Strategic Culture
and its Comparative Analysis:
The Start of an Expedition
Site last updated 13-06-2010 21:43:13
REVISED Draft is Now complete AND SUBMITTED - halleluiah!
Defining Strategic Culture Thesis Draft 2010.pdf
GRAHAMS' DEFINITION
Strategic Culture is how a people organizes and orders itself socially, politically and economically in response to their strategic environment so as to optimize collective security. As such, it is not a static thing but an evolving capacity of a people to coordinate and collaborate their efforts to capitalize on the physical resources available to them and to develop an advantageous strategic relationship within a larger local, regional or global society.
The shared objective of collective security will evolve as a people develops its capacity to control or make best use of their physical and strategic environment. As the Strategic Culture for a people evolves, however, there will likely remain at it’s core some key aspects of the original influence of the physical and strategic environment that shaped their fundamental social, political and economic organizational priorities, values, trends and patterns.
There will also evolve tiers of Strategic Culture within any given people, dependant on an individuals or sub-groups capacity to access and capitalize on available physical resources and their strategic position relative to their local, regional and international society.
Humanity lives in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. The movers and shakers in the global community have expanded beyond the political and the corporate to include non-governmental organizations, interest groups, criminals, and individuals. It is critical to have the analytic tools at hand to make measurable comparative assessments of the stakeholder objectives and priorities in any given situation, but particularly when the situation has the potential for conflict. The concept of Strategic Culture has the potential to be one of those analytic tools. It can, if properly understood, and consistently and comparatively applied, enhance understanding of the core values and motivations behind the choices and actions of stakeholders whether they be governments, corporations or interest groups, including terrorists and criminals.
Included in this understanding of Strategic Culture is recognition of a need for reflective analysis. Without it, any attempted application of the concept in an operational context will tend to be unduly influenced by the projected values and priorities of the analyst and will not be adequately objective or comparative.
In order to understand the basis for the definition proposed in this paper and to better appreciate the potential of Strategic Culture as a measurable occurrence relevant to comparative analysis it is important to review both the terminology being used in this paper to identify the concept and the historical development of previous research. This will help to avoid misunderstanding, identify commonalities and eliminate isolated and context dependent variables. It is anticipated that this will sufficiently refine understanding of the concept and support the proposed definition so that it can subsequently find consistent operational application in comparative analysis.