Module 3.5 – Cultural Image

 

Module 5 – Introduction

How close we stand to someone can make them feel comfortable or threatened. If they feel threatened, they can think of us as being threatening, imposing, aggressive, and definitely unpleasant. The distance depends upon the culture of the person you are talking to. There are similar cultural rules about how we address people, how loudly we speak, and whether we should bow or shake hands. All of these affect the image we create.

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1. Cultural Image

            For reasons best understood and explained by psychologists and cultural anthropologists, how close we stand to someone can make them feel comfortable or threatened. If they feel threatened, they can think of us as being threatening, imposing, aggressive, and definitely unpleasant.

            The distance depends upon where you are and whom you are talking to.

            There are similar rules about how we address people, how loudly we speak, and whether we should bow or shake hands. All of these affect the image we create.

            These, too, vary from place to place and according to whom you are dealing with.

            There is nothing politically incorrect, fawning, subservient, or demeaning about good manners, but “good manners” can also vary from place to place.

            When you travel from country to country—or even from region to region within the same country—you can run into more than a different language or dialect. You can run into a completely different culture. This is especially dangerous when the culture looks enough like your own to make you “think” you know what you are doing.

            Our assumptions frequently trap us, and they can lead to project/programme purpose complications, social embarrassment or hurt feelings, and even serious legal problems. They can also cost us project/programme purpose because they make us look boorish, rude, insensitive, or just plain stupid.

            With supersonic planes that can take us virtually anywhere in the world in less than a day, and with instantaneous communication via phone, fax, e-mail, and the Internet, we tend to forget just how big—and culturally diverse—the world really is, and how we might be perceived in all these different cultures.

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2. Intercultural Tips

            As we have seen, one of the byproducts of modern transportation and communication is the frequency with which we have to learn how to adjust to and work within other cultures. Nipporica Associates is an intercultural communication and relations consulting organization in Leawood, Kansas. The following tips on dealing with other cultures were taken from the 100-plus suggestions they have on their web site at http://www.nipporica.com/tips.htm. Those listed below were chosen because they focus on image, the one you create, and those “created by” people from different cultural backgrounds.

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3. Intercultural Tips (Continued)

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4. Intercultural Tips (Continued)

  • Ask: When you don’t understand something, or are unsure what is either appropriate or inappropriate, or even why… Ask!
  • Honesty: If you make a mistake, or commit a cultural faux pas, make a simple, quick apology.
  • Common Knowledge: Don’t take too much for granted, especially in terms of what you expect someone from a foreign culture to know. Ask yourself, “Have I ever been embarrassed because no one told me something?” Then act accordingly.
  • Patience: Working in a different culture provides many “opportunities” to make mistakes, be unintentionally offensive, and to react in surprising and inappropriate ways. Be patient with yourself, and with others, and move past these occurrences as quickly as possible.
  • Barriers and Shock: A culture barrier is external, and is encountered when two or more people experience a difference of values, assumptions, or expectations of appropriate behaviors. Culture shock is internal, and is a reaction to unfamiliar stimuli. Culture shock can be triggered by the experience of hitting a culture barrier; however, culture shock is a personal experience, whereas a culture barrier is a shared experience.
  • Questions: Most people enjoy talking about themselves and their cultures when asked. This helps develop comfort, warmth, and trust in a relationship.

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5. Showing Respect

            Every culture has specific ways of showing respect. The levels of respect, and the way respect is shown, will usually vary depending upon the importance of the person and your relationship to that person.

            Two reigning queens from similar-sized kingdoms, for example, would treat one another differently than they would were they meeting their own subjects. If you were meeting one of them, your outward signs of respect would depend upon your own title, rank, position, and lineage.

            When you finally do meet the most important person you are probably ever going to meet—that someone you have always wanted to meet—what will you do? Curtsy? Shake hands? Genuflect? Kneel? Lie prostrate on the floor? Salute? Bow? And if you do bow, how deeply will you bow, and how many times?

            If you are wearing a hat, will you take it off? Or, will you have to put one on for the occasion?

