Communication or Conflict

Conferences: their nature, dynamics, and planning

Mary Capes, Mary Capes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136436284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1960 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Part One
Working Papers Prepared for the Conference

The Cultural Perspective

MARGARET MEAD

In a large, complex, rapidly changing modern society, an institution like a conference or a meeting takes many forms, and each detail of form and phrasing carries a different freight of meaning to the participants. Every innovation, specifically designed to escape from the limitations or implications of some traditional form, either bears initially or rapidly acquires a new set of such meanings. So that even in planning a conference within a single culture, it is important for the planners to recognize explicitly the kinds of choices that they are making when they pick the place of meeting, the time of day, the form of invitation, the methods of choosing the participants, the procedure for the discussion, and the form that the results of the meeting will take. There is great significance in each such detail.

All planners of meetings do take many of these matters into account whenever a conference is to be convened. The long heated arguments over time and place and chairmanship which precede any new venture, are expressions of the knowledge, explicit or otherwise, each of the planners has of the implications. The last twenty-five years have seen a great increase in the articulate recognition of these factors, in the United States with its spate of inventions —forums, panels, buzz sessions, group decision—in the Soviet Union with the rigid control of agenda which the Communist party has developed to contain the potential spontaneity of the participants, with the development in Great Britain during and after the war of traditional conference resources, and the spread through the agencies of the United Nations and other international bodies of the specific articulate practices of peoples who have become conscious of the contributions which their own particular practices can make to the purposes of any given sort of conference.

It is essential to recognize the sort of factors which vary from culture to culture, including some of the apparently trivial ones, and to bring to awareness in each culture the importance of those procedures old and new which they have taken for granted, or the significance of which they may have actively resisted recognizing.

Whether the group meet 'around a table, whether the table is covered by a red or green baize cover—of great significance in prerevolutionary Russia—or by a white damask table cloth as in a modern American hotel, whether there is a pitcher of water, with one or two glasses or a whole trayful, whether the chairman sits on a rostrum, whether the meeting is 'called to order' with bell or gavel or a hesitant cough, or the announcement that the steno-typist or the tape-recorder are ready, something is conveyed. Each and all of these details serve as signals to the participants that certain kinds of relationships will henceforth hold within the meeting. Time itself means one thing in those societies which can think of a single meeting as something which has a beginning and an end without further commitment, and another in those cultures where a single attendance in a meeting may be regarded as committing oneself for life.

The Evaluation of Procedures as They Relate to Different Cultures

Further, the existing evidence for the efficiency of different procedures within a culture needs to be marshalled and re-evaluated in cultural terms. For example, a given procedure is 'releasing' when used with a middle-class group, but 'demoralizing' when used with a working-class group. Will a given form of representation and instruction provide conditions within which people of one culture will faithfully pursue a path even against their judgement, provide an expressive outlet for the representatives from another country, and result in a third group of representatives being at swords' points with each other? Almost all of the experiential and experimental work that has been done on problems of group performance has either ignored culture, by holding it constant, or has failed to take into account the full significance of cultural differences. For example, in the classical Autocracy-Democracy Studies done by Kurt Lewin (Lewin, et al., 1939), the transition from democratic to autocratic regime in a group of Iowa children did not produce the expected and regular result of demoralization and loss of spontaneity in the case of one child. This child who reacted more favourably to the autocratic regime was the son of a West Point (the U.S. Military Academy) officer and had learned to trust a type of regime which the other children (children of faculty members of the University of Iowa) had learned to distrust. From the Lewin experiments it is not possible to conclude that all children, or even all American children, will respond favourably to a democratic, and unfavourably to an autocratic, atmosphere. It may be argued that, in time, the democratic group atmosphere is intrinsically better fitted to evoke spontaneity, but only if the necessary allowance has been made for culturally engendered distaste, distrust, or active dislike of such a procedure during interim learning periods of various lengths.

