Which ethical system has influenced behavior and shaped culture in parts of Asia but is not considered a religion?

Terms in this set (125)

A) values. Values form the bedrock of a culture. Values provide the context within which a society's norms are established and justified. They may include a society's attitudes toward such concepts as individual freedom, democracy, truth, justice, honesty, loyalty, social obligations, collective responsibility, women, love, sex, marriage, and so on.

By values, we mean ideas about what a group believes to be good, right, and desirable. Put differently, values are shared assumptions about how things ought to be. By norms, we mean the social rules and guidelines that prescribe appropriate behavior in particular situations. Norms are the social rules that govern people's actions toward one another. Norms can be subdivided further into two major categories: folkways and mores. Folkways are the routine conventions of everyday life. Generally, folkways are actions of little moral significance. Rather, they are social conventions concerning things such as the appropriate dress code in a particular situation, good social manners, eating with the correct utensils, neighborly behavior, and the like. Although folkways define the way people are expected to behave, violation of them is not normally a serious matter. Folkways include rituals and symbolic behavior. Mores are norms that are seen as central to the functioning of a society and to its social life. They have much greater significance than folkways. Accordingly, violating mores can bring serious retribution. Mores include such factors as indictments against theft, adultery, incest, and cannibalism. In many societies, certain mores have been enacted into law.

It is possible to talk about culture at different levels. It is reasonable to talk about "American society" and "American culture," but there are several societies within the United States, each with its own culture. For example, in the United States, one can talk about African American culture, Cajun culture, Chinese American culture, Hispanic culture, Indian culture, Irish American culture, Southern culture, and many more cultural groups. In some way, this means that the relationship between culture and country is often ambiguous. Even if a country can be characterized as having a single homogeneous culture, often that national culture is a mosaic of subcultures.

According to some commentators, modern British society is now rapidly leaving behind this class structure and moving toward a classless society. However, sociologists continue to dispute this finding and present evidence that this is not the case. For example, one study reported that state schools in the London Borough (suburb) of Islington, which now has a population of 230,000, had only 79 candidates for university, while one prestigious private school alone, Eton, sent more than that number to Oxford and Cambridge. This, according to the study's authors, implies that "money still begets money." They argue that a good school means a good university, a good university means a good job, and merit has only a limited chance of elbowing its way into this tight little circle. In another recent survey of the empirical literature, a sociologist noted that class differentials in educational achievement have changed surprisingly little over the last few decades in many societies, despite assumptions to the contrary.

In 1904, German sociologist Max Weber made a connection between Protestant ethics and "the spirit of capitalism." Weber noted that capitalism emerged in Western Europe, where "business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labor, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant." Weber theorized that there was a relationship between Protestantism and the emergence of modern capitalism. He argued that Protestant ethics emphasize the importance of hard work and wealth creation (for the glory of God) and frugality (abstinence from worldly pleasures). According to Weber, this kind of value system was needed to facilitate the development of capitalism. Protestantism also may have encouraged capitalism's development in another way. By breaking away from the hierarchical domination of religious and social life that characterized the Catholic Church for much of its history, Protestantism gave individuals significantly more freedom to develop their own relationship with God. The right to freedom of form of worship was central to the nonconformist nature of early Protestantism. This emphasis on individual religious freedom may have paved the way for the subsequent emphasis on individual economic and political freedoms and the development of individualism as an economic and political philosophy. Thus, the combination of hard work and the accumulation of capital, which could be used to finance investment and expansion, paved the way for the development of capitalism in Western Europe and subsequently in the United States.

Because Islamic banks cannot pay or charge interest, they must find a different way of making money. Islamic banks have experimented with two different banking methods—the mudarabah and the murabaha. A mudarabah contract is similar to a profit-sharing scheme. Under mudarabah, when an Islamic bank lends money to a business, rather than charging that business interest on the loan, it takes a share in the profits that are derived from the investment. Similarly, when a business (or individual) deposits money at an Islamic bank in a savings account, the deposit is treated as an equity investment in whatever activity the bank uses the capital for. Thus, the depositor receives a share in the profit from the bank's investment (as opposed to interest payments) according to an agreed-on ratio. The second Islamic banking method, the murabaha contract, is the most widely used among the world's Islamic banks, primarily because it is the easiest to implement. In a murabaha contract, when a firm wishes to purchase something using a loan—let's say a piece of equipment that costs $1,000—the firm tells the bank after having negotiated the price with the equipment manufacturer. The bank then buys the equipment for $1,000, and the borrower buys it back from the bank at some later date for, say, $1,100, a price that includes a $100 markup for the bank.

Hinduism has approximately 1.1 billion adherents, most of them on the Indian subcontinent. Hinduism began in the Indus Valley in India more than 4,000 years ago, making it the world's oldest major religion. Unlike Buddhism, its founding is not linked to a particular person. Many Hindus believe that the way to achieve nirvana is to lead a severe ascetic lifestyle of material and physical self-denial, devoting life to a spiritual rather than material quest. Buddhism was founded in India in the sixth century B.C. by Siddhartha Gautama, an Indian prince who renounced his wealth to pursue an ascetic lifestyle and spiritual perfection. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism does not support the caste system. Nor does Buddhism advocate the kind of extreme ascetic behavior that is encouraged by Hinduism. Nevertheless, like Hindus, Buddhists stress the afterlife and spiritual achievement rather than involvement in this world. But unlike Hinduism, the lack of support for the caste system and extreme ascetic behavior suggests that a Buddhist society may represent a more fertile ground for entrepreneurial activity than a Hindu culture.

The three values that are central to the Confucian system of ethics are loyalty, reciprocal obligations, and honesty in dealings with others. In Confucian thought, loyalty to one's superiors is regarded as a sacred duty—an absolute obligation. In modern organizations based in Confucian cultures, the loyalty that binds employees to the heads of their organization can reduce the conflict between management and labor that we find in more class-conscious societies. However, in a Confucian culture, loyalty to one's superiors, such as a worker's loyalty to management, is not blind loyalty. The concept of reciprocal obligations is important. Confucian ethics stress that superiors are obliged to reward the loyalty of their subordinates by bestowing blessings on them. A third concept found in Confucian ethics is the importance attached to honesty. Confucian thinkers emphasize that although dishonest behavior may yield short-term benefits for the transgressor, dishonesty does not pay in the long run. The importance attached to honesty has major economic implications. When companies can trust each other not to break contractual obligations, the costs of doing business are lowered.

Hofstede first isolated four dimensions that he claimed summarized different cultures—power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity. The power distance dimension focused on how a society deals with the fact that people are unequal in physical and intellectual capabilities. The individualism versus collectivism dimension focused on the relationship between the individual and his or her fellows. Hofstede's uncertainty avoidance dimension measured the extent to which different cultures socialized their members into accepting ambiguous situations and tolerating uncertainty. His masculinity versus femininity dimension looked at the relationship between gender and work roles. Hofstede later expanded his original research to include a fifth dimension, called long-term versus short-term orientation, that he argued captured additional cultural differences not brought out in his earlier work. It refers to the extent to which a culture programs its citizens to accept delayed gratification of their material, social, and emotional needs. It captures attitudes toward time, persistence, ordering by status, protection of face, respect for tradition, and reciprocation of gifts and favors.

Sets with similar terms

Which ethical system that has influence behavior in shape culture in parts of Asia is not considered a religion?

Which religion does not owe its founding to any one particular individual Buddhism Hinduism Christianity Islam Catholicism?

What term is used by Hofstede to describe a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic human drives?

What Confucian ethic is central to the Chinese concept of guanxi?