Intercultural communication An introduction

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Intercultural communicationAn introduction

• Malene Gram

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Globalization

• Political
• Economical
• Technology
• Cultural

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National culture without significance?
Source Information 25th of April 01
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Crash course
Lecture 1 An introduction to the field Gary P.
Ferraro (1998) The Cultural Dimension of
International Business, Prentice Hall
International (UK) Chapters 1 and 2. (pp.
3-46)   Lecture 2 Functionalism and why Hofstede
is not loved by everybody Susan C. Schneider and
Jean-Louis Barsoux (1997) Managing Across
Cultures, Prentice Hall. Chapters 1 and 2. (pp.
3-45)   Lecture 3 Symbolisme - culture is
communication Clifford Geertz (1973)
Interpretation of Cultures, New York, New Basic
Books, pp. 3-30   Lecture 4 Danish
culture Garrison Keillor (1998) Civilized
Denmark, National Geographic, July Richard Hill
(1995) We Europeans. Europublications. The
Danes. The entrepreneurial extroverts, (pp.
215-221)
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Source Jandt, 1998
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Disposition for i dag

• What is culture?
• Which peoples culture has being studied?
• Etnocentrism/relativism
• Case different expectations
• Culture shock

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What is culture?
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Culture definitions

• Edward B. Tylor "Culture or civilization, taken
  in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex
  whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
  morals, law, custom and any other capabilities
  and habits acquired by man as a member of
  society." (1871)

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Kroeber Kluckhohn found 164 definitions in the
1950s

• "Culture consists of patterns, explicit and
  implicit, of and for, behaviour acquired and
  transmitted by symbols, constituting the
  distinctive achievement of human groups,
  including their embodiments in artefacts the
  essential core of culture consists of traditional
  (i.e., historically derived and selected ) ideas
  and especially their attached values culture
  systems may, on the other hand, be considered as
  products of action, on the other as conditioning
  elements of further action." (1952, p. 181)

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Other definitions

• Hofstede Culture is the collective programming
  of the mind 1980
• Culture behaviour
• Geertz man is an animal suspended in webs of
  significance he himself has spun 1973
• Birmingham school collective subjectivity
• Culture meaning
• What is natural and evident?

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Marco Evaristti and God Save Denmark

• Provoking art with identity as theme
• Jewish parents, father Italian, mother Russian,
  grew up in Chile, then Israel, Scotland and
  Denmark
• Who are we/they/I?
• The language we speak now is German
• The law of Jante is the reason why you never
  give compliments

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Marco Evaristti

• Why is it so important to focus on what is
  Danish? It must be a huge insecurity. But what
  makes us insecure?
• The Danes are very provincial maybe that why
  they have so big problems with the national
  question

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Ladmiral and Lipiansky

• 8 months shy (universal)
• I am not a part of my mother
• The unknown reveals the known
• For the individual and the group
• Me versus the other
• Us versus the others
• The child grows and so does the surroundings

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• Age group, skin colour, social class, church,
  regional and national identity
• Affiliations are internalised
• cultural representations and ideologies such as
  stereotypes and prejudices
• Constant dialectic between identity and alterity,
  what is known and unknown

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Perceptions of culture

• Germany
• A nation relatively late in 1872
• Court closed
• Upper middle class (boursoisie) unhappy with the
  aristocrats
• Kultur true values

• France
• Unity in the human race
• Universalistic perception of Culture
• Civilisation

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Ethnocentrism

• Tendency to categorised what is known as good and
  what is unknown as bad
• An obstacle to intercultural communication

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Source Gary Larsson
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Source Schneider and Barsoux
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Cultural Relativism

• Cultural relativism holds that "good" means what
  is "socially approved" by the majority in a given
  culture. Infanticide, for example, isn't good or
  bad objectively rather it's good in a society
  that approves of it, but bad in one that
  disapproves of it.

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We are the best!
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Case Sheila Graham in Poland

• What goes wrong?
• Differences in expectations?
• What is natural and evident?

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Culture shock

• You deny it to yourself
• You get a chaos of thoughts and feelings
• You grieve
• You adapt to the situation

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Culture shock

• A proces of adaptation starts when the well-known
  and predictable world breaks down through a
  process of abstraction and redefinition
• Peter Marris quoted in Bennett

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Culture shock

• fight,
• flight,
• filter and
• flex

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Next time

• Read chapters 1 and 2 in Managing across cultures
  in the compendium