0:05
In the previous video, we introduced the concept of culture shock.
In this video, we will take a closer look at it.
You can probably already appreciate that even the mild form of culture shock,
experienced by the sales people who moved from one company to the next,
is disruptive to team performance.
Obviously, it affected global firms' sells team,
since the team had to go out and recruit new members.
But the concept was originally developed during an earlier era of anthropology,
when researchers like me would go away for
prolonged periods with very little contact with their home countries.
For example, when I went to Brazil in the 1970s for
a prolonged stint of field research, about 2 and a half years,
I had no phone contact with the United States and only intermittent mail contact.
Probably half the letters would get lost.
That situation is obviously different from the present day, when we have phone and
Internet communication almost everywhere.
But understanding the more extreme forms of culture shock can better help us to
comprehend the little shocks that disrupt many teams of all sizes.
1:16
Initially, the sojourners report elation and optimism associated with
positive expectations regarding interaction with their hosts.
As they actually become involved in the role relationships and
encounter frustrations in trying to achieve certain goals
when the proper means are unclear or unacceptable, they become confused and
depressed and express negative attitudes regarding the host country.
1:57
What I want to stress here is the relationship between culture and feelings,
or emotions.
As we'll see in unit three of this course,
team cultures regularly develop mechanisms for calling up
positive feelings that motivate individual members to contribute to group efforts.
These mechanisms crucially involve rituals and symbols.
We'll be looking at the roll of rituals and symbols in teams of different sorts.
2:24
Culture shock is related to what anthropologist Anthony F C Wallace
referred to as mazeway disintegration.
Wallace was actually my predecessor here at Penn many years
ago as Chair of the Anthropology Department.
In any case you can think of a mazeway as a kind of a mental map for life.
The analogy here is to the actual mazeways used by
psychologists in their experiments with rats.
2:50
Wallace felt that each of us had such a mazeway in our head.
Wallace's idea was that the mazeway includes the goals we're trying to
achieve, as well as the plans and processes and techniques for
achieving those goals.
If you think back about our earlier definition of culture,
you'll remember that includes goals and values.
In so far as we acquire those goals and
values through social learning from others.
It also includes ways of behaving and speaking.
These are the analogues to the plans, processes, and
techniques in Wallace's mazeways.
Wallace was interested in extreme cases of mazeway disintegration, as for
example after natural disasters, but also dramatic cross-cultural encounters.
Many Native Americans, for example,
experienced mazeway disintegration when Europeans colonized the new world.
They experienced new and strange ways of life.
New preconceived routines.
Different ways of reasoning about the world.
Situations like the one experienced by the recently hired Global Farm
sales personnel are small scale examples of this kind of disintegration.
I myself never experienced this kind of deep culture shock that causes significant
depression.
However, I do recall my sense of shock as I became more deeply involved in Brazilian
culture.
I remember that many of my middle class Brazilian friends, when they were driving
on city streets, would see a pedestrian crossing in front of them.
And for me, shockingly, say in an aggressive tone of voice,
that guy wants to die, as they accelerated towards the pedestrian.
I experienced the game myself many times as a pedestrian.
And it invariably angered and upset me, as well as being frightening.
In particularly memorable incident, I was in Rio crossing the Avenida Beira Mar,
which has several lanes going in one direction.
There was only one car on the road at the time, fairly far away and
in the lane closest to me.
I knew that I would be well across the road before the car arrived.
4:54
But I did not figure that the car would actually accelerate sharply,
zoom across the three lanes, and aim straight at me.
As I jumped out of the way, I heard him yelling at me and
gesticulating out the window.
I felt enraged, simultaneously occurred to me, hey, wait, you're an anthropologist.
You're experiencing culture shock, because this is not the way people drive
where you grew up, or at least they didn't have that particular game.
That realization help me to cope with my cultural shock.
Greg Urban, Ph.D.Professor
