Figuring Foreigners Out, 20th Anniversary Edition: Understanding The World's Cultures
180
Figuring Foreigners Out, 20th Anniversary Edition: Understanding The World's Cultures
180eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780585485928 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quercus |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2011 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Sales rank: | 332,535 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Figuring Foreigners Out
A Practical Guide
By Craig Storti
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Copyright © 1999 Craig StortiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-585-48592-8
CHAPTER 1
What Is Culture?
To realize it takes all sorts to make a world, one' must have seen a certain number of the sorts with one's own eyes. There is all the difference in the world between believing academically, with the intellect, and believing personally, with the whole living self.
— Aldous Huxley Jesting Pilate
For the most part this book will focus on cultural differences, on the ways in which a person from one culture thinks and behaves differently from a person from another. It is these differences, after all, which cause most of the confusion, frustration, sometimes even hostility that occur when people from different cultures interact with each other. Before you can fully understand and appreciate cultural differences, however, you first need to understand what culture itself is and how it operates, which is the purpose of this brief opening chapter.
The best place to start is with a definition of culture. Two researchers in the 1960s are reported to have found over three hundred definitions of culture, and there are no doubt many more in existence today. Fortunately, most of these definitions contain many of the same elements, which suggests that there is a common core to what observers in the field think of as culture. For the purposes of this workbook, the following definition will suffice:
Culture is the shared assumptions, values, and beliefs of a group of people which result in characteristic behaviors.
This definition captures two essential points about culture: that it has an invisible dimension (assumptions, values, and beliefs) and a visible dimension (behavior) and that these two dimensions relate to each other as cause and effect, respectively. Practically speaking, what this means is that behavior — the things people do and say — is neither arbitrary nor spontaneous. That is, people don't make up their behavior as they go along; they don't wake up saying, "I think I'll act like this today." Rather, behavior is a direct result of what people assume, value, or believe in. Indeed, when we say that someone's behavior "makes no sense," what we really mean is that that person's behavior is not consistent with what we know he or she believes in or holds dear.
Understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between the two dimensions of culture is essential to any kind of successful cross-cultural undertaking, for once you grasp that behavior is tied to values and beliefs, then it's not difficult to accept that people with different values and beliefs — such as a person from another culture — are going to behave differently from you. Nor should it be difficult to then go one step further and accept that that other person's behavior, no matter how different from your own, probably makes perfect sense to that individual and other members of his or her culture.
With this definition of culture to guide you, move on now to the three exercises in this chapter. They will explore the concept of culture in more detail and provide you with a firm foundation for examining the cultural differences that are the focus of the rest of this workbook.
Exercise 1.1
Matching Values and Behavior
The portion we see of human beings is very small: their forms and faces, voices and words. ... [But] beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.
— Freya Stark The Journey's Echo
This exercise demonstrates one of the key features of culture just described: the cause-and-effect relationship between people's assumptions, values, and beliefs (the invisible side of culture) and their behavior (the visible side). This relationship is at the heart of culture, which is to say that there can be no real understanding of culture if this relationship is not likewise understood.
Below you will find a list of ten values or beliefs on the left side and ten behaviors on the right. Match each value or belief with a behavior which someone who holds that value is likely to exhibit.
1. Being direct ____ Use of understatement
2. Centrality of family ____ Asking people to call you by your first name
3. Fatalism ____ Taking off from work to attend the funeral of a cousin
4. Saving face ____ Not asking for help from the person next to you on an exam
5. Respect for age ____ Disagreeing openly with someone at a meeting
6. Informality ____ Not laying off an older worker whose performance is weak
7. Deference to authority ____ At a meeting, agreeing with a suggestion you think is wrong
8. Being indirect ____ Inviting the teaboy to eat lunch with you in your office
9. Self-reliance ____ Asking the boss's opinion of something you're the expert on
10. Egalitarianism ____ Accepting, without question, that something cannot be changed
Suggested Answers
8 Use of understatement
6 Asking people to call you by your first name
2 Taking off from work to attend the funeral of a cousin
9 Not asking for help from the person next to you on an exam
1 Disagreeing openly with someone at a meeting
5 Not laying off an older worker whose performance is weak
4 At a meeting, agreeing with a suggestion you think is wrong
10 Inviting the teaboy to eat lunch with you in your office
7 Asking the boss's opinion of something you're the expert on
3 Accepting, without question, that something cannot be changed
Exercise 1.2
"How" Does a Behavior Mean?
I grew up in Iowa and I knew what to do with butter: you put it on roasting ears [of corn], pancakes, and popcorn. Then I went to France and saw a Frenchman put butter on radishes. I waited for the Cosmic Revenge — for the Eiffel Tower to topple, the Seine to sizzle, or the grape to wither on the vine. But ... the universe continued unperturbed.
— Genelle Morain Toward Internationalism
People are in the habit of thinking that behavior has inherent meaning, something attached to the behavior that enables people to understand it, that somehow makes it mean this and not that. In fact, for all practical purposes, an instance of behavior has no particular meaning other than what the people who witness that behavior assign to it. In short, behavior means what we decide it means — and very often it means nothing at all.
