1.5 Theories of Cross-cultural Communication

Many frameworks attempt to define cultural norms that guide social interaction. Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Edward T. Hall, and Jeanne M. Brett are some researchers who have developed frameworks to describe different cultures. A brief description is provided below for each framework or prototype.

Hofstede

Social psychologist Geert Hofstede (Hofstede, 1982, 2001, 2005) is one of the most well-known researchers in cross-cultural communication and management. Hofstede’s theory places cultural dimensions on a continuum that range from high to low and really only make sense when the elements are compared to another culture. Hofstede’s dimensions include the following:

• Power distance: High power distance means a culture accepts and expects a great deal of hierarchy; low power distance means the president and janitor could be on the same level.
• Individualism: High individualism means that a culture tends to put individual needs ahead of group or collective needs.
• Uncertainty avoidance: High uncertainty avoidance means a culture tends to go to some lengths to be able to predict and control the future. Low uncertainty avoidance means the culture is more relaxed about the future, which sometimes shows in being willing to take risks.
• Masculinity: High masculinity relates to a society valuing traits that were traditionally considered masculine, such as competition, aggressiveness, and achievement. A low masculinity score demonstrates traits that were traditionally considered feminine, such as cooperation, caring, and quality of life.
• Long-term orientation: High long-term orientation means a culture tends to take a long- term, sometimes multi-generational view when making decisions about the present and the future. Low long-term orientation is often demonstrated in cultures that want quick results and that tend to spend instead of save.
• Indulgence: High indulgence means cultures that are okay with people indulging their desires and impulses. Low indulgence or restraint-based cultures value people who control or suppress desires and impulses.

These tools can provide wonderful general insight into making sense of understanding differences and similarities across key below-the-surface cross-cultural elements, but remember that people are still individuals and may or may not conform to what’s listed in the tools.

Trompenaars

Fons Trompenaars is another researcher who came up with a different set of cross-cultural measures. These are his seven dimensions of culture (The seven dimensions of culture, n.d.):

• Universalism vs. particularism: the extent that a culture is more prone to apply rules and laws as a way of ensuring fairness, in contrast to a culture that looks at the specifics of context and looks at who is involved, to ensure fairness. The former puts the task first; the latter puts the relationship first.
• Individualism vs. communitarianism: the extent that people prioritize individual interests versus the community’s interest.
• Specific vs. diffuse: the extent that a culture prioritizes a head-down, task-focused approach to doing work, versus an inclusive, overlapping relationship between life and work.
• Neutral vs. emotional: the extent that a culture works to avoid showing emotion versus a culture that values a display or expression of emotions.
• Achievement vs. ascription: the degree to which a culture values earned achievement in what you do versus ascribed qualities related to who you are based on elements like title, lineage, or position.
• Sequential time vs. synchronous time: the degree to which a culture prefers doing things one at a time in an orderly fashion versus preferring a more flexible approach to time with the ability to do many things at once.
• Internal direction vs. outer direction: the degree to which members of a culture believe they have control over themselves and their environment versus being more conscious of how they need to conform to the external environment.

High context and low context cultures

Cultural context is a concept developed by cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall (Hall and Hall 1990; Hall 1976). In his model, context refers to the stimuli, environment, or ambiance surrounding an event.

Communicators in low-context cultures (such as those in North America, Scandinavia, and Germany) depend little on the context of a situation to convey their meaning. They assume that listeners know very little and must be told practically everything. Low-context cultures tend to be logical, analytical, action-oriented, and concerned with the individual.

In high-context cultures (such as those in Japan, China, and Arab countries), the listener is already “contexted” and does not need to be given much background information^[3]. High-context cultures are more likely to be intuitive, contemplative, and concerned with the collective. Communicators in high-context cultures pay attention to more than the words spoken – they also pay attention to interpersonal relationships, nonverbal expressions, physical settings, and social settings. In high-context cultures, communication cues are transmitted by posture, voice inflection, gestures, and facial expression. Establishing relationships is an important part of communicating and interacting. Unlike the linear communication style preferred in low-context cultures, high-context communicators may use spiral logic, circling around a topic indirectly and looking at it from many tangential or divergent viewpoints. A conclusion may be implied but not argued directly.

Brett’s Prototypes of Culture

Jeanne M. Brett (2014) described three prototypes of culture: dignity, face, and honor.  According to Brett’s framework, Western European and North American regions have a dignity culture, Asia has a face culture, and the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America have an honor culture.

• Dignity Culture is the prototype of Western society. The key characteristic of dignity culture is the emphasis on the individual. Self-worth—one’s value to society in dignity culture—is self-determined or intrinsic, independent from social status, and therefore quite stable even in social situations that are much more threatening to self-worth in other cultures. In such an environment, people are quite concerned for their own welfare, and rather less concerned about the welfare of others.
• Face Culture is the prototype of East Asian societies. The key characteristic of face culture is the emphasis on the interests of the collective, relative to those of the individual. (By collective we mean the groups to which people belong.) Self-worth—one’s value to society in face culture—is socially conferred. Face depends on a person’s relative position in a stable social hierarchy, and on fulfillment of the person’s role obligations in that society. Thus people are very concerned with the status and welfare of the groups from which they derive face.
• Honor Culture societies are distributed geographically around the world and constitute our third prototype. Honor culture is characteristic of Middle Eastern and North African cultures, Latin American cultures, and to some extent, Southern European cultures.  In honor cultures, self-worth is an individual’s estimate of their own value as socially claimed from and recognized by society. Thus self-worth in honor cultures combines elements of self-worth as defined in dignity cultures with elements of self-worth as defined in face cultures.

Understanding self-worth, power and status, sensitivity to insults, confrontation style, trust, and mindset from the perspective of dignity, face, and honor culture means that when you see people acting quite like one of these cultural prototypes, you can avoid interpreting their behavior through the lens of your own culture and see it instead as an expression of their own culture.

A Final Note

In the description of different cultural frameworks, particular individuals are not being described but cultural prototypes, or central tendencies of thought and action that have developed historically in those cultures and still hold, even if not practiced by all people in that culture. We should assume neither that all people in a particular culture follow all norms of that culture. There are subcultures within cultures; not everyone is going to act exactly like the cultural prototype or framework. The purpose of discussing the different frameworks is to help you see cultural differences that may affect communication.

You can learn more about the different frameworks in the Culture section of Intercultural Business Communication.