[MUSIC] So the next item on the menu is culture's dimensions or parameters. As soon as this importance of comparing cultures that started from this first book of Edward Hull was understood and internalized by the scholars. There was immediately this surge, this movement to try and find the parameters and variables with which we could describe cultural differences. Because cultural differences were here, they were observable. What the scholars needed, what the specialist, professionals needed for practical reasons as well, was the language we could describe these differences. We call it, cultural parameters or dimensions here. The first thing that scholars and practitioners would look at would be value orientations because all these parameters were connected, related to the deeply lying layers of culture that differentiate cultures between each other which we call values. Search was started already in Edward Hall books with his description of different attitude towards time that people may have and proxemics as well. Speaking about time as single-focused, or multi-focused, attitudes that different cultures would demonstrate. Then a very important line of research by Francis Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck. They worked out a special questionnaire that people from different cultures would fill out and depending on the way they were answering, they were giving their responses, they created for probably the first table, the first paradigm of different value orientations that we will look in a few minutes in more detail. Not less important and famous Sociologist Geert Hofstede, whose books were actually, the most prominent works on intercultural communication in the 70s and 80s. And I use the titles of his book, Cultures, Dimensions, and Culture Consequences. These are the titles of his books. Who worked out 4 dimensions with which he described cultures in 110 countries of the world where he was also working with questionnaires that the employees of the IBM companies in these countries were filling out. And so with having the organizational culture from the same corporation keeping it the same, he was able to find differences in national cultures. Michael Bond was following in his steps, and also famous important works by Trompenaars. So these are probably the most important names. Of course I didn't list everyone whose works allowed us to find more and more analytical descriptions using various features and parameters, of course sometimes over lapping with each other in order to describe culture. So they were looking at the features that could be observed in behavior through the search. And that were reflected in certain communication patterns that people realized in their communicative behavior. Besides that what else we could considered to be culture's dimension or culture's parameters. That will be the way how we acquire culture, how we get cultural knowledge, or how we become culturally competent. This happens as all sociologist will know through the process of enculturation or as it's call socialization. When as young babies, we are growing up in certain cultures and acquire this culture in the process of our socialization. But at the same time, many people in the world, maybe not the majority of the Earth's population, but a great variety of cases, is when people get to know some other culture. Be it at home for some reasons, communicating and interacting with different representatives of one culture. Actually going from one organization to another, we have to acquire to adapt to some other culture, and that's process is also called cultural adaptation. It includes acculturation, when we managed to learn something about another culture. Manage to reflect somehow about it and use what we know about this culture in our behavior and our interactions. So we get acculturated to certain cultures. As I said it could just going to work in a new profession, or living in another region of a country, or changing organization or going abroad to live in some other far away country. This process of course has many stages in its process and their achievement to the full achievement to the full realization to this process could be called assimilation. This is the situation when this new acquired culture to which we are getting adapted becomes absolutely close to us in some way, ousting the patterns of behavior, the patterns of interaction that were known to us as our native culture. So, the process of simulation is more typical when we speak about certain groups of people. An individual usually goes through a process of acculturation. But when we talk about a certain group as a represent of a culture, and this culture is being dominated by the culture of the country where they now live. Or in some other circumstances when the initial, native culture of this group is being lost, and it takes place in time with generations, usually it's not the first generation. Then we talk about assimilation. So it's mostly process typical for groups. And one more dimension that we need to add here is the dimension of how we chunk culture, in terms of various groups that will make it. We talk about culture or co-culture or subculture, or group, or as linguists would put it and how we discussed it last week, in terms of discourse community. This chunking into groups, allows us to contextualize differences and similarities. Because, if you remember we said that cultures complex and heterogeneous. So, in order to capture differences more precisely to make it more situational, the sociologist introduced the idea of groups as something that could be characterized by culture. Now, coming to this idea of value orientations questionnaire and how the research is performed what we get as a result. Let's say a few words about questionnaires used by Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck. That was quite long ago, their first publication was in 1962, and you can find some sample questions from this questionnaire in the hyperlink at the screen to see how it was performed. The result that they would get, the product that they would get after they worked with these questionnaires would look kind of like this table. Where you have certain issues in the left column like human nature, human relationship to nature, time orientation, activity orientation, relational orientation and forcible value orientations that each of this issue would be, where it would be found. Of course, these words like able, neutral, good, past, present, future, are just labels and in order to make sense of this, we need to understand what is behind this label. And I will just give you two examples that were used as questions to get the answer in the questionnaire by Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck. So when they were searching what they later called human relationship to nature, kind of questions they would suggest with the situations like following, imagine that some person had a lot of livestock and some of this cattle just died. How would you talk about the reasons why it happened to this man? And there was also the answers that were suggested. So the respondent had only to choose one. One suggestion would be well, it happens, Gretel got ill, it's a normal thing that may happens and you cannot do anything about this, we can't be the masters of the situation with infectional diseases. So the master of this livestock is not to be blamed. The second answer would be well, of course, it's this person, he's responsible, it was his livestock you've had to do something and fix it and be able to control the situation. The third answer would be, well probably something was wrong with this people, with this person mind. Maybe he was not in the context with the environment around him, maybe he was not in harmony with the animals who provided food for him, so it just got out of balance. And these three answers would be then reflected on this table as subjugation, submission to nation when they cannot do anything. It's just you know, things happen and the master of his livestock was not able to influence it. The mastery answers would say okay, you are the master, you own this cattle, you have to do something about it, it's your fault that it happened like that. And the third one, harmony. An attitude to nature that, well you have to be in balance, and if bad things happen, it means that we got out of this balance. The second example about time orientation which is labeled here as either past or present or future, can be judged by the answers to the following situation offered in the questionnaire. How would you educate your children? What would we use? And the answers that were given were like follow, well we need to teach our children on the examples from the history of our people, or our family, our town. They need to use these examples and follow them in their life. That will guarantee that they will, grow up as a nice people and they will be successful in their life. Another answer will be like the following, well of course it's very important to pay attention to what our forebears, fathers, forefathers did and the history of our family, city, nation, whatever. But you know life is also so dynamic. We need to take into account what happens now. For instance, when we choose profession for our children we have to look at the world around us, it is important. And then the future orientation, of course, would be expressed by the ideas like following. Well, when you educate your children, when you try to grow them up as good and effective and has a successful and happy people, you have to think about their future, forget about things that happened before, this world, there's no more here. They will be living in the future, we need to look at the tendencies that are taking place and prepare them for their future life. So that's basically just examples of how this value orientations could be worked out. [MUSIC]
