Intercultural Negotiations

Ian MacKenzie

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415617468
• eBook ISBN: 9781317981978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Intercultural communication is a daily occurrence for most people, as a result of transnational population flows and globalized media. The contributions to this volume propose reconceptualizations of orthodox accounts of intercultural communication based on supposed national cultural characteristics. They approach the subject from a variety of angles, including intercultural communication training, the role of power in intercultural negotiations, the linguistic situation in Europe, and the conflict between nationalist and transnational discourses in literature. The articles consider the need for a revision of the notions of culture and communication given multicultural and multilingual environments such as universities; the use of English as a lingua franca in Europe; how collaborative discourse can reshape power relations; the importance of social intelligence in intercultural communication; cultural and linguistic influences on conceptual metaphors and their translation; and the way Irish and Galician women poets negotiate competing ideologies such as nationalism, feminism, Celticism and Catholicism. This book was published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Introduction

English studies and intercultural negotiations

Ian MacKenzie

Intercultural communication is a daily occurrence for many, if not most, people. As James Clifford put it, 20 years ago:

This century has seen a drastic expansion of mobility, including tourism, migrant labor, immigration, urban sprawl . . . . In cities on six continents, foreign populations have come to stay – mixing in but often in partial, specific fashions. The ‘exotic’ is uncannily close .... Difference is encountered in the adjoining neighborhood, the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth.

(Clifford, 1988: 13–14)

But while some foreign populations have come to stay in Western cities, there are also perpetual migrants. In a more recent book, Clifford (1997: 1) quotes the Indian ethnographer Amitav Ghosh writing about ‘a quiet corner of the Nile Delta’: ‘the men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge . . . some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas’ (Ghosh, 1986: 135). Clifford (1997: 1) says ‘It’s hard to imagine a better figure for postmodernity’ than the ‘traditional, rural village as airline transit lounge’, but then quotes a further paragraph in which Ghosh reveals that this is merely the continuation of a centuries-old tradition of travel and border crossing in the Middle East.

If everyday life often involves intercultural communication, the university is no exception. In their contribution in this issue, ‘"Culture" and "Communication" in Intercultural Communication’, Alan Durant and Ifan Shepherd describe the student community at their university in London: ‘Most speakers are bilingual or multilingual; in communication they combine pragmatic strategies, cultural schemata and general knowledge derived from many different backgrounds’. Consequently, they suggest, intercultural communication is more than cross-cultural communication: It is interactive, with scope for creative fusion, initiative and change, and it may need to be reconceptualized if it is adequately to reflect substantially culturally diverse discourse communities. Intercultural research could usefully analyse moments of communicative convergence as well as moments of breakdown or misunderstanding.

Even in a less diverse student community than Durant and Shepherd’s, the study of English in Europe (and beyond) necessarily involves encounters between cultures. Teachers and students of English literature, language, linguistics and cultural studies, no less than the authors they read, are situated in particular cultural and temporal contexts, and are continually encountering others. To describe the teaching and reception of foreign literatures, as well as reading texts from earlier periods in one’s own language or languages, as exercises in intercultural communication is actually quite a modest claim compared with George Steiner’s (1998: 49) succinct (and italicized) assertion that ‘inside or between languages, human communication equals translation’.

Although learning to read literature could be described as a form of intercultural communication training, it rarely is. This term is more likely to be heard in international companies. A large market has opened up for those who claim to be able to teach businesspeople to communicate and negotiate effectively with people from other countries – or other markets, as business people tend to call them – and other business cultures. Many teachers as English as a foreign language (as the industry has traditionally been known in Europe), especially teachers of business English, have successfully made the transition to ‘intercultural training’, often tripling their income at the cost of getting up early and wearing a suit.

Intercultural communication theory

Contrary to many people’s multicultural reality, the mainstays of intercultural communication training tend to be primers on ‘national cultural characteristics’. The major intercultural theorists have their own models of the dimensions or characteristics or determinants of national cultures which clearly have at least a superficial plausibility, and find a ready audience, despite rival contemporary discourses about hybridity, variety, diversity, fusion, transculturation, liminality, change, and so on.

