Patterns of Culture

Benedict's 1934 classic of cultural anthropology, based on her and Franz Boas's fieldwork on three societies (Zuni, Dobu, Kwakiutl), argues that each culture is a coherent pattern that selects certain human capacities and suppresses others, and that "normal" is a cultural category rather than a biological one. The book was foundational to cultural anthropology and its influence extends into every contemporary discussion of organisational culture. For product direction the transfer is not literal but deep: the cultures of product organisations are patterns in Benedict's sense, and learning to read a culture ethnographically is closer to what leading a product organisation actually requires than most "culture" literature admits. A long book, dense in places; read the first half carefully.