            Will you be allowed to start a conversation? Or do you have to wait for him, or her, to start it? When you talk, will you look her, or him, directly in the eye? Or look down at your feet?

            What will people think of you if you don’t do it properly?

            How will you know what to do? Where did you learn it?

            How would you go about learning the proper way to greet someone from a different country or culture?

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6. Titles

            One of the most common ways of showing status is by attaching it to the one symbol everyone has—a name. It doesn’t have to be said to be a status symbol. It can be on your project/programme purpose card, letterhead, or door.

            There are two ways to do it: titles and distinctions.

            Different cultures treat such titles and distinctions differently. If you don’t do it properly, you could be considered rude, ignorant, comical, or someone of so little knowledge, breeding, refinement, or status that no one will bother dealing with you.

            Titles show rank, position, power, education, memberships, and accomplishment.       Some formal titles go in front of the name, such as General, President, Premier, Doctor, Professor, Detective, CEO, Pope, Mother Superior, Rabbi, Captain, Nurse, Judge, and so on. Others come after the name, such as first flautist with the symphony orchestra, or office manager, or chief financial analyst.

            There are also the standard academic distinctions: B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

            Sometimes initials indicate both educational accomplishments and the profession they entitle the person to: medical doctor, M.D.; dentist, D.D.S.; lawyer, J.D.; certified public accountant, CPA; professional engineer, P.E., or a member of an ordained religious community, such as the Society of Jesus, S.J.

            There are also the standard courtesy titles, which, depending upon the organizational culture, may or may not be used, such as Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms.

How titles are used is a good way of determining both organizational culture, and rank. It is also a potential pitfall for the person who fails to use them in the acceptable way.

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7. Nonverbal Code

            Language differs from country to country, even when the same language is spoken. An Englishman from London and an American from Texas often speak radically different—and at times mutually incomprehensible—versions of the same language.

            To be accepted, we have to understand the language and the way it is used.

            While we know that language code is not universal, we sometimes assume nonverbal codes are. They aren’t. Certain gestures, called emblems, have meaning. But, just as words differ from culture to culture, so do emblems.

            The “thumbs up” gesture means, “Good luck!” in the U.S. and Britain. In ancient Rome, it signaled that a gladiator’s life should be spared because he fought well in the Coliseum. In Iran and other parts of the Middle East, however, it means an obscenity.

            Putting your hands on the sides of your head and sticking your index fingers up on each side like a rabbit’s ears might mean you are imitating a bunny for a children’s story in the West. In Japan it means: “I am angry,” or “You are evil.”

            Holding up the index and middle fingers forms the letter “V.” During World War II it stood for “victory.” During the Vietnam War era, it was the “peace symbol” used by anti-war protestors in the United States, and still means “peace.” But in Australia it is a very rude gesture. If you go back to the days of the Roman Legion, and the Roman numerals they used, it may have meant that you were ordering five beers.

            The lack of universality of a gesture has caused many a problem for people trying to communicate, especially when they are unaware of regional, cultural or other nuances that the gesture can connote.

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8. The Look

“Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of ‘just looking.’”
            -- Victor Burgin, American communication theorist

            According to Daniel Chandler, a communication theorist at the University of Wales, the way we look at people and at ourselves, and even what we do and do not look at, is regulated by our culture.

            Not knowing how to “look” can be as damaging as not knowing how to address a action sponsor/beneficiary, or how to conduct yourself at a restaurant, social outing, or project/programme purpose meeting. As he says at his web site, at http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze07.html: “There are social codes of looking (including taboos on certain kinds of looking).”

            “Children are instructed to ‘look at me,’ not to stare at strangers, and not to look at certain parts of the body... People have to look in order to be polite, but not to look at the wrong people or in the wrong place, e.g. at deformed people.”

            Amongst the Luo tribe, in Kenya, he says that you should not look at your mother-in-law. In Nigeria, you never look at a high-status person. In some South American Indian tribes, you do not look directly at the person you are talking to. If you are having a conversation in Japan, look at the person’s neck, not the face.

            How long we can look at someone is also a cultural issue. He says Arabs, Latin Americans and southern Europeans look longer than the British or white Americans, while black Americans look less.

