Individual and Group; Pinto

A key theme in the research on culture is the degree in which people are focused on the individual or on the group. Prof. Pinto takes this as the core of his concept of culture and talks about tight and loose structures. A tight structure equals a group oriented culture. In such a culture the focus is on the position of the group in society and the individual person has to contribute to the enhancement of that position. In a somewhat extreme way one may say that the group determines all and everything; what school you are going to, what job you are going to do, which partner to marry and what house to live in. The individual is boxed in, a tight culture.

The loose structure or individualistic culture is just the opposite. The individual person has a dream future and s/he uses all and everybody to realise it.

In Pinto’s graph you see smaller and wider boxes in a matrix of cultures, representing tighter and looser structures. If you open the stack you see how the pyramid of Maslow is affected by this theory. Indeed, Maslow is clearly based on Western individualistic culture (loose structure) and does not recognise that tight structures result in different values.