“Legal Systems Different From Our Own” is a fantastic work that explores how many different cultures approached legality. The diversity of ideas there has given me both concrete ideas of how to incentivize people, and helped shake me out of some default frames I was holding.
I’d be interested in other works that do the same thing, but for different aspects of community building (including but not limited how to help people find connection, how to help them gain skills, how to ensure the community has a good mixture of growth and stability, etc).
Three useful answers to this question would include:
1) if there literally is a book that is an overview of different communities or cultures and interesting elements of how they work, that’d be useful
2) if you have read a book that deals with one particular community or type of community, writing up a summary of that book
3) writing up experiences from a given community, especially if there were particular social tools that the community used that have neat implications.
Check out “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer. It’s a book about how to work with people from different cultures—different expectations of bosses, different ways to give positive and negative feedback, different balance of work and personal relationships, etc.
FYI, I read this book and it was great. I’ve had on my todo list to write up a book review / summary of it.