CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION
When you think of intercultural communication, perhaps you don’t think about the next door neighbor who just moved in from another state, or the person who works as a firefighter when you work in retail. But, these are just a few of the people that you communicate with interculturally. Interpersonal communication, which happens between two people, often has intercultural aspects to it, and there’s more to it than just talking with someone while traveling to another country.
First, the big view of culture and communication deals with beliefs, attitudes, values, and norms. Many definitions of culture call for it being a shared belief system, attitudes, values and norms. However, sometimes within a culture, those beliefs, attitudes, values, and norms may be different, and it’s still the same culture. Intercultural communication is defined as a symbolic exchange process where people from different cultural communities negotiate shared meaning (Ting-Toomey & Chung, 2012).
Part of culture includes beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms, and these are often shared within cultures. Beliefs are big. They encompass people’s world view, which is the overall way someone views their place in their city, neighborhood, school, friend group, etc. It may include religion, and often does, as religion tends to be a lens through which humans view their world.
Alternatively, the lack of religion could also frame someone’s worldview. Two people who are communicating from different world views may have more trouble understanding each other. For instance, one friend who is Hindu and the other friend is an atheist may question how the other gets along in the world, if there is no higher power in the atheist’s life, and vice versa, the atheist may be confused by how the Hindu can have many gods.
Values are the learned organization of making choices and resolving conflict, according to Novinger (2001). They are effectively what someone views as morally right or wrong. Most people would agree that murder is wrong, but what people view as murder may not always be the same. For instance, one culture may be against the death penalty, while the next thinks it’s fine.
Attitudes include a cognitive layer and an affective layer, with the cognitive layer allowing a person to suspend judgment and be open-minded, and the affective layer allowing the purposeful commitment to perspective-taking and empathy (Ting-Toomey & Chung, 2012). Attitudes can also be simply feeling positive or negative about something.
These can be changed more easily than something like beliefs or values. For example, if someone doesn’t like pizza as a child, but then tries it again with prompting of friends as a teen, and then they do like pizza, the person’s attitude about it changed. However, it tends to be more difficult to change something like religious beliefs. If someone grows up being Christian or Hindu, those belief systems and values that come with them tend to stay with a person, and are more ingrained than attitudes.
Then norms are what people within a culture have come to understand as the way things are done. For instance, if a family has dinner together, there may be certain things that happen in that process. Perhaps two family members cook together, one person sets the table, everyone talks happily during the meal, and another person cleans up after the family is done. In another family, it may be completely different, with the adults talking while the children look at their phones. The norms in one family are not better or worse; they are different.
Co-cultures are cultures within a larger culture that are differentiated from each other. A group of children in theatre class in middle school comprise a different co-culture than a group of football players. The IT people in a state agency have a different co-culture than the people who work with Medicaid applicants in the same state agency. The people within a generation comprise a co-culture, as do people from a particular ethnicity or race. People who enjoy riding motorcycles are a co-culture. Basically, we are all part of many co-cultures, and part of a larger culture.
Within our own worlds, we observe others. First-order reality is what is physically observable, whereas second-order reality is attaching meaning to first-order reality. Different people may have different second-order reality. For instance, if a person someone just met shakes their hand, that’s a first-order reality. A second-order reality is that the person has a super-firm handshake that is almost painful and you feel like they want to overpower you. That person’s second-order reality is that they admire the person and want to impress them with a firm handshake, and they have been told they have a weak handshake earlier in the day. Two completely different meanings are present, and neither person knows the other person’s second-order reality.
Social practices
Geert Hofstede, a noted culture researcher, used the metaphor that your own culture is like the air you breathe, whereas another culture is like water, and you can survive in both, but you must learn to survive in the second one by using tools (2010).
There are several dimensions of culture we use, including high context and low context. Hall (1976) coined these terms, in which high context means the information conveyed is mostly within the person, whereas in low context, the information conveyed is in explicit code. This means a home loan, with all its many pages of documents to sign, is low-context, coded in language specific to the process, whereas your best friend’s stricken expression as she’s lost her 15-year-old pet is high context communication. You can do both, but each is necessary in different situations.
Time is valued and perceived differently in different cultures. In Germany, for instance, trains run like clockwork, and in the United States, school schedules are by the minute. At one Texas middle school, school begins at 8:45 a.m., students have precisely seven minutes between classes, and school releases at 4:05 p.m. In Mexico, when someone says to meet at 8 p.m. to go to dinner, it could be 9 or 9:30 by the time people actually arrive. None of these situations are seen as good or bad within their own cultures, but they could promote miscommunication within people from different cultures.
Within cultures, there are different values placed on talk and silence. In the United States, there is a tendency to think talk is highly valued, and that silence means there is something wrong. For instance, there is the dreaded “silent treatment” in interpersonal relationships, where someone isn’t talking to the other person in order to punish that person. However, contradictorily, there is also what’s labeled a comfortable silence, in which two people can simply be together without talking and there is no issue.
