Does Culture Defy Definition?

Only a few times in my professional life have I been approached with a request to have an unsolicited and unstructured conversation with a C-level executive about “culture”, not to pitch something but to help clarify the idea because it seemed confusing, ambiguous and ephemeral. In most of these cases, the request came after the executive was being solicited by a number of providers to help address a specific cultural challenge in their organization.

The executive said in the opening of our conversation: “I am actually pretty confused! Everyone seemed to operate with a different way of understanding culture? This does not make sense and is not so in other aspects of business… in finance, strategy, or marketing. Of course, there are different options and strategies in these areas, but there is not much disagreement of what they mean, are about, and how they work. That seems to be different with culture!” And he was right!

Culture is different from other aspects of an organization as it forces anyone who wants to act upon it to either implicitly or explicitly choose their understanding of it. And, consultants also know to leverage this for their own commercial advantage— unfortunately not always in service of the organization, its people and its culture(s).

Tracing the idea of culture

The idea of “culture” has a long and complex intellectual history, evolving from early anthropological roots into a central concern in management, leadership, and organizational studies. Originally derived from the Latin colere, meaning “to cultivate,” culture referred broadly to the cultivation of the human mind or civilization. In the 19th century, anthropologists such as Edward B. Tylor defined culture as the “complex whole” of knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, and customs acquired by people as members of society. This holistic view treated culture as a distinct way of life, shaped by shared meanings and passed down through generations.

In the mid-20th century, culture began to draw the attention of business leaders and social scientists in the wake of globalization, decolonization, and the growing complexity of multinational operations. Initially, interest in culture within business contexts was largely instrumental, driven by the need to understand and manage differences in consumer behavior and workplace practices across countries. Researchers like Geert Hofstede played a foundational role in this transition. Hofstede’s influential studies in the 1970s and 1980s mapped cultural dimensions (such as individualism vs. collectivism or power distance) across national contexts, giving managers frameworks to interpret and navigate intercultural dynamics.

Contemporary definitions of culture
By the 1980s and 1990s, the focus shifted from national culture to organizational culture. Scholars such as Edgar Schein emphasized that every organization develops its own unique culture—comprised of shared assumptions, values, and artifacts—that shapes employee behavior and influences organizational effectiveness.

This insight marked a turning point in leadership theory and practice: managing an organization was no longer just about structures and processes but also about shaping the “soft” elements—norms, identity, and meaning-making—that drive performance and engagement.

Today, culture is recognized as a strategic asset and a source of both resilience and risk. In an era of rapid technological change, hybrid teams, and increasing attention to inclusion, psychological safety, and employee well-being, the cultural dimension of leadership has become even more salient. Adaptive leaders are expected not only to understand cultural differences but to foster environments where diverse perspectives can contribute meaningfully to shared goals.

The above sketches the development in theory and partially explains the fuzziness of the concept of culture in general use. From a sense of being cultivated and “complex whole”, to the underpinning of performance and effectiveness the meaning of culture shifts significantly. It is used to describe a static sense of identity, an inevitable backdrop, or a dynamic, co-created phenomenon at the heart of modern organizational life. It does not help to create clarity when the same speaker in the same conversation can use the term “culture” in all three ways in the same conversation.

Unclear by definition

Unfortunately, clarity is not helped when we look for an authoritative definition. As early as 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn identified over 160 distinct definitions. Since then, the number has only grown as scholars and practitioners across fields—from anthropology to business—develop context-specific understandings of what culture is and how it functions.

The first academic attempt to define culture came from Edward B. Tylor in 1871, who described it as: “That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Tylor’s definition remains foundational, especially in anthropology, for its breadth and acknowledgment that culture is learned. But it has been criticized for being overly static and encyclopedic—lacking any sense of change, power dynamics, or lived experience.

Fast forward to Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s (1952) meta-definition, which refined the idea of culture as: “Patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols… including traditional ideas and their attached values.”

This added an important dimension: the symbolic and value-laden nature of cultural patterns. These early definitions remain influential but are often too generalized for application in dynamic, multicultural environments.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) brought a more interpretive lens, seeing culture as: “A system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”

Geertz emphasized meaning-making through symbols—rituals, language, gestures—and positioned the anthropologist as an interpreter of these webs of meaning. His definition was transformative for qualitative research and ethnography but less applicable in domains that require actionable metrics or behavioral change.

