Australian Army Journal

OPERATIONAL CULTURE
The Myths of Cultural Awareness:
Culture Does Not Eat Strategy for Breakfast
THE AUTHOR
Captain David M. Bergman is a founding member of the Swedish 10th
Psychological Operations Unit. He has served as team leader, platoon commander
and officer in charge of training, has seen operational service in Bosnia and
Afghanistan and is a former exchange student to the US Army John F. Kennedy
Special Warfare Center and School. He holds a Master of Social Science in
psychology and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in comparative literature. He is a published
author both of fiction and non-fiction, having written the Manual of Operational
Culture for the Swedish Armed Forces and a number of volumes on aspects of
military psychology.
ENDNOTES
1 Angus Houston, Joint Operations in the 21st Century, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2007.
2 Steven Brain, Operational Culture: Is the Australian Army Driving the Train of Left at the
Station?, United States Marine Corps, School of Advanced Warfighting, Command and Staff
College, Marine Corps University, Quantico Virginia, 2008.
3 Christopher Lamb, Review of Psychological Operations Lessons Learned from Recent
Operational Experience, National Defense University Press, Washington DC, 2005; Australian
Army, Adaptive Campaigning: The Land Force Response to Complex Warfighting, Directorate
Combat Development, Future Land Warfare, Canberra, 2006.
4 Kelton Rhoads, ‘The Culture Variable in the Influence Equation’ in Philip Taylor and Nancy Snow
(eds), Handbook of Public Diplomacy, Routledge, 2008.
5 Brain, Operational Culture.
6 The conceptual question ‘common sense – common to whom?’ is often asked by cultural
lecturer Karin Sharma. See Karin Sharma, Alla dessa kulturer (in Swedish), Industrilitteratur, 2011.
7 Rhoads, ‘The Culture Variable in the Influence Equation’.
8 Lamb, Review of Psychological Operations Lessons Learned from Recent Operational Experience.
9 Solomon Asch, ‘Effects of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments’ in
Harold Guetzkow (eds), Groups, Leadership and Men, Carnegie, Pittsburgh, PA, 1951.
10 Peter Smith and Michael Bond, Social Psychology Across Cultures, Prentice Hall, 1999.
11 David Matsumoto, Handbook of Culture and Psychology, Oxford University Press, USA, 2001.
12 William Sumner, Folkways, Ginn and Company, Boston, US, 1906.
13 Livia Markóczy, Us and Them, Annual editions, International Business, Wiley Press, 1999.
14 Ben Shalit, The Psychology of Conflict and Combat, Praeger Publishing, 1988.
15 Livia Markóczy, ‘Are cultural differences overrated?’ Financial Times, 26 July 1996.
Australian Army Journal
Culture edition 2013, Volume X, Number 3 Page 140