Geopolitics Magazine March - April 2015 ( 8th Edition ) | Page 72

Geopolitics & Daily News Magazine
Written by T. Pitikaris
ΒΑΒ,ΒSc, MSc
Financial Analyst
PhD candidate of
Macroeconomics
Written by N. Kanelos
Financial Analyst

The European Project and the EU Ecosystem
“Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It
is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide
verge of that circle he is powerful and free: as it is with man, so with communities. The nations of our
time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves
whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism,
to prosperity or to wretchedness”
--Alexis de Tocqueville
As it is known, any type of human organization, from a family to a community and from a nation to a
coalition of nations, develops its own culture. In accordance, from the smallest family business up to
multinational agencies operating in many countries and different time zones, each corporation develops
its own unique identity, its own culture. The latter was described by (McDonough and Braungart 2010,
Needle 2010) as: “ the way that we do things here” and “The organizational culture it's hard to be
explained to outsiders. It is an asset accumulated and distributed by mentoring for a long time, long
enough before you know just how “the things to work all around here”. So, in order to evaluate – or at
least to try to evaluate – an institution, one must first understand its organizational culture.
Organizational culture may be defined as the principles that govern the actions and reactions taken by
an organization, which are derived by its core values; it is the hardcore logic of organization that
arranges the behavior of the people, it is the established mentality that allows or prevents innovative
actions and plans, it is the strategy behind every action taken etc. Thus, by nature, organizational
culture is a unique characteristic of every organization, a characteristic that the organization develops
over time and that constitutes its own identity (Modaff, DeWine et al. 2008). And alongside with
organizational behavior, they both constitute the systemic entity that we call organization.
But as it happens to every social structure, this culture does not come out of the blue: it reflects the
accumulated knowledge that the organization has earned over time and which the organization’s elite
(leaders) considers important enough to pass on to the next generation, so that lessons learned
through hard work may become an asset in decision making process. Thus, culture is a piece of
wisdom that is passed onto the next generation.
Last but not least, culture is what “we really think when no one is looking in our hearts and minds”; as
individuals we have different priorities and principals and as humans, we are subject to human nature
that determines how we behave when no one is watching - are we going to eat the forbidden apple?
Much alike, an organization embodies mindsets in terms of a value system. This system is used to
inspire future mindsets. It is a great competitive disadvantage for the organization when one may
regard the culture of the organization he is working at as alien to his/her department, institution,
country mindset(T.Pitikaris 2014).
Mentality
Even though cultural meanings and values prevail in meetings, and to a large extent in the
organization as a whole, there are, alternative orientations.
there are just numbered the

organizations that are based on a coherent and easily ranked set of

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