Cultural Diversity

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Cultural Diversity

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Cultural Diversity

• Diversity comes from the Latin verb divertere, to
  differ.
• It is the condition of being different or having
  differences.
• Diversity implies a lack of standardization, of
  orderliness, of homogeneity.
• When we talk about diversity, we are talking
  about the other, whatever that other might be
• someone of a different gender, race, class,
  national origin

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Cultural Diversity

• somebody at a greater or lesser distance from the
  norm
• someone outside the set or
• someone who doesnt fit into the mental
  configurations that give our lives order and
  meaning.
• In short, diversity is desirable in principle,
  but may not be so in practice.
• Long live diversityas long as it conforms to my
  standards, to my mind set, to my view of life, to
  my sense of order.

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Cultural Diversity

• The United States, by its very nature, by its
  very development, is the essence of diversity.
• It is diverse in its geography, population,
  institutions, technology, its social, cultural,
  and intellectual modes.
• What makes the U.S. so attractive to immigrants
  are the protections and opportunities it offers.

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Cultural Diversity

• The true history of the U.S. is the one of
  struggle against intolerance, against oppression,
  against xenophobia, against those forces that
  have prohibited persons from participating in the
  larger life of the society on the basis of their
  race, their gender, their religion, their
  national origin, their linguistic, and cultural
  background.
• What keeps our society together is tolerance for
  cultural, religious, social, political, and even
  linguistic differences.

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Cultural Diversity

• Nonetheless, in this new century, we will need
  attitudes and behaviors that recognize and
  promote interdependence and cooperation among
  various cultural groups, both nationally and
  globally.
• However, the process of interdependence and
  cooperation is made more complex by the presence
  of more than one set of core referents and
  beliefs.

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Cultural Diversity

• Core referents and beliefs are influenced by
  cultural proximity, majority-minority relations,
  migratory trajectories, economic conditions in
  the receiving country, and by length of stay,
  age, sex and gender roles.
• Getting this fact understood in a society based
  on individualism and competition is not easy.
• We are a nation founded in independence.

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Cultural Diversity

• Americans have a great desire for autonomy and
  self-reliance.
• Separateness is a cultural norm for us.
• Our heroes are lonesome cowboys and hard-boiled
  detectives who work by themselves.
• Our economic system is based on individual
  enterprise, entrepreneurship, and competition.

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Cultural Diversity

• In the workplace, the goal is to get to the
  top, despite our understanding that it is
  lonely at the top.
• Indeed for Americans, changing our attitudes and
  behaviors so that our society will be able to
  adapt and survive is challenging.

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Cultural Perceptions

• Our perceptions of the world influence how we
  behave and communicate.
• By observing the way people around us behave, we
  learn how to interpret our world.
• Cultural perceptions arise from our
  interpretations of our highly individualistic and
  unique set of experiences in the culture in which
  we have been raised.
• Moreover, how we react to our perceptions is a
  result of our learning and cultural conditioning.

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Cultural Perceptions

• Although each individual perceives his or her own
  individual reality, groups of individuals,
  through cultural conditioning, tend to perceive
  the universe in similar ways.
• Whether one will salivate or regurgitate at the
  thought of eating the meat of a cow, fish, dog,
  or snake will depend on how thoroughly one has
  internalized the attitudes and values of the
  culture in which he or she has been raised.

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Culture Versus Ideology

• Culture encompasses a set of distinctive
  spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional
  features of society or a social group, that are
  reflected in art and literature, lifestyles, ways
  of living together, value systems, traditions and
  beliefs.
• Ideology, on the other hand, is comprised of the
  ideas of a group, their nature and source, and
  the doctrines, opinions or ways of thinking of a
  group.

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Culture Versus Ideology

• Ideologies are attached to an agreed upon set of
  beliefs or a creed.
• Beliefs, in a general sense, can be viewed as
  individually held subjective probabilities that
  some object or event possesses certain
  characteristics.
• A belief involves a link between the belief
  object and the characteristics which distinguish
  it.
• Whether we accept the New York Times, the Bible,
  the entrails of a goat, tea leaves, the visions
  induced by peyote, or the changes specified in
  the Taoist I Ching as sources of knowledge
  depends on our cultural background and
  experience.