In business and management, Geert Hofstede’s (1991) influential work defined culture as: “The collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others.”

Hofstede’s model, based on large-scale surveys of IBM employees, introduced dimensions like individualism vs. collectivism and power distance. While his framework is still widely used in corporate settings, it has been criticized for reinforcing national stereotypes and treating cultures as fixed entities rather than dynamic systems.

Within organizations, Edgar Schein (1985) offered a more developmental view: “Culture is a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems… considered valid and taught to new members.”

Schein’s model focuses on how culture is formed through group learning and embedded in unconscious assumptions. This makes it especially useful for diagnosing corporate culture, though less attuned to issues of identity, power, and cross-cultural adaptation.

Shared aspects across all definitions. 
These classic definitions represent only a small sample of available definitions, but they reveal a wide spectrum that only reinforces the fuzziness of the culture concept. Perhaps identifying the shared aspects among the definitions across disciplines can bring us closer to clarity? Such an analysis reveals the following seven attributes:

1. Shared: Culture is not individual—it exists within and across groups.
2. Learned: It is acquired through socialization, not biologically inherited.
3. Symbolic: Culture is mediated through symbols, rituals, and language.
4. Patterned: Cultural behaviors and beliefs follow structured regularities (i.e., norms).
5. Dynamic: Culture changes in response to context and interaction.
6. Reinforced: Culture persists through what is rewarded or sanctioned.
7. Emotional: Affective norms shape what people feel and express in groups.

While this list helps intuit the phenomenon we call "culture", it may not help anyone who is looking for precision in a quest to address challenges of culture in an effective and meaningful way.

A quest for clarity.
So, if neither history nor definition bring us closer to a clear understanding, it is no wonder that executives are confused. This leaves us with three options on our quest for clarity:

1. The experts are wrong. Neither may have captured the true essence of the phenomenon. More work and study is needed to bring precision and clarity to the field.
2. Culture is not a useful frame for practice - neither as a diagnosis of challenges, nor as a way of informing action.
3. “Fuzziness” is a real and inherent feature of culture. This means that we need to treat fuzziness itself not as a problem but a real feature.

I hope you agree with me that the third option is rather intriguing, and - if true - can bring us some clarity, albeit not in the way initially hoped or asked for. If true, “culture” would be akin to “light” - a quantum phenomenon. While my understanding of physics is limited, it nevertheless offers an interesting and unexpected source of inspiration and inquiry that might get us closer on this investigative journey.

Culture as a quantum phenomenon

According to my understanding, quantum phenomena emerge from quantum mechanics, i.e., the physics of subatomic particles. There are, as far as I know, four key principles in quantum mechanics:

1. Superposition: A particle can exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed.
2. Entanglement: Particles that have interacted can become linked so that the state of one instantly affects the state of another, no matter how far apart.
3. Observer effect: The act of measuring a system changes its state. The outcome depends not just on the system but on the interaction between observer and system.
4. Uncertainty and probability: Exact outcomes can’t be predicted, only probabilities. Reality is not fixed until measured.

Quantum phenomena imply that reality itself is co-constructed through interaction and observation. If culture were a quantum phenomenon, it would explain why each of the many definitions captures aspects, but not the whole of the phenomenon.

Applying the principles of quantum mechanics to the idea of culture generates helpful insights.

Understanding culture as a quantum phenomenon provides useful and promising clues in our quest for clarity and actionability:

• Rather than focusing on traits of other cultures, we would focus on cultivating mindfulness and/or situational awareness, and adaptive, creative response—just as quantum physicists work with probabilities and tendencies.
• We would realize that culture is co-created and rigorously apply it. Every member alters the relational field through their presence and perception (see below). Thus, inclusiveness, belonging or any other quality of culture we seek to alter or bring about is dependent on a continuous negotiation of shared reality - a quantum negotiation.
• Leadership becomes less about values or behavioral prescriptions and more about creating, curating, and facilitating space for emergence. Effective leaders in global or hybrid settings function like quantum facilitators: attuned to energy shifts, ambiguity, and hidden entanglements between people.
• Culture is not embedded in people as individuals, but in the relational field they co-create as observing and sense-making actors - through patterns of interaction, shared attention, silences, and absences. Organizations should measure not just outputs but resonance, coherence, and divergence in subjective experience.