For example, the American theorist Edward T. Hall (1976) divides the world into high-context and low-context cultures. High-context cultures – the norm in East Asia – are ‘affiliation cultures’ in which people tend to have similar experiences and expectations, allowing many things to be left unsaid. In high-context communication people rely more on non-verbal communication (facial expression, gestures, eye movement) and inferences that can be drawn from implicit shared cultural knowledge. People in such cultures are said to have a greater ability to anticipate and understand the feelings of others than in low-context cultures. Low-context cultures often consist of people with a wider variety of backgrounds, so in low-context communication – the norm in Europe and North America – people use more direct or explicit verbal communication, and are said to be less adept at interpreting non-verbal and emotional clues.

Daniela Wawra’s essay, ‘Social Intelligence: The Key to Intercultural Communication’, makes strong recommendations regarding intercultural training for people in low-context cultures. She insists that non-verbal communication and emotions are much more important in human interactions than has been recognized, and are even more crucial in encounters where the participants do not share the same cultural background. Wawra draws on recent work in social neuroscience, and specifically the concept of social intelligence as developed by Daniel Goleman. Social intelligence is defined as consisting of social awareness (what we sense about others), primal empathy (our attunement to other people), empathic accuracy, social cognition (knowledge about how the social world works), social facility, and so on. The traditional cognitive and behavioural elements of intercultural training – studying the principles of communication, reflecting on communicative norms and strategies for avoiding miscommunication, improving language skills, cultural awareness and cultural knowledge, and so on – still only involve learning about communication and particular cultures; what is more important is to empathize with them. A prerequisite for this is to be aware of one’s own emotions, and to be able to manage them. Wawra maintains that such affective skills and non-cognitive abilities, essential to competent intercultural communication, can be significantly improved by social intelligence training.

Whereas Hall divides the world into two types of cultures, Geert Hofstede, cited in three contributions in this issue, distinguishes three levels of ‘human mental programming’. Between the universal level (determined by biology and physiology) and the individual level (the realm of psychology) comes a collective level – patterns of thinking, feeling and acting, and values (or mental programmes) that everyone in a particular cultural context acquires in childhood socialization and carries through life, which are resilient to change and often contain strong national components that are passed on from generation to generation.¹

Hofstede outlines four bipolar dimensions of national culture, three of which are self-explanatory: ‘individualism vs. collectivism’, ‘masculinity vs. femininity’, and ‘uncertainty avoidance’ (Hofstede 1983: 65, 110, 148, 176). The fourth is ‘power distance’ – the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. Fons Trompenaars, another influential Dutch theorist, outlines seven aspects of national cultures: ‘universalism vs. particularism’– believing that rules and regulations apply to everybody, or that personal relationships and friendships should take precedence; ‘individualism vs. communitarianism’; ‘specific vs. diffuse’ approaches to business relationships – whether people stick to facts and data, or use feelings and goodwill; ‘neutrality vs. affectivity’ – whether people control their emotions in professional contexts, or show their emotions and become involved; ‘inner-directed vs. outer-directed attitude’ – whether or not people believe they can control and direct their environment; ‘achieved status vs. ascribed status’ – whether you are judged on what you have accomplished, or whether status is ascribed to you according to birth, kinship, gender, age, rank or connections; and ‘sequential time vs. synchronic time’ (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 1997: 8–10).