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Beliefs

• Ideologies are attached to an agreed upon set of
  beliefs or a creed.
• These beliefs represent a tenet or body of tenets
  held by a group.
• A belief may be reflected in the conviction of
  the truth of some statement (e.g., the Nicene
  Creed) or in the reality of some being or
  phenomenon.

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Beliefs

• Whether we accept the New York Times, the Bible,
  the entrails of a goat, tea leaves, the visions
  induced by peyote, or the changes specified in
  the Taoist I Ching as sources of knowledge
  depends on our cultural background and
  experience.
• As far as beliefs are concerned, there are no
  rights and wrongs.

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Beliefs

• If someone believes that the voices in the wind
  can guide ones behavior along the proper path,
  we cannot throw up our hands and declare the
  belief wrong (even if we believe it to be wrong).
• We must be able to recognize and to deal with the
  belief as belonging to that individuals
  subjective experience of reality.

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Ethnocentrism

• Nonetheless, the belief that ones own culture is
  superior to all others is a belief common to all
  cultural groups.
• All cultural groups regard their own culture as
  not only the best but also the correct, moral and
  only way of life.
• This belief is pervasive, often unconscious and
  is imposed on every aspect of day-to-day
  interaction and practices.

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Values

• Value(s) refer to the especially favorable way of
  regarding the ideas, behaviors, customs, beliefs,
  and institutions of a group.
• Valuative dimensions include qualities such as
  usefulness, goodness, aesthetics, need
  satisfaction, and pleasure.
• Although each of us has a unique set of values,
  cultural values are a set of organized rules for
  making choices, reducing uncertainty, and
  reducing conflicts within a given society.

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Values

• Cultural values are generally normative in that
  they inform a member of a culture what is good
  and bad, right and wrong, true and false,
  positive and negative, which behaviors are
  important and which should be avoided.
• Cultural values define what is worth dying for,
  what is worth protecting, what frightens people,
  what are considered to be proper subjects for
  study or ridicule, and what types of events lead
  individuals to group solidarity.

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Attitudes

• Beliefs and values contribute to the development
  and content of attitudes.
• An attitude may be defined formally as a learned
  tendency to respond in a consistent manner with
  respect to a given object or orientation.
• Whatever cultural environment surrounds us helps
  shape and form our attitudes towards what we like
  and dislike, our readiness to respond, and
  ultimately our behavior.

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Cultural Organizations

• The manner in which a culture organizes itself
  and its institutions also affects how members of
  the culture perceive the world.
• One of the most important cultural elements is
  world view.
• World view deals with a cultures orientation
  toward such philosophical issues as God,
  humanity, nature, the universe, and other
  concepts of being.

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World View

• It influences beliefs, values, attitudes, uses of
  time, and many aspects of intercultural
  communication.
• A Catholic, for example, has a different world
  view than a Moslem, Hindu, Jew, Taoist, or
  atheist.
• World view helps to locate our place and rank in
  the universe.
• Native Americans see themselves as one with
  nature and the universe.

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World View

• They perceive a balanced relationship between
  humankind and the environment, a partnership of
  equality and respect.
• Anglos, on the other hand, see a human-centered
  world in which humans are supreme and apart of
  nature.
• They treat the universe as a place to carry out
  their desires and wishes through the power of
  science and technology.

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Family

• Although the smallest social organization in a
  culture, the family, is one of the most
  influential.
• The family sets the stage for a childs
  development during the formative period of life.
• The family present the child with a wide range of
  cultural influences that affects almost
  everything from a childs first attitudes to the
  childs acquisition of language and the amount of
  emphasis place on it.

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Family

• The family also offers and withholds approval,
  support, rewards, and punishments, which have a
  marked effect on the values children develop and
  the goals they pursue.
• If, for example, a child learns by observation
  and communication that silence is paramount in
  their culture, as Japanese children do, they will
  reflect that aspect of culture in their behavior
  and bring it to intercultural settings.