The truth of this is easy enough to demonstrate. Take a simple gesture, such as the American okay sign: the thumb and forefinger meet to make a circle and the remaining three fingers are held aloft. In the United States this behavior means okay or all right (and also designates zero). In parts of the Mediterranean and Latin America, it is an obscene gesture. In Japan it designates coins (as opposed to paper money). And there are no doubt many places where it has other meanings or even no meaning at all. This gesture or piece of behavior does not somehow carry its meaning within it; meaning is imposed on it (or not) by those who observe it.
When the people attaching meaning to a behavior are from the same culture, they are likely to attach the same meaning, resulting in successful communication. But when they are from different cultures, they may take the same behavior to mean very different things. This phenomenon, different people assigning different meanings to the same behavior, is at the heart of most cross-cultural misunderstandings. The exercise which follows illustrates how this can happen.
Part 1
Read the description of the eight instances of behavior given below and write down your immediate response to or interpretation of that behavior (what meaning you would assign to the behavior). The first one has been done for you.
1. A person comes to a meeting half an hour after the stated starting time.
Your interpretation: This person is late and should at least apologize or give an explanation.
2. Someone kicks a dog.
Your interpretation:
___________________________________
__________________________________________________
3. At the end of a meal, people belch audibly.
Your interpretation:
___________________________________
__________________________________________________
4. The young person you are talking to does not look you in the eye.
Your interpretation:
___________________________________
__________________________________________________
5. A woman carries a heavy pile of wood on her back, while her husband walks in front of her carrying nothing.
Your interpretation:
___________________________________
__________________________________________________
6. A male guest helps a hostess carry dirty dishes into the kitchen.
Your interpretation:
___________________________________
__________________________________________________
7. A young man and a young woman are kissing on a park bench.
Your interpretation:
___________________________________
__________________________________________________
8. While taking an exam, a student copies from the paper of another student.
Your interpretation:
___________________________________
__________________________________________________
Part 2
In the second part of this activity, you will find the same eight behaviors from Part 1, but you are now being asked to imagine the meaning these behaviors would have in a culture different from your own. The particular cultural difference is described in each case. Read each behavior and the description of the culture and then write in the space provided what meaning you think a person from that culture would assign to the behavior.
1. A person comes to a meeting half an hour after the stated starting time. How would this act be interpreted by
* someone from a culture where people always arrive half an hour after the stated starting time?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
* someone from a culture where meetings never start until at least an hour after the stated time?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
2. Someone kicks a dog. How would this act be interpreted by
* someone from a country where dogs always carry disease?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
* someone from a country where dogs are not kept as pets and are usually vicious?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
3. At the end of a meal, people belch audibly. How would this be interpreted by
* someone from a culture where belching is the normal way to compliment the food?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
4. The young person you are talking to does not look you in the eye. How would this be interpreted by
* someone in whose culture it is considered rude to make eye contact when listening to older or senior people?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
5. A woman carries a heavy pile of wood on her back, while her husband walks in front of her carrying nothing. How would this be interpreted by
* someone from a culture where men never carry wood?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
6. A male guest helps a hostess carry dirty dishes into the kitchen. How would this act be interpreted by men from a culture where men never clean up after a meal?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
* the hostess from that same culture?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
7. A young man and a young woman are kissing on a park bench. How would this act be interpreted by
* someone from a culture where men and women never touch in public?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
8. While taking an exam, a student copies from the paper of another student. How would this act be interpreted by
* someone from a culture where exams are not fair and are designed to eliminate students at various stages of the education system?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
* someone from a culture where it is shameful not to help your friend if you are able to?
Interpretation: _________________________________
__________________________________________________
What have you learned from this exercise? Probably that you shouldn't be too quick to judge other people's behavior, at least not from your own point of view. The wiser course in any cross-cultural situation is to suspend interpretation or judgment, suspend the assigning of meaning until you can find out what any given behavior might signify in the other person's culture. Then you will at least be able to interpret the behavior "correctly."
This does not mean, by the way, that you will necessarily like or approve of the behavior at that point; it merely means that you will probably understand what lies behind it, the logic of the behavior in that culture. In some cases, knowing why people behave in a certain way — for example, learning that people keep dogs away for fear of disease — may cause you to change your opinion of the behavior and the person. In other cases, however, knowing why people behave as they do will not change your opinion. The point is not that you should always be able to like or accept the different behaviors of people from other cultures, but only that you should reserve judgment until you have understood them. Indeed, that rule applies to any kind of interaction, whether cross-cultural or not. But once you have understood, then you are in a better position to judge.
Finally, you will note that this exercise has deliberately selected behaviors that exist in two or more cultures but have different meanings — the usual suspects in cross-cultural misunderstandings. There are, however, many cross-cultural situations where the confusion is not caused by different interpretations of a shared behavior but by the fact that what is a behavior in one culture, such as a gesture, is in fact not behavior — because it has no meaning — in another culture. This common scenario will be examined in chapter 3.
