QUANTIFICATION OF CULTURE USING ANALYTICAL HIERARCHICAL PROCESS: COMPARISON OF MODELS

In recent years, strategies have being proposed to integrate different elements of society with technological advances (both infrastructure and Information and Communications Technologies - ICT) to create environments in favor of sustainable social and economic development. Culture works as a catalyst for these smart societies. It is understood as a construct consisting of values, perceptions, beliefs, symbols and expressions, defined as information accumulated over time, shared by a group of people and guided by the social institutions. The cultural dynamics is a key factor in the decision-making, organization, education, information management and communication of societies, for this reason it is necessary to have tools that help to understand and measure its elements.

The models to quantify culture aim to describe this construct from axes on which a society is considered to be developed. These axes, known as dimensions, vary according to the approach of the author who proposes the model, therefore the discussion on which one of those are the most suitable to characterize culture emerges. This study uses the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) through the software EXPERT CHOICE to determine the performance of the model proposed by the authors and compared it with those developed by researchers such as Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Antanas Mockus and others. This comparison is made according to some reference criteria taken from the elements in the definition itself of culture and the review of the state of the art on the works of cultural measurement. The social criterion refers to the relationship between the members of a society, emphasizing on the Social Identity, the distribution of roles in the community (Social Distribution) and the Social Control. The Environmental Criterion is defined by relationship of people with the nature, taking into account their attitude toward science as an influent factor on the state of the environment and the importance given to the consequences of their actions in the short and long term (orientation toward time). The Institutional criterion studies the organizations that govern, guide and serve the society, both public and private, through the level of acceptance of the power gap between people and the institutions (Hierarchy) and the Perception towards them and the norms. A number of tests were performed varying the priority weights of criteria to cover the domain of the AHP, yielding as a result a set of charts showing the differences between models. To check these outcomes, a Wilcoxon test was performed using the statistical analysis software R to determine the existence of statistically significant differences, giving validity to the study.

The results presented in this paper are part of a project undertaken by the authors to relate “culture and citizen behavior” with “technology acceptance”. Future work would include computational agents to take decisions on social dilemmas in the context of game theory. Cultural variables of this study model will act as prior knowledge for the agents. The final result will be a serious game where education and innovative research will be linked in order to promote human values through technology in educational institutions and contribute to public policy on social issues in Colombia.