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Future Bureaucrat
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I wrote a paper regarding (partially) collectivism and individualism. I think that may account for a part of the civil behavior.
If anyone's interested:
Quote:
Individualism stands for a society in which the ties between individuals are loose. Everyone is expected to look after him or herself, or only their immediate family. Relationships and group memberships are impermanent and nonintensive. In individualistic societies, the smallest unit of society tends to be the individual.# Persons from individualistic societies are considered discrete, autonomous, self-sufficient, universal entities.# Due to the emphasis on individualism, values such as self-reliance, hedonism, competition, and emotional detachment tend to dominate.# In addition, individualists tend to value curiosity, open mindedness, creativity, variety, and self-sufficiency.# Consequently, society is an aggregation of atomistic individuals who seek to maximize their own goals.# Individualists interact with others utilizing mutually agreed-upon principles, such as equality, equity, non-interference, and detachment. Thus, laws and regulations in individualistic societies are especially important since they are needed to regulate interactions.
In addition, individualistic behavior is generally more prevalent in industrial societies. In these industrialized cultures, there tend to be less stable, long term relationships with individuals outside the immediate family. Through industrialization, there is increased division of labor and less interdependence, resulting in greater impersonality between people. In an impersonal society, confrontations and open discussions of conflict are considered salutary.# Indeed, in individualist cultures, the belief is that the clash of ideals will result in greater truth. Thus conflict is the norm in an individualistic society.#
In the workplace, individualism colors the relationship between employer and employee. Employees are expected to act rationally according to their own interests and thus work is organized to align to the employee’s interests.# Through aligning interests, two individual entities are able to come to a mutually agreeable and productive arrangement. When it comes to business transactions, the task and goal are of the utmost importance. Business relationships which are otherwise a priority are placed below other goals of profit or meeting established objectives.
Low context communication is also characteristic of an individualist society.# Low context communication requires explicit communication of information and generally follows four maxims. First, individuals should not give more or less information than necessary.# Second, that people should state only which is sufficient to support the statement.# Third, statements should be relevant to the context of the conversation.# Finally, communicators should avoid obscure expressions, or excessive verbosity.# Thus, communications in individualist societies are generally explicit, with nothing left to inference.
Characteristics of Collectivism
In contrast to individualism, collectivism is characterized by an emphasis of the group above the individual. Collectivism is reflected in a social pattern of closely linked individuals who define themselves as interdependent.# These interdependent individuals integrate into strong cohesive groups which offer protection in exchange for loyalty.# In a collectivist society, groups define individuals and are a major source of the collectivist’s identity. Collectivists tend to place emphasis on duties rather than rights# and place great emphasis on harmony.# In most collectivist cultures, direct confrontation is considered rude and undesirable. The word no is seldom used because “no” is a confrontation.# Thus, collectivists are expected to show greater conformity and accommodation.#
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...xM/edit?hl=en#
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...ek/edit?hl=en#
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...hc/edit?hl=en#
/Mental masturbation
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Lieber Code on the laws of war
"Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God."
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Last edited by KirStang; 03-16-2011 at 02:08 PM..
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