The meaning of concepts in business: What PODCAST #Biz_Culture is about?

We are in a period of transition, the 4th Industrial Revolution. It is changing our economy, our working methods, our market and, at the same time, our society and its culture. We have Tesla machines, AI technologies, businesses are investing more and more into neuroscience applications. What’s next? Are we really going to learn to read the thoughts of others in the near future? How does all this affect our behavior, social norms, culture and society as well as individuals alone?

Artificial intelligence is here with its algorithms for our open data online. We type billion of concepts as keywords in search engines daily, and yet — most of the meanings is still blurry to us both individually and collectively. By moving into economical perspective, massive business industries are built on this. Due to a lack of our own knowing of meaning on concepts and social instinct to belong to some social group, we are building economy out of it. The book “Phishing for fools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception” (Akerlof and Shiller, 2015), just proves that people are often regarded as “marionettes” for external factors and power relation circumstances due to their will of belonging to some social group.

Therefore, it has become highly important to understand the individual as well as collective side of our behavior and decision-making motives, influenced by the meaning of the concepts, stored in our mind. According to Strauss and Quinn (1997), these individual storages are called “schemas”. It grasps the information, behaviors, feelings and symbols in the individual subconsciousness, which can be enacted only through social interactions. In this way, an individual can be recognized as a member of social group, which shares the same stored knowledge. Such socio-cognitive system in business can be recognized as business culture itself. We tend to share the same values, beliefs, behavior patterns or ethnics in business and call it therefore business culture. However, by sharing the same knowledge, do we actually share the same meaning of the concepts in business? With regard to this, the roots of behavior and our decision-making motives, may prompt us to find an answer to this question.

The meaning of concepts matter.

Collectively used concepts help us, as human race, to make sense out of our complex external world. We label everything and connect it with a particular meaning, which latter becomes collectively shared knowledge by cultures, social groups or other collective systems as business culture itself. However, conceptualisation of everything around us, builds a new complex world inside of our mind. Fortunate to us, we have already created the solution for this process, the so-called artificial intelligence (AI). It helps us not only to merchandise our thoughts, but it does think ahead for us.

In the meantime, the medicalization of social problems and treating them as an illness, we view it as some usual external environment management tool within the socially built structures. We solve our “social errors” by curing them with medical treatments, punishing them by law or go against social norms and try to concentrate on inner-work by searching for who we are as the core. Yoga, meditation, neuro-luingvistic programing with concentration on our spirituality and control of our mind; or self-taught new skills in order to find your passion and the niche in the global market. Yet, this is the basics of our contemporary society life today.

Therefore, the cycle turns around and we appear where we start — dealing with “our complex world” again. Isn’t it paradoxical? The problem here, is not whether we fit social norms or not, but how we position ourselves inside of our mind when we act according to them. This applies to the business environment as well.

We are tend to call ourselves highly developed civilizations, but allow our mindset still be in colonial age, ruled by social norms and collective conceptualization of the meanings. The so-called “3rd world” still has a mindset of being “not good enough” in comparison to the more developed countries. They are still trying to apply various development programs in order to reach an “invisible confirmation” that they belong to the group of the “cool guys”.

Colonialism has made a huge impact on human cognition in rage of nations by separating the globe into “us/they” sides according to the development level of the country (Sreemany, 2016). However, this is just an example of a power relation game, played with our perspectives on surroundings, when we merchandise the nations according to who is bight and who is not. As a famous theory on power/knowledge by French sociologist Michael Foucault state — “power is everything”, but it all depends on embodied and enacted “regimes of truth” within us (Foucault 1991).

Discussion in need.

Why is it important to discuss? Especially, when most of these topics have some sort of a philosophical angle? We believe the answer is strongly related to the AI technology and our cognition processes nowadays, which impacts our behavior and decisions we make in our daily lives. As Dirk Nicolas Wagner in his research on economics and AI highlights “it is important to identify, observe, question, and discuss economic patterns of economic thought to allow our shared mental models to appreciate and adapt to a world with AI” (2020:112). AI is going to be a part of our life. We want this or not. That is why it is important to understand not only mechanism and processes of AI technology, but also our own cognitive processes and behaviors based on decision motives, since a specific culture of collaboration here is the must.

Still, in order to discuss the obstacle of problems, contexts, external and internal impacts on business behavior, values, ethics and culture itself — we need to understand first the meaning of concepts we use in machinery thinking modes, stored in our own mind. This also supports a discussion about how we enact these modes collectively: do we give our control panel for collective systems or do we act as agents, navigating throughout the systems? Yet, which of these points of view is actually more valuable in business, science and our daily lives, we definitely want to ask.

The two ways of thinking — it is a never-ending debates with agent vs. system approach on thinking, behaving and changing processes in business. This is what we, together with our listeners and the guest speakers, want to observe during our discussion at We ask, how the mind conceptualization processes appear within the entrepreneurship behavior and how the meaning of concepts forms socially collective patterns as norms for business culture. This podcast — is a small-scale research, where each of our guests is like a scientific or practical respondent of the business culture concept meaning. Every discussion is engaging and at the same time — mentally challenging with a slight dash of fun.

For more live conversations with PODCAST #Biz_Culture, please follow us: https://soundcloud.com/podcast_biz_culture

If you would love to be a part of these discussions in the future or just be very close to our content, become our Patron here: https://www.patreon.com/VizB

RESOURCES:

• Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. London, Penguin.
• Sreemany, I. (2016) Is the term Development Eurocentric? Discuss. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310845435_Is_the_term_Development_Eurocentric_Discuss [accessed on 09.11.2020]
• Wagner, D., N. (2020). Economic patterns in a world with artificial intelligence. Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. Vol. 17, pp. 111–131 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40844-019-00157-x [accessed on 04.11.2020]
• Strauss, C., and Quinn, N. (1997). A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Akerlof, G., A., and Shiller, R., J. (2015) Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception. Princeton University Press

Originally published at http://vizseption.wordpress.com on January 14, 2021.