Hall, Hofstede and Trompenaars are the most widely-cited theorists, but there are many others. Shalom Schwartz (2004) proposes an alternative set of dimensions – embeddedness vs. intellectual and affective autonomy, hierarchy vs. egalitarianism, and mastery vs. harmony; Ronald Inglehart (1997) classifies countries according to two dimensions – traditional vs. secular-rational values, and survival vs. self-expression values; while a further, splendidly essentializing description of national cultures is proposed by Richard Lewis (2003), who places all the countries in the world at the corners or along the sides of a triangle, according to whether they show the characteristics of one or two of three ‘poles’: ‘linear-active’, ‘multi-active’ and ‘reactive’ cultures. According to Lewis, people – or, more specifically, businesspeople – in linear-active cultures such as Britain, the USA and Germany are generally organized and rational, use logic rather than emotions, plan in advance, and like to do one thing at a time. They are essentially individualist, and what Trompenaars calls ‘universalist’. Multi-active cultures in Southern Europe, Latin America and Africa attach more importance to feelings, emotions and intuition, and relationships and connections. People like to do many things at the same time; they are flexible, good at changing plans and happy to improvise. They believe in social or company hierarchy, and respect status. They are essentially collectivist or communitarian, and what Trompenaars calls ‘particularist’. Asian countries constitute a third pole, reactive cultures in which people prefer to listen to and establish the other’s position, and then react to it. They try to avoid confrontation, and ‘losing face’ or causing someone else to.

Most of this work is based on questionnaire research, largely concerning the attitudes of businesspeople to workplace issues, and Hofstede’s data (admittedly well over 100,000 questionnaires) comes from a single multinational company, IBM. This leads to the common criticism that such research only shows what a country’s culture would be like if everybody in it worked for IBM – imagine questionnaire results based entirely on university teachers! – but the researchers obviously claim that such data is more reliable than simple observation.

One obvious objection to the notion of national ‘mental programmes’ is that there are also important discourses and ideologies which cut across national cultures and thus complicate descriptions of national identity. Yet as Manuela Palacios demonstrates in her study ‘Within and Beyond the Nation: Contemporary Irish and Galician Women Poets’, transnational discourses are necessarily transformed by the sociocultural specificities of different communities. Palacios shows how Celticism and Catholicism have fared while being used to support nationalist aspirations, while conversely feminist discourses have proved resistant to patriotic imperatives that seek to subordinate women’s interests to those of the nation. Feminist ideas were for a long time subordinated to nationalist ones, but Irish and Galician women poets have now distanced themselves from discourses that construe them as symbolically central – biological reproducers of the nation, transmitters of the national culture and signifiers of ethnic and national boundaries (woman as nation/nation as woman) – but grant women little social agency, and marginalize them as writers and citizens.

Irish and Galician poets have also had to make the decisive choice between using the vernacular or the colonial language. Immigrants (or simply migrants) tend to have less choice: For social and economic advancement, they generally need to learn the dominant local language, and ways of behaving, which the linguist and anthropologist Anna Wierzbicka describes as ‘cultural scripts’. Wierzbicka (2006: 7) states that ‘during my thirty odd years of living in Australia I have had to absorb a good deal of "foreignness" (that is, in my case, "Angloness" and also "Anglo-Australianness") into my ways of speaking, thinking and acting’. She argues that the ideology of cultural pluralism (and resistance to the hegemony of the dominant group), which largely emanates from Anglophone countries,

denies the subjective experience of immigrants to English-speaking countries, who often discover the reality of Anglo ways of speaking the hard way, by at first painfully clashing with them and then learning increasingly to avoid the clashes and attendant pain . . . To deny the validity of the notion of Anglo cultural patterns or Anglo ways of speaking is to place the values of political correctness above the interests of socially disadvantaged individuals and groups.

(Wierzbicka, 2006: 21–2)

Yet Wierzbicka insists that culture training needs to be done from within the framework of cultural scripts, based on her account of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). This theory is that all meanings can be ‘adequately portrayed in empirically established universal human concepts, with their universal grammar’ (2006: 23). Cultural scripts, or ‘widely shared and widely known ways of thinking’ can be identified in the terms of these concepts. Importantly, however, the matching irreducible cores of all natural languages, ‘reflecting in turn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction: English studies and intercultural negotiations
• 2. 'Culture' and 'Communication' in Intercultural Communication
• 3. Social Intelligence: The key to intercultural communication
• 4. Legitimacy, Comprehension and Empathy: The importance of recontextualization in intercultural negotiations
• 5. Within and Beyond the Nation: Contemporary Irish and Galician women poets
• 6. Translating the Metaphors We Live By: Intercultural negotiations in conceptual metaphors
• 7. Negotiating Europe's Lingua Franca
• Index