Lecture 2. Culture.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 417.

Culture. Professional culture. Behaviour culture. Speech culture. Politeness.

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has different meanings. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

1) excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as “high culture”;

2) an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the social knowledge;

3) the set of attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.

When the concept first emerged in the 18^th century in Europe, it meant a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the 19^th century, it came to refer first to the betterment of an individual, especially through education, and then to the satisfaction of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity. Nowadays culture isa combination of material and ideal (spiritual) values. It is an integral part of rights and creative activity in all spheres of life and consciousness. Such human activities are focused on creativity and consist of creation of values, norms, sign systems and understanding the cultural values and their use.

In the broad sense, culture is all that man has created in addition to the natural environment (tools and methods of manufacture, worldview of science, religion, art, etc.). A man is the subject of culture: it creates, stores and distributes the created cultural values. The "culture" category means man-made artificial sphere of existence and self-regulation of social interaction and behavior.

Culture performs the following main functions in a society as:

- accumulative (summarizes and accumulates various forms of individual, group and social experience and communication models);

- conductive (transmitting this experience and examples from one generation to another, from one society to another);

- social (educational );

- regulatory (rules of behaviour adopted in a given culture);

- generative (generating new designs and communication, behavior, beliefs);

- cognitive;

- communicative;

- prognostic;

- values-oriented.

Professional culture is defined as a high degree of personal skills and training to meet specific business purposes and provide maximum possible performance. There are four levels of professional culture: pre-professional, initial professional, professional, and higher professional culture. P.C. is the term used in sociology and cultural studies to characterize the social and professional quality of work. The main elements of professional culture are primarily education (total, average, secondary, higher), professional experience and workers' skills. Professional culture is a part of general human culture, but also the form and method of its manifestation. Professional business culture includes the following concepts: "business ethics", "business etiquette", "professional ethics", "business communication", "business culture".

Behaviour culture.The notion of behavior culture is directly linked with the notion “culture”. Behaviour culture is a set of forms of everyday human behavior (at work, at home, communicating with other people), which are the external manifestation of moral and ethical behaviour standards. Behavior culture reveals what specific ways are found in the behavior requirements of morality. Behavior culture includes all extra and inner human culture: etiquette, rules of human behavior and behavior in public places; life culture, including the private nature of needs and interests of people outside the relationship at work, organization of private time, etc. The behavior culture of a person characterizes his or her spiritual, moral and aesthetic heritage, showing how deeply she learned cultural heritage of mankind and made it his or her own consequence. Behaviour culture is also treated as behavior norms and rules of human residence, ability to find the right choice in various conditions of communication with the surroundings. The human behavior culture reflects his/her personality.

Speech culture.Speech culture is one of the components of behavior cultural. Speech culture is the degree to which the phonetic, word usage and grammar norms are installed in a particular language; the ability to accumulate the best examples in the speech of an individual. Speech culture is compliance with established rules of words pronunciation and phrases construction, which provides the scientific development of phonetic, grammar and lexical aspects of a language. It helps to create works on linguistic disciplines, including textbooks, grammars and dictionaries. It is a level of language development, the degree of mastering a language or dialect.

Politenessis a moral quality that characterizes human behavior, when respect for individuals has become a daily norm of behaviour. Politeness is an elementary requirement of behavior culture. It includes attentiveness, the outer manifestation of goodwill, willingness to help, delicacy and tact.

The principles of politeness are a strategy of speech behavior that prevents conflict situations in order to “save face” (dignity, self-esteem, prestige, etc.) in situations where there is the threat of “losing face”. In general, politeness principle in ethics is defined as the principle of inter-relations of communicants in the act of communication. Politeness principle includes a number of maxims (=main points). The six most important maxims are: the maxim of tact, generosity, approval, consent, modesty and sympathy. Therefore, rules of politeness promote building horizontal communication model, the essence of which is equal position of communicators, regardless of their role in the process of speech interaction.

The rules of politeness facilitate the communication process. They are traditional, as they reflect the historical experience of human interaction and are transmitted from generation to generation.