Unit 2-9. A new approach to a theory of culture

 

Guidelines for extensive reading of ESP texts

Dr. Bernard Saint-Jacques is Linguistics Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. His research of the last years has been about Intercultural understanding and communication. This essay discusses the impact of globalization on the study of culture and intercultural communication. Japan is selected as a case study to illustrate how culture is being transformed by the shrinking global community. The concept of identity and how it has been altered by globalization is also discussed in the essay. Professor Saint-Jacques sees people in modern society as “living at the same time within particular cultural settings on the one hand, and between different cultural environments on the other one,” which produces multiple identities. In the second part of his essay, Professor Saint-Jacques proposes an approach to teaching intercultural communication (ICC) in the globalized society. His method involves viewing culture as “ways of thinking, beliefs, and values,” and a greater incorporation of language into the teaching of ICC.

This essay is intended to show you that there are many ways of viewing culture, but also that your views should not become static. Culture and communication are influenced by societal changes, and these changes need to be acknowledged, both in theory development and in classroom instructional methods.

 

Text 2-9. A NEW APPROACH TO A THEORY OF CULTURE

(After Bernard Saint-Jacques)

Introduction

Intercultural communication is based on intercultural understanding. Intercultural understanding cannot be realized without an objective and up-to-date understanding of the notion of culture. Globalization, however, has changed the notion of culture. Culture can no longer be described as the property of a single nation.

Globalization has changed the concept of culture. Globalization stands for the overlapping of global and local factors (Robertson, 1997). Human beings are living at the same time within particular settings on the one hand, and between different cultural environments on the other one. This is nothing new.

One lives between one’s home in a family, on the one side, and also is situated in the daily life world – going to school, working in one’s professional life, on the other.

This has been happening for thousands of years. In a culturally globalized world, between-situations are becoming essential for any understanding of culture. There were three stages in globalization.

The first one was political, the founding of the United Nations in 1945.

The second one was the economic globalization, the spread of free-market capitalism in virtually every country of the world since 1980.

The third one is … cultural globalization, which has an essential function for the efficient working of the political and economic globalizations of the world. In fact, the economic and political globalizations have given rise to the problematic triangle “identity–culture–communication” in international relations (Wolton, 2005). As the technology for worldwide transmission of information continues to progress, attempts by some countries to restrict this transmission are becoming more and more ineffective (McPhail, 1989).

The debates on globalization have focused on economic and political issues, but the powerful impact of globalization on culture has not been sufficiently analyzed and researched.

Globalization provides a good opportunity to reflect on the efficiency of the tools which the intercultural enterprise so far has developed to promote intercultural understanding (Kalscheuer, 2002). Thomas’s (1996) definition of culture as a system that is valid for all members of a society or nation, as well as Hall’s (1984) and Hofstede’s (1980, 1991, 1997) “cultural dimensions”, fixed sets of polar attributes (collectivism vs. individualism, monochronic vs. polychronic, high power distance vs. low power distance, high context culture vs. low context culture, etc …) obtained with questionnaires to very small groups of participants of a given society, are not any more adapted to research in intercultural understanding.

Cultures are not homogeneous and stable entities. Recent cultural theory takes into account the increasing mixture of cultures and people within each culture, and emphasizes the hybrid nature of culture (Bhabba, 1994, Pieterse, 1994, Shweder & Sullivan, 1990). Welsh (1999) stresses the reciprocal influences of cultures.

Three Decades Have Passed

It is essential to recall that three decades have passed since Hofstede proposed his cultural dimensions and his classification of countries. During that time, there were many reviews of Hofstede’s work expressing several important caveats in dimensionalising cultural values. A large number of questions remains as to how exactly these concepts work in real-life relationships. These concepts suffer from the same weakness as the concepts of culture in that they are too readily used to explain everything that occurs in a society (Kim, Triandis, Kagitcibasi, Choi, 1994). Concerning individualism versus collectivism, the multidimensional nature of these concepts has been frequently discussed. We can be both individualistic in some situations and collectivistic in others (Kim et al., 1996).

In a recent paper, Chirkov, Linch, and Niwa (2005), examining the problems in the measurements of cultural dimensions and orientations, raised three basic questions:

(1) “The operationalization of individualism/collectivism assumes a high degree of cultural homogeneity of the surveyed countries across geographical regions and across different life domains. This assumption however is far from reality, especially in multiethnic countries”.

(2) Moreover, this operationalization of cultural dimensions ignores the fact that different cultural values and practices may be internalized by people to different degrees, thus demonstrating high interpersonal variation in their endorsement (D’Andrade, 1992).

(3) Measuring culture-related constructs to average individuals’ scores on, for example, an individualism–collectivism self-report scale, across samples taken from different countries is wrong. “This does not make sense because culture is not an attribute of a person, nor is it the main value of some aggregate of individuals”. Further, quoting Fisk (2002), Chirkov et. al. (2005) conclude that “taking the mean of a group of individual scores does not make such variables into measurements of culture”.

Moreover, the expressed cultural values of many intercultural surveys and questionnaires are not necessarily the same as behaviors. The sample and the participants used in intercultural surveys have often been criticized as not representative of the culture of a given country being studied. In many cases, the participants were college or university students, and sometimes surveyed outside of their country of origin, without taking into account the cultural influence of the country in which they had been international students for some years.

