The Missing Links in Teaching Culture: Culture-Just-Is and Cultural Self-Awareness

This essay recommends a shift in how we teach students about culture in cross-cultural, diversity-focused, organizational behavior, and management courses from knowledge about other cultures to understanding the role and function of culture and cultural self-awareness. I make the case that by focusing on teaching knowledge about “other” cultures, students gain either superficial understanding and false confidence or develop defensiveness and resistance, particularly when discussing topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Instead, students must start with understanding the universal purpose and function of culture, a concept called Culture-Just-Is (CJI) and with developing cultural self-awareness (CSA). By understanding the universal function of culture, regardless of its content, and by developing CSA, students 1. understand how culture provides a meta-context that shapes everyone’s thinking and behavior; 2. avoid seeing culture as something about “other” people; 3. are better prepared to engage with the numerous unfamiliar cultures they are likely to encounter; and 4. are likely to be less defensive when discussing topics that have unfortunately become controversial. Teaching CJI and CSA supplements rather than replaces our standard pedagogies that emphasize acquiring knowledge about cultures that are different from our own.