Explaining the emerging influence of culture, from individual influences to collective phenomena

Abstract

This paper presents a simulation model and derives from it a theory to explain how known cultural influences on individual decisions lead to collective cultural phenomena. This simulation models the evolution of a business organization, replicating key micro-level cultural influences on individual decisions (such as allocating and accepting tasks) and subsequent macro-level collective cultural phenomena (such as robustness and sensitivity to environmental complexity). As a result, we derived a theory on how to relate the influence of culture from individual decisions to collective outcomes, based on this simulation. We also point out that cultures appear to be related to specific sets of abstract, coherent and recurrent interaction patterns between individuals.