Visser, Krosnick and Lavrakas (2000) have emphasized the non-probability and the non-representative sample of participants in most cross-cultural studies. These authors warned social and cross-cultural psychologists that “social psychological research attempting to generalize from a college student sample to a nation looks silly and damages the apparent credibility of our enterprise”.

In Goodwin’s book Personal Relationships across Cultures (1999), one can find interesting discussions of Hofstede’s classification. In the introduction, Goodwin writes: “I will try to demonstrate how many of our cherished views of other cultures are becoming less relevant and less accurate – If, indeed, they were ever accurate at all” (1999). What is also striking is that data from a reexamination of Hofstede’s country classifications, conducted twenty-five years after the original research, suggests “significant shifts in value classifications in some countries” (Fernandez, et. al., 1997). In an interview in Canada published in the InterCultures Magazine, Oct. 2006, when asked, “Between the time that you were first analyzing the data and now, has your definition of culture changed at all?” Hofstede answered: No, not really. Of course, you have to realize that culture is a construct. When I have intelligent students in my class, I tell them: “One thing we have to agree on: culture does not exist.” Culture is a concept that we made up which helps us understand a complex world, but it is not something tangible like a table or a human being. What it is depends on the way in which we define it. So, let’s not squabble with each other because we define culture slightly differently; that’s fine.

From this interview, it is quite clear that Hofstede’s “cultural dimensions” are not at all the rigid and universal fixed sets of polar attributes that several scholars are still using in their intercultural research.

Three Basic Facts for a Theory of Culture and Intercultural Understanding. Any theory of culture in this globalized world must address the following three basic facts: (1) Cultural Predestination!, (2) Individual Values, and (3) A Set of Dynamic Processes of Generation and Transformation.

Some aspects of these facts are not new and have been discussed by scholars in the past; these basic facts, however, have often been disregarded by those doing research in intercultural communication, resulting in very dubious affirmations about the nature of various cultures and people living in these cultures. The pragmatic integration of these three facts in intercultural research represents the essential basis for the new approach to a theory of culture proposed in this paper.

3. Cultural Predestination!

Cultural comparisons should avoid overstressing differences because it leads to overemphasizing the features of a given culture, as if it were a unique attribute. It is quite clear that in the past, in order to make comparisons more striking, people have been tempted to exaggerate differences, leading to a focus on a given country’s distinctive features at the expense of those characteristics it shares with other societies. Yamazaki (2000) writes: “Human beings seem to like to give themselves a sense of security by forming simplistic notions about the culture of other countries.” Stereotypes are then often created.

It is essential to research distinctive features in the light of features which are common to other cultures. To put it in Yamazaki’s words:“Commonalities are essential if comparisons are to be made” (Yamazaki, 2000). Cultures are not predestined to have some immutable distinctive characteristics. Yamazaki uses the expression “cultural predestination” (2000) and Demorgon (2005) emphasizes the same idea: “The absolute distinctiveness of cultures is a problematic notion.” The reason for this is quite simple: cultures influence each other and often there is a process of fusion. How can one attribute at a given moment distinctive features to a culture which is in perpetual development and change? This point will be developed to a greater extent in the section dealing with the dynamism of cultures.

Individual Values

A nation or an ethnic group cannot be considered as a single unit. Nations are not culturally homogeneous. Within the same nation, social classes, age, gender, education, religious affiliations and several other factors constitute theself-awareness and self-consciousness which become the markers of cultural identity, subcultures within a national culture. There are, within a nation, regional cultures, cultures of towns and villages, small group cultures, and family cultures which form cultural units. Renan’s 1882 famous definition of nation, “L’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun” [The essence of a nation is that the individuals of this nation have many things in common] has to be extended to the various groups which constitute cultural units in a nation. The members of these groups also have many things in common. Nations are not culturally homogeneous. Individuals within a given nation are not always identical and their cultural behavior might be different. Several studies, for instance, Kim (2005), and Kim, Hunter, Miyara, Horvath, Bresnahan and Yoon (1996) have emphasized this point. Very often, individual values rather than cultural values will be better predictors of behavior (Leung, 1989, Leung & Bond, 1989, Triandis, 1988). It is quite evident in the modern world that culture-level generalizations or national-culture generalizations are no longer adequate for intercultural research.

It is sufficient to consider the vast number of countries in the world which are multicultural and multilingual and where there is considerable immigration. Canada, where you have English-Canadians and French-Canadians, First Nations, and another 35 percent of the population which is neither from British or French origin but coming from forty different countries, is only one example. It is also the case for the United States, all countries of the European Union, South American countries, most Asian and African countries. Here, one cannot resist quoting some passages of a very recent article by James B. Waldram (2009): “Anthropologists began to appreciate the artificial nature of their notion of ‘cultures’ as distinct, bounded units harbouring culturally identical citizens…. We began to appreciate ‘culture’ as a live experience of individuals in their local, social worlds”. In addition, he adds: “Cross-cultural psychology has retained the broad generalizations and essentializations rejected by anthropology, to continue to assign research participants to groups as if there were no significant intra-cultural variability, and then engage in primarily quantitative comparisons”.

It is now more than evident that serious cultural research cannot apply anymore the absolute and general dimensions of individualism versus collectivism, high-context versus low-context and other similar dimensions to most countries in the world.