A tangential concept that might be of interest to the commenters is the Arabic term "asabiyyah" [0]: >`Asabiyya or asabiyyah (Arabic: عصبيّة) refers to social

A tangential concept that might be of interest to the commenters is the Arabic term "asabiyyah" [0]: >`Asabiyya or asabiyyah (Arabic: عصبيّة) refers to social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness and sense of shared purpose, and social cohesion,[1] originally in a context of "tribalism" and "clanism". The 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun talked about it in a cyclical sense, related to rise and fall of civilizations, and had dire descriptions about when societies lost asabiyyah. In general, it's a sort of group feeling or solidarity, a sense that you and those around you are on the same side and have each other's backs -- as opposed to a society where you don't know your neighbors and you just happen to live among a bunch of other people who have no aligned interests or goals. Even the so-called "rugged individualism" mythos of early pioneer/settler American colonists still was embedded in nested layers of communal structure, layers that can seem invisible when you're constantly immersed in it. What I think makes this and the Denmark article interesting is that they're trying to point at a concept that is inherently fuzzy and qualitative (how do you measure units of social cohesion?), and yet seems to play an important role in how a social system works. Tweaking a policy knob here or adjusting a legislative knob there may have influences on this, but the possible effects are constrained and filtered through the ever-present culture. Everything is part of the system (think about the laws we have in which implicit expectation of selective enforcement is what makes it even functional, like speeding). People are both code (their DNA) and its expression in the environment (epigenetics). Programming teams are both the tools they use (IDEs, source control, Agile, etc) and the fuzzy culture that makes it work well in Company A and fail utterly when trying to apply it to Company B. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah