2.3. Culture's Dimensions: Value Orientations

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Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication

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National Research University Higher School of Economics

Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication

45 ratings

In the course “Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communications": we will: 1) Build skills in the analysis of the intercultural communication process using Russian-Western communication as an example. 2) Apply the knowledge of interrelations between different contexts of communication (cultural, institutional, professional, social, interpersonal, etc.) to the cultural history and national psychology of Russians. The purpose of the course is to provide the students with a broad overview of the basic principles governing the past, the present and the future interactions between Russia and the West, with a focus on the culture and national psychology of Russians and Western Europeans. For example, we will look at the cases when basic cultural values of Russians show up through the linguistic choices shaping language production which is consequently misattributed by Western partners. No matter what the language of intercultural communication is – Russian, or English – the meaning of many linguistic expressions may be reconstructed wrongly by the representatives of another culture. Some of the basic questions we will tackle are: • What are the concepts of culture that have the strongest influence on communication? • What are Russian basic cultural values and how they shape modern Russian consciousness? • What are the specific communication patterns of modern Russians, including those of public and electronic discourse? • What is important to know about communication with Russians in organizational contexts? Importantly, this course is NOT just a list of practical instructions of dos and don’ts of dealing with Russians. The course contains a substantial academic component introducing the key notions and concepts of the Theory of Communication, which will be extensively introduced throughout the first few modules of the course. These theoretical grounds will be further on used as a tool for analyzing the intercultural communications with Russians.

From the lesson

Culture in Intercultural Communication

This lecture will focus around Culture per se and the language we need to be able to discuss it. The more complex and less formalized is the subject of the discussion, the more crucial are its instruments. We will introduce various dimensions that are applicable to different cultures and will also start to discuss the Russian culture in these terms. Starting this week we will also present short interviews of Prof. Bergelson's with people (non-Russians culturally) who have lived and worked in Russia, and who will serve as experts on various issues and contexts of communication with Russians. As stereotypes are one of the central concepts in the cross-cultural discourse, this week we will see interviews centered on this topic. The experts you will meet -- and not only this week -- are Anna Skaya (CEO VisualDNA Russia), Michael Johnston, (Private Equity Sector Lead Director of Strategy at Deloitte), and Ilya Gnoensky who specializes in crisis management.

2.1. Metaphors of Culture14:54

2.2. Components and Characteristics of Culture14:39

2.3. Culture's Dimensions: Value Orientations13:36

2.4. Cultural Orientations Model (COM)11:45

Meet the Instructors

Mira Bergelson
Professor
Philological Faculty

[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]

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