Exercise 1.3
What Culture Is Not
It began to dawn on them that beyond the teeming romance that lies in the differences between men — the diversity of their homes, the multitude of their ways, the dividing strangeness of their faces and tongues — there lies the still profounder romance of their kinship with each other, the immutable constancy of man's need to share laughter and friendship, poetry and love in common.
— Arthur Grimble A Pattern of Islands
Not all behavior is cultural. There are many behaviors, many things people do and say, that are neither caused by nor related to their culture. If all human behavior were put on a continuum, that part related to culture would fall in the middle, between universal at one extreme and personal at the other. The point of this exercise is, precisely, to put culture in its place.
Universal behaviors are those which apply to everyone, regardless of culture, what is usually referred to as "human nature." All people in all cultures eat regularly; eating is not French or Indonesian or Kenyan. The French prepare and eat different foods than do Kenyans, with different social customs involved, but the act of eating is universal — as are using language, seeking shelter, and raising children. In a book like this, which focuses on culture and cultural differences, it's easy to give culture more credit than it is due, to get the impression that everything about a person from Culture A is going to be different from everything about a person from Culture B, and to conclude therefore that all cross-cultural interactions by definition are going to be difficult. But this would be to overlook those many universal assumptions, values, and behaviors which transcend culture, those numerous ways in which all people are alike. In short, while cultural factors will play a part in most cross-cultural interactions, causing the usual complications, universal factors will also be present, making things somewhat easier.
At the opposite end of the behavioral continuum from the universal lies the personal. While shared assumptions, values, and beliefs guarantee that people from the same culture will be similar in many ways, personal experience guarantees that no two people from the same culture will be identical. To put it another way, each of us is in part a product of culture (and to that extent similar to others from the same culture) and in part a product of our own unique life circumstances (and to that extent like no one else anywhere).
The news here for the culture crosser is not nearly as good, for while the phenomenon of universal behavior makes cross-cultural interaction potentially easier, the phenomenon of personal behavior makes all interactions potentially more complicated. It means that the behavior you might predict or expect of someone, based on what you have learned about his or her culture, will not necessarily occur in any given interaction because a personal influence might override a cultural inclination. In other words, in the right circumstances cultural information will be very useful to you in dealing with foreigners, but it will not always be an accurate predictor of how someone is going to behave.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Figuring Foreigners Out by Craig Storti. Copyright © 1999 Craig Storti. Excerpted by permission of Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Preface to the Second Edition xiii
Self-Assessment: Pre-Test xvii
Introduction xxiii
Chapter 1 What Is Culture? 1
Exercise 1.1 Dinner with Some Brahmins 3
Exercise 1.2 Matching Values and Behavior 6
Exercise 1.3 How Does a Behavior Mean? 9
Exercise 1.4 What Culture Is Not 14
Exercise 1.5 Observation or Interpretation? 18
Chapter 2 Building Blocks of Culture 21
Exercise 2.1 Dialogues 23
Concept of Self: Building Block 1
Exercise 2.2 Dividing the Spoils 26
Exercise 2.3 Individualist-Collectivist 28
Exercise 2.4 Choices 31
Exercise 2.5 What Would You Do? 34
Personal Versus Societal Responsibility: Building Block 2
Exercise 2.6 An Accident 38
Exercise 2.7 Universalist-Particularist 40
Exercise 2.8 Choices 43
Exercise 2.9 What Would You Do? 46
Review Exercise-Building Blocks 1 and 2 50
Concept of Time: Building Block 3
Exercise 2.10 Service with a Smile 55
Exercise 2.11 Monochronic-Polychrome 57
Exercise 2.12 Choices 60
Exercise 2.13 What Would You Do? 63
Locus Of Control: Building Block 4
Exercise 2.14 Who's in Charge Here? 67
Exercise 2.15 Internal-External 69
Exercise 2.16 Choices 72
Exercise 2.17 What Would You Do? 75
Review Exercise-Building Blocks 3 and 4 79
Exercise 2.18 Dialogues Revisited 84
Chapter 3 Styles of Communication 87
Exercise 3.1 Dialogues 88
Verbal Communication
Exercise 3.2 Direct and Indirect Communication 91
Exercise 3.3 Comparing Communication Styles across Cultures 95
Exercise 3.4 Communication Techniques 100
Exercise 3.5 Switching Styles 105
Nonverbal Communication
Exercise 3.6 The Body Language Quiz 111
Exercise 3.7 Nonverbal Communication 114
Exercise 3.8 Dialogues Revisited 119
Chapter 4 Culture in the Workplace 123
Exercise 4.1 Dialogues 124
Exercise 4.2 Power Distance 127
Exercise 4.3 Comparing Workplace Norms across Cultures 130
Exercise 4.4 What Would You Do? 138
Exercise 4.5 Dialogues Revisited 144
Chapter 5 Developing Cultural Awareness 147
Exercise 5.1 The Stages of Cultural Competence 148
Exercise 5.2 The Stages of Cultural Sensitivity 152
Epilogue 157
Self-Assessment: Post-Test 159
Recommended Reading 165
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