Anthropology is the study of human civilizations and culture. archaeology is a branch of anthropology. Now many of the studies on corporate culture that have been done including the work done by Edgar Schein use anthropology as the frame of reference. Now, my research was designed to build on science research by focusing on specific artifacts that he wrote about in his research. When anthropologists study culture, they studied from three perspectives social culture, material, culture, and ideological culture. Now, each of our next three lessons, we'll look at these categories in detail, but let's start with a high level overview of social culture.

Social culture refers to how a society is structured in terms of its members roles and responsibilities. social cultural refers to The study of class distinctions, and the distribution of power that exists in any human collective from a sociological standpoint. The next category is material culture. Let's look at how this is defined. material culture involves examining all the things that people in society make, that is their tools and technologies. material culture also entails studying patterns of subsistence, which refers to the ways people work together and support one another and exchanging required goods and services.

Now, let's look at ideological culture. Here's the definition. ideological culture refers to a group's values, beliefs and ideals. ideological culture refers to studying the things that people view as important. Additionally, it's about characterizing the emotional and intellectual guidelines that govern their day to day existence and interactions. Shine spoke so much generally about artifacts as the things that you can see and hear and feel when you encounter new culture.

My research was designed to identify specific artifacts or specific cultural traits that appear in just about every organization. Each of the traits that I identified through my research can be grouped in to one of the three categories that we're talking about social culture, material culture, or ideological culture. And our goal in cultural analysis is to identify the specific artifacts that appear in your organization and then to subject them to rigorous analysis. And helping you to determine whether or not a specific cultural trait is working in support of your efforts to create a high performance, truly optimized culture or whether that artifact is working against you in terms of your efforts to create a culture that is strong and powerful, and works as a true competitive differentiator for your company. Let's sum up with three key takeaways. corporate culture has historically been studied using anthropology as the frame of reference.

Archeology, a branch of anthropology is based on analyzing artifacts. Organizational archaeology, identifies and groups artifacts into the categories of social material and ideological culture. In the next lesson, we'll look at the 10 specific artifacts that comprise social culture.