Understanding culture as a quantum phenomenon requires comfort with ambiguity and emergence, recognition of relationality over individualism, valuing participation and co-creation over observation and control.

Culture is a verb.
With this perspective, culture is not a static noun but a dynamic verb—a becoming, not a being; a practice, not a feature. Consequently, to “lead culture” as a quantum paradigm means to sense, shape, and participate in the emergence of shared meaning—not to impose values or behaviors and enforce norms.

This requires leaders to:

• Navigate ambiguity and paradox (e.g., speed vs. reflection; global alignment vs. local adaptation)
• Hold multiple truths in mind simultaneously (cultural superposition)
• Recognize that interaction changes the field (observer effect)
• Cultivate relational resonance, not just individual performance (entanglement)

How does this actually help?

I don’t know about you, but I find that understanding culture as a quantum phenomenon helps bring clarity and precision to our discussion, albeit not in the simple form the C-suite executives I mentioned at the outset would have liked.

In my conversations with C-leaders of late, however, I found their receptivity to this idea remarkable. Perhaps because the world at large has also become more complex in other areas and navigating ambiguity and paradox, and holding multiple truths is recognized much more viscerally than years ago.

A transformative leadership practice
I have been surprised by the positive reception of the idea that “culture” - in the quantum sense - describes a transformative leadership practice and that they, as “leaders of culture” are “shapers” of relational fields through:

• Deeper listening
• Holding space for paradox
• Speaking with awareness of impact
• Deciding with foresightful attention to dynamic consequences and ripple effects
• Cultivating resonance and coherence without collapsing difference
• Enabling and facilitating cultural emergence rather than “leading people”

This changes, in profound ways, what we need to inspire leaders to learn, focus on, and embrace. And, however we are oriented in the work of culture, it also changes how we need to do our work, including our consciousness for the language we use, the understanding of culture we promote, the way we frame cultural challenges, and the solutions we architect.

Real-world implications
When we seek to address challenges that are cultural, or help leaders address them, our starting point needs to be to examine our understanding of culture. This is crucial because how we understand and frame a problem profoundly shapes our ability to address it. That is: our beliefs about a problem often become part of the problem. This is anything but theoretical, by the way.

Take water scarcity, for example. In many regions, it’s seen as an issue of supply: not enough rainfall, not enough reservoirs. But when anthropologists studied communities in Kenya, for example, they found that social norms around gender roles (e.g., who should fetch water) and property rights (who owns the borehole) were far more limiting than the aquifers themselves. The challenge wasn’t just physical—it was culturally reinforced.

Or consider organizational burnout. In many corporate settings, burnout is diagnosed as a personal resilience issue. The solution? Meditation apps. But as research reveals, burnout is usually a relational and systemic problem—linked to mismatched values, lack of autonomy, or low trust environments. If we perceive burnout as an individual failure, we design shallow solutions.

In management consulting too, these insights are essential. One global firm found that project teams in East Asia were “underperforming” by the organisation’s “Western” standards of innovation and initiative. But anthropological interviews revealed a different story: local employees were navigating intense cultural expectations around hierarchy, harmony, and face-saving. What looked like passivity was actually a complex form of social intelligence. The solution wasn’t more brainstorming workshops—it was leadership training in cultural fluency and trust-building.

What we assume to be the nature of a problem narrows the scope of viable solutions. It’s what Gregory Bateson, systems thinker and anthropologist, described as “the difference that makes a difference”—meaning, the frame we apply influences the outcomes. In anthropology—and in complex leadership challenges—solutions start not by jumping to action, but by re-examining our assumptions, particularly when challenges are recurring and intractable.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn as “Anthropologically speaking … how we understand "culture" matters” in May 2025.

About the Author

Joerg Schmitz is a business anthropologist passionate about exploring human behavior through the lens of anthropology and organizational culture. He is the founder and Managing Director of The Inclusive Leadership Institute (@TheInclusiveLeadershipInstitute). After 35 years living in the US and working with organizations and institutions globally, he currently resides in Bremen, Germany. Connect with him at [email protected] to continue the conversation.