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9. The Look (Continued)

            In some cultures too short a gaze—looking away too quickly—is seen as “insincere, dishonest or impolite whilst…(in other cultures) too much gaze (staring) is seen as threatening, disrespectful and insulting.

            “Within the bounds of the cultural conventions, people who avoid one’s gaze may be seen as nervous, tense, evasive and lacking in confidence whilst people who look a lot may tend to be seen as friendly and self-confident.”

            He also describes what he calls the “sustained hate stare,” the look bigots give to those they feel superior to. This sort of “look” can lead to depersonalization and victimization.

            There is also the “tourist gaze” which indicates that you are a visitor. It also reflects that you are wealthy enough, and have enough status and free time, to travel to different part of the world and see different cultures.

            People who are in love, courting, or flirting, have noticeable different ways of looking at one another, as do people who dislike or hate one another.

            “Codes of looking are particularly important in relation to gender,” he adds.     “One woman reported to a male friend: ‘One of the things I really envy about men is the right to look’. She pointed out that in public places, ‘men could look freely at women, but women could only glance back surreptitiously.’”

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10. Your Image as a Decision Maker

            If you are an executive or a manager, part of your job is making decisions.

            Is the ability to make decisions quickly the sign of a good manager? Are you a better manager is you make them quickly? Or slowly?

It all depends where you are.

            If you are in China, good decisions take time, according to a 1998 article in CIO Magazine, where writers Perry Glasser and Richard Pastore talk about differences in management styles and the decision-making process in the East and the West.

            “The biggest specific difference between Western and Chinese project/programme purpose culture is in decision making. Quick decisions are alien to the Chinese. Rapid decision making, incorporating quickly gathered and processed information, is a sign of an aggressive, highly competent manager in the West.

            “But to the Chinese, haste is the sign of an idiot.

            “The Chinese prefer to deliberate longer, even on decisions that might take Western managers five minutes.”

            The article quotes Richard Loi, managing director of United Parcel Service (UPS) in Beijing, who says that within the Eastern concept of doing project/programme purpose: “A snap decision to them is an insult.

            “They want to feel honored that you bring issues to them and ask what they would do. Even if you think it’s a simple decision, mull it over and talk to them about it.”

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Assignments

 

Matching the Columns

1.   Common knowledge

A.   It is impossible to compare other cultures based on this.  If we want to understand why people behave the way they do, we must understand the contexts.

2.   Questions 

B.  An effective way of presenting information and attitudes in all cultures.  They can reinforce theory and bring a concept of life.

3.    Tell stories

C. Don’t take too much for granted, especially in terms of what you expect someone from a foreign culture to know.  

4.    Know thyself

D. In order to understand differences and by sensitive to others, you must be aware of your own thoughts, feelings, and biases.  

5.    Values

E. Most people enjoy talking about themselves and their cultures when asked.  

6.    Patience

F.  We must be this way with ourselves while working in different cultures because we may make mistakes, be offensive, and react surprising and inappropriate ways.

 

Answers:  (1-C, 2-E, 3-B, 4-D, 5-A, 6-F)


Multiple Choice

 

 

1.         When traveling from country to country you can run into a completely different ________.

a.       Language

b.      Dialect

c.       Culture

d.      All of the above

 

2.         Usually varies depending upon the importance of the person and your relationship to that person.

            a.  Levels of respect

            b.  The greeting

            c.  Attire

            d.  None of the above

 

3.         One of the most common ways of showing status is by attaching it to the one symbol everyone has - _______.

            a.  A house

            b.  A job

            c.  A name

            d.  An education

 

4.         The two ways to show your status is through ______ and ______.

            a.  Education; power

            b.  Titles; distinctions

            c.  Position; accomplishments

            d.  Money; class

 

5.         How titles are used is a good way of determining both ______ and ______.

            a.  organizational culture; rank

            b.  Class; education

            c.  Position; accomplishments

            d.  None of the above

 

6.         Just as words different from culture to culture, so do ________.

            a.  Emblems

            b.  Positions

            c.  Languages

            d.  None of the above

 