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School

• The school is another social organization that
  historically had the major responsibility for
  passing on and maintaining culture.
• The school is a communitys basic link with its
  past, what has happened, what is important, and
  what one as a member of the culture must know.

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Mental Processes

• The mental processes, forms of reasoning, and
  approaches to problem solving prevalent in a
  community make up another major component of
  culture.
• Unless you have had experience with people from
  other cultures who follow different patterns of
  thought, most people assume that everyone thinks
  the same way and solves problems in a similar
  manner.

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Mental Processes

• However, there are differences in aspects of
  thinking and knowing.
• Lets look at a general comparison between
  Western and Eastern patterns of thought as a
  means of clarification.
• In most Western thought, there is an assumption
  of a direct relationship between mental concepts
  and the concrete world of reality.

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Mental Processes

• This orientation places great stock in logical
  considerations and rationality.
• There is a belief that truth is out there
  somewhere and that it can be discovered by
  following the correct, logical sequences.
• One need only turn over the rocks in the right
  order and it will be there.
• The Eastern view, best illustrated by the Taoist
  thought, holds that problems are solved quite
  differently.

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Mental Processes

• To begin with, people are not granted instant
  rationality.
• Truth is not found by active searching and the
  application of Aristotelian modes of reasoning.
• On the contrary, one must wait and if truth is to
  be known, it will make itself apparent.

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Mental Processes

• The major difference in the two views is that for
  the Western mind, human activity is paramount and
  will ultimately lead to the discovery of truth.
• In the Taoist tradition, truth is the active
  agent, and if it is to be known, it will be
  through the activity of truth making itself
  apparent.

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Time

• A cultures concept of time is its philosophy
  toward the past, present, and future and the
  importance or lack of importance it places on
  time.
• Most Western cultures think of time in
  linear-spatial terms.
• We are time-bound and well aware of the past,
  present, and future.
• In contrast, the Hopi Indians pay very little
  attention to time.

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Time

• They believe that each objectwhether a person,
  plant, or animalhas its own time system.
• Eastern tradition has perceived time as a dynamic
  wheel with circular movements and the now as a
  reflection of the eternal.
• The West, however, has represented time either as
  an arrow or as a moving river that comes out of a
  distant place and past (not here and now) and
  goes into an equally distance place and future
  (also not here and now).

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Time

• In this linear view of time, history is
  goal-directed and gradually progressing in a
  certain direction.
• Eastern cultures embrace a polychronic system and
  are less inclined to adhere rigidly to time as a
  tangible, discrete, and linear entity.
• They emphasize completion of transactions here
  and now, often carrying out more than one
  activity simultaneously.

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Time

• The traditional Eastern orientation of time
  depends on the synchronization of human behavior
  with the rhythms of nature.
• The Western orientation to time depends on the
  synchronization of human behavior with the
  rhythms of clocks or machine.
• The Western monochronic system emphasizes
  schedules, segmentation, promptness, and
  standardization of human activity.

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Space

• Another area of cultural diversity has to do with
  the way people use space as part of interpersonal
  communication.
• Proxemics involves not only the distance between
  people engaged in a conversation but also their
  physical orientation.
• Arabs and Latinos tend to interact in closer
  physical proximity to each other than do North
  American Anglos.

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Space

• Physical orientation also helps to define social
  relationships.
• North Americans prefer to sit where they are face
  to face or at right angles to one another.
• We seldom seek side-by-side arrangements.
• Chinese, on the other hand, often prefer a
  side-to-side arrangement and may feel
  uncomfortable when placed in a face-to-face
  situation.

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Space

• We also tend to define social hierarchies through
  our nonverbal use of space.
• Sitting behind a desk while speaking with someone
  who is standing is a sign of a superior-subordinat
  e relationship, with the socially superior person
  seated.
• Room furnishings and size can be indicative of
  social status.
• In corporate America, status can be measured by
  desk and office size, and whether one has carpet
  or merely a rug on the office floor.

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Space

• Organization of space is also a function of our
  culture.
• South American house designs are extremely
  private with only one door opening onto the
  street and everything else behind walls.
• North Americans are used to large unwalled front
  yards with windows looking into the house,
  allowing passersby to see what goes on inside.