Culture and social impact
Culture is the common understanding or grouping of beliefs, values and practices in a society at a given moment in time. Culture is the sharing of ideas and habits that can manifest itself in religious doctrines, etiquette, cuisine, politics and speech. Ultimately, culture creates a social reality that guides our actions.
In my research on social impact, I uncovered the work of Bibb Lantané, a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University. Professor Bibb Latané has authored more than 140 articles and books about his research on bystander intervention in emergencies, social impact and group influence, and other topics. In his studies, Lantané proposes that dynamic social impact exhibits itself in culture through regional clustering, correlations among cultural elements, consolidation of minorities, and continuing diversity.
The Lantané Dynamic Social Impact Theory is based on five principles:
1. Individuals differ.
2. Individuals have relatively stable locations in space.
3. Social influence is proportional to a multiplicative function of the strength, immediacy and number of sources.
4. The iterative, recursive outcome of individual influence processes will lead to the global self-organization of socially influenceable attributes and the emergence of group-level phenomena.
5. Social influence will be incremental for unimportant issues, catastrophic for important ones.
Lantané sums up that “Dynamic social impact theory views culture as a continuing human creation to which everyone contributes.” Culture is organic and constantly evolving through communication and social constructs.
As individuals come together in clusters or groups, the question still remains how do organizations measure their social impact in the communities which they exist and influence?