The cultural dimension must also be taken into account when the response of members of different cultures to a meeting form originally developed in one of these cultures is considered. It has been argued (Krapf, in press) that one of the difficulties in evoking cooperative behaviour from Latins and Anglo-Saxons when the committee form is used, is that Anglo-Saxons, afraid of a strong 'father' (Blanco-White, 1939), trust their 'brothers' to unite to protect them against the 'father' (chairman); while Latins, afraid of their 'brothers', look for a strong 'father' (chairman), to protect them against each other. This neglects the implications of the fact that the committee form itself is Anglo-Saxon, and has been moulded and shaped through centuries to accommodate and control the various possible responses of men who sit in committees, containing in its procedures allowances for those who seek a strong 'father' as well as for those who distrust him. Latins, who have never worked in a comparable situation, when they enter it, may react with a strong unconscious distrust or hostility, which is very different from the response of the Anglo-Saxon, who is dealing with a familiar and seasoned form of his own tradition. Where the Latin may react in an all-or-none fashion to the form itself, the Anglo-Saxon will react to specific details, sure in his knowledge that he knows what to do when either a fellow-member or the chairman oversteps his role. The use of any seasoned form depends upon the presence of those who know how to use it, but precautions must be taken lest those to whom the form is unfamiliar come to feel that they are enmeshed among plotters who are subtly manipulating them simply because they use the familiar procedures with ease and skill (see Mead, 1945a). Conversely, smoothly operating forms may prove very seductive to those whose previous group experiences have been inconclusive and infrequent.

When any procedure is to be adapted for cross-cultural use, whether it be within a national state, to serve in bridging gaps between classes, races, religious groups, or disciplines, or across national boundaries, the planners must be aware of the culturally regular expectations of each or all of the different groups of participants. If the style to be followed has already been developed by one group— say the multi-disciplinary team of a child guidance clinic, or the collective bargaining committee of a factory—it is important to realize that those to whom the style is familiar will react in awkward and unpredictable ways when confronted with the inexperience of the new-comers—and on the other hand, the new-comers will see the unfamiliar style of the meeting through their own cultural spectacles. The chairman who takes his coat off to indicate informality may instead be indicating disrespect for his hosts, his vis-á-vis, or his role; the chairman who dresses with special care may be indicating not—as he intended—respect for the task at hand, but a sense of the superiority of his group over some other. If the style of meeting to be followed is in the style of the hosts' country, institution, or discipline, then a different set of complications will ensue from that if the style is that of the guest group. The complexities of hospitality and courtesy have to be worked out differently in the two cases. If this is done consciously, then slight but articulate gestures may be sufficient to dispel the unwanted effects which the adoption of one procedure or another may produce. But it is possible to make such symbolic gestures only if such matters are articulately recognized. A case in point was the initial misunderstanding at the San Francisco conference at which the UN was inaugurated, when the Russian delegation assumed that rotation of the chairmanship was 'natural', and this seemed to the Americans an 'unjustifiable' demand. Meticulous attention to such details sometimes comes into disrepute because the planners fail to distinguish between communicative gestures and the realities of the task ahead. If an international group is meeting in a country where the most rigid hierarchies prevail and discussion is unknown, they cannot expect to get discussion in a discussion group by appointing the 'natural' chairman, a professor who neither understands nor approves of discussion and who is guaranteed to drive relentlessly towards some conclusion in which he believes. Here the error involved is in trying to bridge the gap between 'hierarchical group' and 'discussion group', ignoring the reality which determines that people who neither understand nor believe in discussion cannot lead discussion groups. In such circumstances, it is necessary to construct other posts which will symbolically satisfy the sensibilities of the given hierarchical groups, at the same time devising a formula for choosing a discussion group chairman who can lead discussion.

Flexibility of Procedure

This means that a continued flexibility is necessary in translating practice across cultural lines so that the accidents of previous cultural experience will not prevent suitability of procedure. For example, most American discussion groups have moved from devices designed to make 'everybody' participate, to a recognition that individuals should have the right to sit quietly and not 'participate' verbally, unless they want to. In the course of this current recognition of the right to silence, techniques which 'go round the room', ways in which people speak in turn, or alphabetically, will all be in disrepute in one country, because of their implication of forced participation, whereas they may be very useful devices in another cultural situation where the junior is afraid to speak up in the presence of a senior.