Talk seems to be valued more in the United States than in some other places. For instance, Zimmermann and Morgan indicate there is a lot of pressure to express yourself in Western culture, but perhaps we should “ think about silence, solitude, and contemplation and the role they might play in restoring personal understanding of the Self and of authentic experience of the Other through reflective learning” (2016, p. 400). Some Native American people like the Apaches, value silence, as do the French (with people they don’t know), and because people from the United States who are not Native Americans value talk, miscommunication may happen frequently (Ting-Toomey & Chung, 2012).
Nonverbal communication permeates all of communication, and is truly inescapable, even sometimes with someone’s absence. In nonverbal communication, there are factors of facial expression, touch, artifacts, use of time, gestures, tone, volume, choice of clothing, hairstyle, or makeup. All of these determine impressions, and may be misinterpreted.
Even the six universal facial expressions, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, happiness, and sadness, are not always supported interculturally (Jack, Garrod, Yu, Caldara, & Schyns, 2012). Just the clothing you’re wearing may tell someone about your personality and culture. While it may be tempting to draw conclusions about someone from their nonverbal communication, ethical communicators work hard to avoid assumptions.
Knowing Hofstede’s Dimensions will help in adapting to your audience in interpersonal communication when you are communicating with someone of a different culture, co-culture, or international culture. Individualism and collectivism are two dimensions that indicate whether someone is more concerned about themselves and their immediate family as opposed to the group. Culturally, people from the United States, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, and Australia are high on the individualism spectrum, while people from countries such as Japan, China, Korea, Venezuela, Guatemala, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, and India are seen as collectivist.
Uncertainty avoidance is the degree to which people do not like uncertainty. In some cultures, people are fine with vague details, while high uncertainty avoidance cultures include people who want to know what’s going to happen, with whom, when, and how.
Power distance relates to how people view people who are more powerful than they are. For instance, think about being on a first-name basis with your boss or parents? This may mean you are a low-power distance person, whereas if you call your boss Ms. Ramirez, you may have a higher power distance.
Masculinity and femininity are also cultural dimensions, in which masculine cultures have different expectations for men and women, and feminine cultures have more fluid gender roles. This can vary within households as well. The concepts of masculinity and femininity are socially constructed concepts, which means there are in-betweens, and these binary stereotypes exist as part of a continuum, which is discussed more in an upcoming unit on gender.
Long-term and short-term orientation is another dimension, where long-term means people are interested in what will happen over a longer period of time, and preparations are made for careers, education, and family life, whereas cultures with a short-term orientation tend to focus on the now, and even the past, with tradition being at the forefront.
Organizational culture
Beliefs, values, and norms within organizational culture may be a bit different than within the social culture. People in general, organize, but what we are considering organizational culture here is some type of organization where there is a purpose, and a culture emerges from it. For instance, a college has an organizational culture. A restaurant has an organizational culture. A retail store and its employees have an organizational culture.
Take a restaurant, Cheesecake Factory. It has an organizational culture, as all its employees dress the same, there is a giant, multi-multi-page menu, and birthdays are celebrated. The decor is expansive, with tall ceilings, and columns with woodwork.
All of these things tell us something about the organizational culture. What people may take away from these artifacts would be that the restaurant wants to convey opulence and fine dining, as opposed to many of the casual restaurants that exist. They take the service and the quality of the food very seriously, and it shows in the décor.
There are also rites and rituals that happen, both between employees, and with guests. One ritual might be a particular way orders are taken, or in a retail store, when new employees are told they must act out “I’m a Little Teapot” prior to their first shift. Stories are told between employees, and there may be myths and legends about that long-term food server who stayed for years, and the manager who saved the day when the electricity went out. All of these contribute to the communication climate of the organization. If you walk into an organization and everyone has a disgusted look on their faces, it may appear to have a negative communication climate, which could affect whether you want to work there at all.
Artifacts in an organizational culture might be the art that is on the wall, or the types of plates that are used for guests. It may also be, in an educational institution, what types of tables and chairs the students sit in, as opposed to the instructors.
Occupational culture comprises people who are working in the same field, and may be part of a separate organization, or they may be working in the same organization (Trice & Beyer, 1993). Like other subcultures, they may have frequent social interaction, shared experiences, and similar personal characteristics, all of which lend themselves toward cohesion (Trice & Beyer, 1993). An occupation can span multiple organizations, and there is often a culture permeating a particular occupation.
For instance, people working in the restaurant industry will have shared experience of terms they use, like “two-top” meaning a table for two, and “86” meaning leave out, and will be able to share discussions about customers, managers, and more. Another example is of firefighters, who share a culture as well, and others may feel left out because they do not have that knowledge and experience.
People in the military immediately have a shared connection in which they discuss where they’ve been, what branch, and what their jobs were. In the information technology field, there is a shared experience, and many people in the field have a savior mentality, in which they are seen as the people who can fix everything when something goes wrong. It’s also a culture in which there is a high male population.
It’s important to think about occupational culture when communicating interpersonally, as occupations can shape our experiences sometimes even more than workplaces themselves. The saying “life’s work” comes from the choice of an occupation, after all, and serves to help people form an identity.