7.         The way we look at people and at ourselves, and even what we do and do not look at, is regulated by our _______.

            a.  Language

            b.  Parents

            c.  Culture

            d.  Job

 

8.         A __________________ is a sort of “look” that can lead to depersonalization and victimization.

            a.  Tourist gaze

            b.  Sustained hate stare

            c.  Short gaze

            d.  Stare

 


Summary

 

            As we have seen, our assumptions frequently trap us, and can lead to project/programme purpose complications, social embarrassment, hurt feelings, and even serious legal problems. They can also cost us project/programme purpose because they make us look boorish, rude, insensitive, or just plain stupid. We cannot assume that everyone else in the world plays by the same rules that we do, or that they will react the same way someone from our cultural background would in a similar situation.

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Test

 

1. ______        A “sustained hate stare” reflects that you are wealthy enough and have enough status and free time to travel different parts of the world.

2. ______        In some cultures too short a gaze is seen as insincere, dishonest, or impolite whilst.

3. ______        The biggest specific difference between Western and Chinese project/programme purpose culture is in the project/programme purpose attire.

4. ______        How close we stand to someone can make them feel comfortable or threatened.

5. ______        Good manners never very from one culture to another.

6. ______        Our assumptions frequently trap us, and they can lead to project/programme purpose complications, social embarrassment, hurt feelings, and serious legal problems.    

7. ______        One of the byproducts of modern transportation and communication is the ability to ignore other cultures.

8. ______        When dealing with other cultures, it is a good idea to estimate the amount of time required for a project and then double it.

9. ______        Culture shock can be triggered by the experience of hitting a culture barrier.

10.______       If you make a mistake, or commit a cultural faux pas, you should make a simple, quick apology.

 


 

Answers:

1.      F – tourist gaze

2.      T

3.      F – decision making

4.      T

5.      F – can vary from culture to culture

6.      T

7.      F – frequency we have to learn to adjust and work with other cultures.

8.      T

9.      T

10.  T


Bibliography

 

Adler, P. (1975). The transitional experience: An alternative view of the culture shock. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 15, 10-14.

 

Ting-Toomey, S. (1985). Toward a theory of conflict and culture. In W. Gudykunst, L.

 

Stewart, & S. Ting-Toomey (Eds.). Communication, culture, and organizational processes. (pp. 71-85). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

 

Weaver, G. (Ed.). (1998). Culture, communication and conflict: Readings in intercultural relations. Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster.

 


Glossary

 

Culture barrier – Is encountered externally when two or more people share an experience of a difference of values, assumptions, or expectations of appropriate behaviors. 

 

Culture shock – Is an internal reaction to unfamiliar stimuli and can be triggered by the experience of hitting a culture barrier.

 

Mindfulness – Being aware of your own reactions to what is going on and how it is based in your own culture.

 

Divergence – Letting the group you are a part of and your conversations collide, so you can explore and understand one another’s different opinions before coming to an agreement or common understanding.

 


Learning Objectives

 

·         There are similar cultural rules about how we address people, how loudly we speak, and whether we should bow or shake hands.  All of these affect the image we create.

·        We cannot assume that everyone else in the world plays by the same rules that we do, or that they will react the same way someone from our cultural background would in a similar situation.

 


Q&A

 

1.  What is the difference between a sustained hate stare and the tourist gaze?

A sustained hate stare is a sort of look that can lead to depersonalization and victimization.  The tourist gaze indicates that you are a visitor and that you are wealthy enough, and have enough status and free time, to travel to different parts of the world and see different cultures.

 

2.  What is the difference between a culture barrier and culture shock?

A culture barrier is external and is encountered when two or more people experience a difference of values, assumptions, or expectations of appropriate behaviors.  Culture shock is internal and is a reaction to unfamiliar stimuli.

 

3.  What do titles say about status?

One of the most common ways of showing status is by attaching it to the one symbol everyone has – a name.  A name reveals titles and distinctions.  Titles show rank, position, power, education, memberships, and accomplishments.   Therefore, titles are a good way of determining both organizational culture and rank. 

 

 

End of Module