What is the ongoing negotiation of learned and patterned beliefs attitudes values and behaviors?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Define culture.
2. Define personal, social, and cultural identities.
3. Summarize nondominant and dominant identity development.
4. Explain why difference matters in the study of culture and identity.

Culture is a complicated word to define, as there are at least six common ways that culture is used in the United States. For the purposes of exploring the communicative aspects of culture, we will defineculture as the ongoing negotiation of learned and patterned beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors. Unpacking the definition, we can see that culture shouldn’t be conceptualized as stable and unchanging. Culture is “negotiated,” and as we will learn later in this chapter, culture is dynamic, and cultural changes can be traced and analyzed to better understand why our society is the way it is. The definition also points out that culture is learned, which accounts for the importance of socializing institutions like family, school, peers, and the media. Culture is patterned in that there are recognizable widespread similarities among people within a cultural group. There is also deviation from and resistance to those patterns by individuals and subgroups within a culture, which is why cultural patterns change over time. Last, the definition acknowledges that culture influences our beliefs about what is true and false, our attitudes including our likes and dislikes, our values regarding what is right and wrong, and our behaviors. It is from these cultural influences that our identities are formed.

Check Your Understanding

Glossary

Culture – the ongoing negotiation of learned and patterned beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviours.
Direct cultures – business conversations can move directly to business without informal conversation.
Feminine orientation – a cultural value of modest, caring values.
High-power distance culture – there are clear hierarchies of power, especially in manager-subordinate organizational roles. You may need to take extra care to elicit feedback and involve senior administrators in discussion because their cultural framework may preclude their participation.
Indirect cultures – business conversations may start with discussions of the weather, or family, or topics other than business as the partners gain a sense of each other, long before the topic of business is raised.
International communication – communication between nations, or two or more people from different nations.
Long-term orientation – relationships often marked by persistence, thrift and frugality, and an order to relationships based on age and status.
Low-power distance culture – people relate to one another more as equals and less as a reflection of dominant or subordinate roles.
Masculine orientation – a cultural value of assertive and competitive behaviour.
Materialistic culture – members place emphasis on external goods and services as a representation of self, power, and social rank.
Monochromatic time – interruptions are to be avoided, and everything has its own specific time.
Polychromatic time – more complicated, with business and family mixing with dinner and dancing, events do not necessarily start on time.
Political systems – framed in terms of how people are governed, and the extent to which they may participate.
Relationship cultures – value people and relationships more than material objects.
Rites of Initiation – marks the passage of the individual to become part of the community.
Short-term orientation – a culture whose people value immediate results and grow impatient when those results do not materialize.

Additional Resources

Global Affairs Canada, Cultural Information: Answers to your intercultural questions from a Canadian and a local point of view  https://www.international.gc.ca/cil-cai/country_insights-apercus_pays/ci-ic_ca.aspx?lang=eng

Cultures at Work: Intercultural Communication in the Canadian Workplace by Ana Maria Fantino (2006) http://volunteeralberta.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Cultures-at-Work-Ana-Maria-Fantino-2006.pdf

Conestoga College: Welcome to Intercultural Communication https://www.conestogac.on.ca/intercultural-communication/

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