OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

Chapter 1
Using a territory’s culture to promote local development
Culture is often defined as the set of values, norms or benchmarks that define
the state of social relations, shared goals, cooperative behaviour and reciprocity
among individuals and communities within a given society. Thus, culture works upon
and influences an economy from the top down. In his work on Die Protestantische Ethik
und der Geist der Kapitalismus, Weber posed a famous question: “How do certain religious
beliefs determine the appearance of an economic mentality, in other words the ethos
of a certain form of economy?” and his response was no less famous: he showed how
the Reformation and the rise of Puritanism led men, faced with the uncertainty of
salvation, to organise their lives in a manner pleasing to God. Weber did not claim
that religion or religious beliefs could explain the functioning of the economy, but he
did insist that they influenced behaviour. Morishima adopts the Weber approach to
explain how Taoism prevented the emergence of individual capitalism in China and
how Confucianism gave Japan the foundation for state-led growth that eschewed
egalitarianism. 6
It is generally accepted today, if to differing degrees, that culture as a system of
values and representations can influence the functioning of the economy at least
indirectly. Terms such as “culture of enterprise”, “entrepreneurial culture”, “development
culture”, testify to this implication. Yet this often leads to stereotyping, citing individual
examples without recognising that culture is itself a result of economic history.
Moreover, there is a tendency to define abstract concepts on the basis of certain features
and then to transfer them from the universal to the local.
We should not be quick to transpose a way of thinking that has been developed
by a society in a specific territory, and when this is attempted the approach is often
reductionist 7 . Yet one thing seems clear in the analyses of local development: a
culture that pays attention to the local level (not to be confused with xenophobia or
parochialism) and at the same time to the international level (without destroying the
local sense of community) can be an asset for its territory. Friedman argues for cultures
that exhibit deep-rooted cosmopolitanism 8 , while Granovetter highlights the role of
those invisible bonds that, by linking the members of the community, allow them to
integrate their territory successfully into the global economy (Granovetter, 1973).
This argument is reinforced by more empirical studies such as those of Putnam [note
CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005 27