WHAT IS CULTURE?

The concept of culture is vague, general, carrying several meanings and elusive, giving birth to a host of assumptions. Edouard Herriot, a French writer and politician, has defined culture as what remains when one has forgotten everything.

Culture may be understood as a system of widely accepted beliefs and assumptions that are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning process. They pertain to people and their interaction, the relationship between them and their environment, how they deal most effectively with their environments given their available resources (Trompenaars, 1993).As mentioned by Ross (1997b), “culture is a framework for organizing the world, for locating the self and others in it, for making sense of the actions and interpreting motives of others.” Herskovitz (1995) considers culture as the “human- made part of the environment,” where man left its print on nature. Triandis (1994) distinguishes between “subjective culture” made of categories, norms, roles, and values, the underlying grammar for interpreting messages and “objective culture,” regrouping human products such as tools, chairs, and airplanes.

Clearly, people are constrained both by reality and by their perception of reality. They tend to act according to beliefs and values provided by their culture. “The role of culture is to answer questions even before they are raised,” observes a French sociologist (Akoun, 1989).

Culture leads to specific behaviors but also and chiefly to differing modes of thinking. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Nisbett and Masuda have shown evidence of opposed modes in their cognitive approach by the Americans and Japanese. The latter start from the context and give a great importance to it. By contrast, Americans move directly toward what seems to them most significant, the interaction itself. The Chinese intellectual approach appears as holistic and based on empirical evidence, whereas Western thinking is analytical and lies on abstract logic. Thus, linear thinking with its rules of univocal relations of causation and the definition of conceptual categories is not a universal way of understanding but is a typically Western approach.

Hall (1976) divides cultures into two clusters, high versus low context, according to the importance people give to the environment in collecting data, interpreting signals, and acting. The Chinese or Japanese belong to high context societies, resorting more for instance to indirect action and implicit expressions, whereas Westerners are parts of low context societies where action is far more direct, and their expressions more explicit.

Hofstede (1980; 2001) distinguishes five basic dimensions of culture that may be used to classify the behavior of negotia­tors. One dimension concerns the power distance between actors, which expresses the willingness of people to accept hierarchical differences. Another measure is the tendency to avoid uncertainty, which is narrowly related to stress, stability, and the desire for rule enforcement. A third dimension, individualism, deals with the relationship between the individual and the collectivity. The last dimension, masculinity, relates to ambition defined as the desire to achieve success (for instance, in business), to be the best, and to earn more. This is opposed to the feminine pole, which means taking a more modest stance, a relation-oriented attitude, and a care for giving support, for nurturing. The last dimension, timeframe, opposes long­term and short-term orientations in goals. The behavior of social actors such as negotiators may be ranked in each of these categories. In a comparative mode, national cultural profiles may be characterized with the help of these indicators.

Language is a cultural output that may help to apprehend how cultural factors influence social action. A basic function of language is to structure reality and organize experience. Language provides categories to seize and express what is perceived and to turn it into thinking. Any particular language has its own set of categories to interpret reality. These categories may considerably differ from one society to another.

National ethnic cultures strongly contribute to shaping what is usually referred to as a “national negotiating style” by combining their own influence with that of history, and of the political system. Subcultures such as family culture, religious culture, gender culture, or corporate culture may also influence negotiation behavior by providing their own norms of conduct, symbols, and meanings.

Cultures are not homogenous, monolithic. They aggregate elements coming from the environmental conditions, and from history. The rationale of a culture is extremely difficult to discern. It is far from being a coherent and stable system of values but rather a “bundle of cultural norms” that are subject to “dialectic tension” (Janosik, 1987). The outcome of the cultural management of these tensions may vary according to time and people. Thus, Blaker (1977) distinguishes between two very different domestic ideals of conflict resolution within the Japanese culture, the “harmonious cooperation” and the “warrior ethic.” Both ideals are rather incompatible but at the same time they are strongly embedded in the Japanese tradition. According to circumstances, one or the other can be legitimate. These tensions between values provide some internal dynamics for change and, as a consequence, the related behaviors become much less predictable than they appear in the Hofstede model. In the same fashion, French culture has always been articulated around conflicting values such as liberty and equality. According to the period, one or the other would dominate, eliciting a change in priorities. This variation on the scale of preferences can be viewed as an indicator of the cultural dynamics.