly) shown below in the form of an onion….

Hofstede’s Onion: Manifestations of Culture at Different Levels of Depth, crudely hand drawn by me

In the book Cultures and Organizations, Hofstede uses much more refined language than I do - splitting these cultural considerations out into practices (the things you do) and values (the things you believe). Practices are broken down still further into three separate categories – Symbols, Heroes and Rituals. Symbols are ‘words, gestures, pictures or objects that carry a particular meaning’ to those who are members of the community. A secret handshake, an old school tie, a viking helmet – all these things mean something to the members of a community that they don’t to those who don’t belong to it. They may be held sacred for years and generations, or they may exist for only a short time before it becoming a bit cringeworthy and are discarded, but there is a time when they hold a cultural relevance for that community.

Heroes are considered ‘persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, that possess characteristics highly prized by the community’ and are therefore considered role models. Steering tactfully clear of both the religious and political ends to the hero-worshipping spectrum, we can recognise this when children (or adults) see their favourite footballer do some sort of ridiculous trick during Saturday’s match and spend training with their teammates the following week trying to copy it. We can recognise this when we go to a tech conference and hear from a speaker who is doing incredible cutting edge things at their place of work, and when we go back to our day jobs we want to copy them. They represent people that the community respects and reveres, regardless of whether they are part of/are even aware of that community existing.

Rituals are things that a community might do that don’t necessarily have to serve any real purpose, but ‘are considered socially essential’. Examples would be an on-the-pitch huddle by a team during a sports match before or after scoring points, the early morning radio taiso exercises performed by millions across Japan, or even something as basic as the meetup host opening the evening’s session by asking attendees to raise their hand if this is their first time so we can all say hello – all of these rituals create the character of your community’s culture and become meaningful to those who are part of it.

These practices will be unique and specific to their community, as they are things that they have decided to do together. Values on the other hand are more complex, as they are usually things that that individuals already have. Values are the schemas that we build our understanding of the world upon. Hofstede describes them as ‘feelings with an added arrow indicating a plus or minus side’. Consider this – do you think you could be part of a meaningful community if you don’t share the same values of right and wrong as everyone else? Of good and evil? Of things that are natural or unnatural? How closely do you think you could belong if you had a different view on the rights of women, on ethnic minorities, or religious tolerance to all the other members of the group? This sounds very heavy and dramatic, mainly because it is – these are the values that are generally imprinted and embedded in us at an early age, and are fundamental to the ways in which we see the world. The same principle applies to us within our communities; the only difference is scale. Do you lead a community based around environmental activism and ending society’s dependence on fossil fuels? Your community’s values are likely to be on a larger scale. Do you run a community based around LARPING? C++? Playing an instrument? Its easy to flippantly dismiss the scale of the values these communities hold as irrelevant when placed next to one focussed quite literally on the future of humanity, but that does kind of miss the point – their importance lies in the fact that they are values shared by the community, and within the boundaries of that community they are a uniting factor and something that they all hold dear. It is through these shared values and the practices we carry out that we find belonging together.

As a leader of a community, you carry a responsibility to ensure that these values and practices are respected and maintained. Your values may be documented in a community charter, articulated in your goal or purpose, or maybe not written down at all – known implicitly by all members who speak and practice them every day. The fact is that they are part of the soul of your community and if you don’t respect them, ensure they are practiced, or refuse to let them play out and evolve, then the thing that binds community members together quickly dissipates and in many cases will lead to it falling apart.

This post is largely based off of my opinions from reading the book Cultures and Organizations and whilst it’s fairly heavy going, its really helped me articulate to myself the real fundamentals of wy communities come together and what they form around.

Right – that’s it for this week. I’ve been struggling to find the time recently to sit down and write anything so it might be a bit slow over the next couple of weeks, but I’ll do my best 😊

Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee :)