In this session, we're going to be talking about the origins of intercultural communication. This is going to give us an idea of the next few videos where they're coming from and a little bit of the origin of the theories behind them. We're going to start with this gentleman here, Edward T. Hall, who was working for the American government and after World War II for the Foreign Services Institute specifically, which was set up in 1946. He's working in the early 1950s trying to help them develop a program to improve their intercultural communication skills around the world. He was an anthropologist by background himself. But what he did was he brought together a variety of fields, which we'll look at in a moment and he is considered today the father of intercultural communication. Some of the books that you can read that he wrote at that time were The Hidden Dimension. He also wrote The Silent Language, and the third book he wrote was Beyond Culture. They will give you a very good idea about intercultural communication to start with. Now, when those fields that he brought together would have been linguistics, anthropology, he would have brought together psychiatry also and biology. He brought all of these together into what we would understand now as intercultural communication. This brings us, they will say to the 1960s and '70s when a Dutch man called Geert Hofstede, who was working at the time for IBM. He interviewed over 200,000 different people who were working for IBM at the time and he brought together all of the results into what were initially four different ways of understanding cultures or dividing out cultures. He looked at the masculinity versus femininity. He looked at collectivism versus individualism, which is an area that is then developed and looked at by many other researchers in the area. Again, he's set up the empirical basis for intercultural communication, which many other researchers then use to develop their theories as well. He also looked at uncertainty avoidance and he looked at the power distance index, which was the differences in terms of authority and levels within the organization. Later on in the 1970s, he added the long-term orientation element to the model, which is based on a Chinese Value Survey, which is done at that time. Then later on with mink of taking data from the water value survey, he also introduce us to the concepts of indulgence versus restraint. But again, we're going go back to those original ideas of collectivism versus individualism, we'll see these repeatedly throughout the other videos as well. Another area, as I've mentioned already was the World Value Survey. The World Value Survey is being constantly updated since the 1980s. It's got a lot of information based on a very comprehensive questionnaire and it also maps out different cultures and groups them together to give us an idea of the different cultures. After that, we can then also look at The Globe study, which was done by House and other researchers around the world. It was a collaborative effort, very definitely linked to the original studies of Geert Hofstede developed two or three other ideas, divided out the areas of masculinity and femininity into gender egalitarianism and also into assertiveness, 62 countries were studied in this and over 16,000 respondents so a lot, very strong theoretical basis there and developed an update of the ideas of Geert Hofstede. We also have at this point as well a few other models that we could look at. For example, we could look at Triandis this is tight versus loose cultures, which breaks cultures down over 30 studies examined that's 30 countries, excuse me, studied here and those 30 plus countries they give us an idea that some cultures, they have very tight cultures, which means that everybody within that culture conforms to the cultural norms. Whereas a loose culture is a culture where everybody has free to do and be whoever they want. This is also important when we're thinking about the sample sizes of the people who are interviewed. Because in a tight study, maybe you're in a tight culture. You need maybe less people in the study. But in a loose culture, you need a much broader sample as well. But again, this is some of the exploration around intercultural communication. We also have people like Richard Lewis. Richard Lewis has divided countries using a triangle, very simple concept that he's done with multilinear and then you've got single aligns and then you've got reactive cultures as well, where he's using time and the way people understand time to divide cultures into different blocks along the different arms of this triangle. Finally, we also have someone like Erin Meyer who has a very simple breakdown using the concept of peaches and coconuts. That there are cultures where people are very soft and friendly on the outside. But then they've got a hard core on the center and there are other cultures that are hired to get to know on the outside. But when you can break through that coconut, you get to have friends for life. Again, these are going from a lot of empirical evidence then going down to simple metaphors like the coconut in the peach. In recent years, we also have people like Aslani and others who've done research with him. Dividing the world into three blocks, into dignity cultures, honor cultures and in face cultures. We'll come back to these and some of the videos later. As you can see, there's a lot of theoretical basis that goes into intercultural communication. I've only mentioned a few of them here. We can go into detail as well with people like [inaudible] or Livermore or [inaudible]. There are many theorists here. The good news for you is there isn't a lot of conflict between their ideas that will be coming through looking at a number of other theorists like Fons Trompenaars as well later on. But you will find that all of them are like an onion and very often culture itself is described as an onion, that people have different layers to their culture and as a result, you have, who you are as a person in one culture. But then underneath that you've got maybe your values and underneath that you've even got your own personal identity, which has been influenced by culture. Well, the study of intercultural communication is also like an onion, but there are many layers to it and that they compliment each other as well. At the moment, it's not that we have a huge division between theoretical schools. If you study any one of the theorists that I've just mentioned or any of the others that I'm going to be looking at in the next videos, you will find that they compliment each other instead of coming into opposition. Look forward to seeing you in the next video.
