Considering culture when studying resilience: proposition of a FRAM based model of the variability of culture

Abstract

The concept of culture allows understanding how individuals adapt to the ecological setting in which they behave and which cognitive system, structural system, and symbolic system they use for elaborating a representation of their environment and deciding how to go about it. The culture of an individual is the result of processes of enculturation and socialisation to values, believes, myths, languages of groups, organisations and spatial areas where the individual evolve or wanted to evolve. The variability of culture affects individual and collective behaviours, notably in their communication and decision-making in coordination, cooperation or collaboration activities.

The finality of this paper is to propose a model of the variability of culture and its influence on resilience key capacities (respond, learn, monitor and anticipate) and on their activation when a situation requiring resilience behaviours occurs. The first part of the paper presents a literature review on culture and a discussion on its impact on resilience capacities and resilience activation. The second part of the paper is related to the presentation of a model of culture variability and its impact on individual and group behaviours based on the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM).