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Unit 3: Cultural and Social Environment

However there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, with shrinking communications and with notes
more people than ever travelling, even the most culture bound product or service can, and is,
finding a world market niche. So even the infamous Veldschoen footwear of the South African
pioneers has found its way into most corners of the world.
self assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
1. The emphasis on individualism may make it easy to build teams within an organization to
perform collective tasks.

2. The primacy of the value of group identification also encourages managers and workers
from moving from company to company.
3. The integrated sum total of unlearned behavioral traits that are manifest and shared by
members of society.
4. Formal education does not play a key role in a society.
5. Religion may be defined as a system of shared beliefs and rituals that are concerned with
the realm of the sacred.

6. Because language shapes the way perceive the world, it also helps define culture.
7. One way in which countries differ is the means of communication i.e. the language-spoken
and the unspoken.

3.1.8 language and culture in india’s foreign Policy

Indian Struggle for Recognition

As an independent political nation, India was still very young, when it assumed the leadership of
the newly emerging Afro-Asian nations. The leadership slipped from its hands, when its rhetoric
of peace did not match with its own performance, both domestic and international; its foreign
policy failed to perceive the changes taking place in the economic front all over the world. The
policy became a list of clichés. Smaller and less prosperous nations, with equally tradition-bound
societies, soon reaped great advantages by focusing more on the economic content in their policy
than on high sounding moralistic declarations. India came to realize only much later that without
a sound economic base of its own, its pretensions to leadership will be just what these were—
mere pretensions.
To recapture the imagination of the West, India’s foreign policy became more and more a cultural
policy, with greater interest shown in the cultivation of the protest academics, protest politicians,
and moralistic philosophers. It made an alignment with the emerging New Age performers in the
sphere of religions and personal life styles, much to India’s detriment, and to the dismay of the
ever-increasing ranks of the conservatives in the West.
The shift in the geopolitical balance, which began with the growing rift between the Soviet Union
and China, and the entry of China as a major international power caused the most crucial and
disadvantageous turn in India’s foreign policy. India’s preoccupation with its geographical
integrity (deeply impressed in the collective consciousness of India by the partition of British
India into Republic of India and Pakistan) came to haunt and guide Indian foreign policy. The
elitist Indian politician, brought up in the Fabian tradition, easily identified the utmost national
interest of preserving India’s geographical integrity with his bias for socialism, which easily
led to India being the leading supporter of the Soviet Union. India was soon perceived to be
mouthing what Soviet Union wanted it to say. Americans began to see that India was rather
simply sanctimonious.

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