Cross-cultural group procedures need to toe developed. In all areas where different sets of expectations are involved, procedures which are specific to the task in hand, and which differ conspicuously from the procedures familiar to any of the participating groups, are exceedingly useful in equalizing and to some extent eliminating conflicts due to previous cultural experience. Those who have had previous experience which led them to expect and respect different forms of behaviour will be at an advantage, and will almost inevitably assume leadership, but this is in fact a way of assuring the most efficient kind of leadership in such a new situation. However, continuous care needs to be exercised lest a given new or special form be identified with a nationality, or a discipline, or an approach, so that individuals react against it because they are culturally identified with some other group, instead of identifying with it because it is the procedure of the immediate situation. Where it is of the utmost importance that all of those who are members of any conference feel, for its duration, identified with it, the presence of procedures which are resisted because they are thought to belong not to the occasion but to some other group may be disastrous. When possible the simple device of using cross-cultural personnel, e.g. having an American-derived specific procedure like 'feed-back', introduced by a Frenchman who is accustomed to the procedure, may have an important disarming effect.

The Dangers of Generalizations about Cultural Behaviour

Cultural insights will be useful in directing and developing conference procedure just to the extent that they are (a) abstract, (b) exceedingly precise, and (c) flexible. Generalizations about the British handling of strength and weakness, as compared with the American and the German, provide a general background for cross-cultural understanding; one may expect the British speaker both to speak from strength and to minimize that strength, whereas the American will speak from weakness and compensate for the weakness, and the German will relate his behaviour to the weakness and strength of his own position in a hierarchy. Such abstract statements of national characteristics are all useful, but they have to be qualified in terms of class, region, occupation, age, and situation, and may very easily become cliches which interfere with, rather than promote, understanding. Furthermore, once any of these cultural differences have become identified and recognized, then the members of a given culture will respond in several new ways. Some will lean over backwards not to behave as they have been described as behaving, others will manipulate the expectation of such behaviour. It therefore does not seem desirable to present static descriptions of attitudes towards authority, equals, allies, enemies, towards time and place, towards compromise, and settlement or armed truce, which may be found to characterize different cultures or sub-cultures, but it is important instead to sensitize those who are planning cross-cultural meetings, or developing new group procedures, to the kind of thing which needs to be taken into account.

A set of guidelines, however, based upon cross-cultural considerations, leads to a more adequate exploration of any particular situation.

(a) In any conference it is desirable that the cultural positions of the participants should be as equal as possible, that no individual should, because of his past cultural experience, be at a disadvantage in his ability to participate and contribute.

(b) In any conference it is desirable to draw on as much as possible that is common and constructive in the past experience of the participants—this means using as many symbols with a high degree of common meaning as possible.

(c) In any conference it is desirable to be able to discount as many as possible of the disadvantages of previous experience or unequal experience—this means that it will be desirable to equalize language background by having each participant speak in a language not his own, instead of the present practice whereby those who come from the large language groups always have an advantage over those who have to operate continuously in a second language.

(d) Where cultural handicaps are inevitable, as for example an existing and intransigent prejudice against some form which is regarded as intrinsically necessary to the purposes of the particular conference, e.g. free discussion, or no agenda, or tape-recording, this should be fully recognized and every effort made to deal with it in terms of the culture from within which the prejudice springs. People who argue against recording so that every word said may be reported may have no objection to a 'précis' or a 'history of a conference'; the first phrasing hits against the cultural value of non-selfconsciousness, but the second invokes a respect for adequate documentation of the past.

The Kind of Questions to Ask

A list of questions which a group planning any kind of conference may consult before they make their decisions about time, place, name, procedure, etc., and whenever they know that they are unfamiliar with the cultural attitudes of some of the expected participants, will sensitize the planners to the particular needs of the situation and yet keep their behaviour flexible as no trait list of cultural characteristics could do.

Name: What does the word which you plan to apply to your particular meeting mean? A free meeting; a controlled meeting; a caucus; a plot; a platform for different points of view; a meeting of minds; a place where lines are drawn more sharply; t...