Social domain theory: interpreting intercultural communication
The domain of social settings
As Layder (1998: 95) explains:
social reality is not simply composed of people's meanings, experiences and subjective understanding, but ... is in large part constituted by systemic features that are relatively impersonal, inert and which represent the standing conditions confronting people in their everyday lives.
When Joanne set off for her visit to Germany, many social actors, the majority of them no longer living, had already shaped the social settings within which she would experience her student exchange. As we have seen, she brings her store of interpretive resources (that is, schemas, frames and scripts) to settings such as the shopping queue or the classroom, and her peers bring theirs. Layder's account emphasizes that there are differences in the degree to which participants are free to make their own decisions about how to 'go on' in these social settings. He is not particularly concerned with constraints deriving from differences in the 'cultures' of social settings as they are found in different parts of the world, but points out that within any given society there is variation in the degree to which people are free to make their own decisions about how to proceed, depending on factors such as the weight of institutional constraints, explicit differentials in power among participants, and so on. The more 'sedimented in time and space' the patterns of social relations are, the more 'demanding' are the practices expected. For example:
The bureaucratic rules and regulations that inform and shape the working practices in many employing organizations ... are good examples of the demanding or mandatory character of reproduced relations and practices. Workers must take account of established practices or risk censure (a reprimand), some kind of deprivation such as the withholding of certain rewards (such as promotion, a pay increase or better working conditions) or even a more serious penalty (such as being fired). (Layder 1997: 111-12)
Now there are, once again, generic similarities across different countries in respect of matters such as the requirement for employees to abide by regulations demanded by employers, or students by those demanded by teachers, but the research carried out in intercultural communication highlights differences in the manifestation of these common requirements at the level of what we would term 'social settings'. Thus international business travellers are as likely as Joanne to have their expectations confounded about such matters as the amount of autonomy in negotiating on behalf of the company afforded to employees of similar rank from, say, the USA or Japan (Scollon and Scollon 2001), or the appropriateness of revealing personal information in the context of what may be seen as a principally commercial interaction.
A number of researchers have sought to distil from various sources sustainable and generalizable claims about differences among countries in respect of the 'sedimented social relations' with which we are concerned here. There is a methodological difficulty with such research, however. By definition, the phenomenon as we have identified it, namely 'sedimented social relations', is not empirically observable. As we discussed above, there is a distinction between people's beliefs about what they should do and what they actually do, while their knowledge of how social relations are structured may be very partial. Thus, while it may be the case that the literature on 'cultural categories' and 'cultural dimensions' may tell us something about the contrasts in the properties of social settings in different parts of the world, we would counsel caution about the social theory on which these findings are implicitly based.
As will be clear by now, we take the view that human beings the world over and throughout time share certain properties in common. These include self-consciousness, embodied physical existence, and an 'ineluctable interaction with an equally material world' (Archer 2000: 318). Given the fact that we are 'made as we are', we are 'inescapably concern[ed]' with 'our physical well-being, our performative competence and our self-worth' (ibid.}. The universality of the human condition necessarily poses a challenge to any essentialist notion of a plurality of cultures, since it entails an engagement by all human beings with inevitable tensions, such as that between separateness and connectedness referred to above. Commentators on intercultural communication have listed collections of such tensions, with a suggestion that, while the tension, or continuum, is common to all individuals and the groups to which they belong, different groups veer to varying degrees towards one end or the other of these continua. Thus White (1999), for example, summarizes a scheme proposed by Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961), which contrasts different perceptions of such core concepts as: human nature (as good, evil, neutral or mixed; as changeable or unchangeable); human relationships (as individual, collective or hierarchical); and space orientation (as public, private or mixed). One important area of variation among different groups of people is that held to be prevalent in their attitudes towards social interaction.
Trompenaars (1993: 29) identifies 'dimensions' of the way people relate to each other, which include universalism versus particularism; collectivism versus individualism; and achievement versus ascription (how status is accorded). These dimensions are strikingly similar to the 'pattern variables' identified by Parsons, whose conception of social relations. Trompenaars' research method was to present respondents with scenarios, somewhat similar to the critical incident we cited at the beginning. These scenarios, however, involve some kind of dilemma, and the choices for which respondents opted were taken as an indication of their priorities along the kind of continua sketched above. Thus those who choose to get a friend out of trouble even if it means lying to the authorities, for example, are held to be demonstrating a 'particularist' orientation, while those who say they would act in accordance with respect for the law, irrespective of personal consequences (to themselves or a friend), would be taken to have given a 'universalist' response. White (1999) summarizes this research thus:
Having used this and other problems with management trainees from over fifty nationalities, Trompenaars concludes that some countries are more universalistic than others, that is, people abide by the rules — formal or codified, while others are more particularistic, that is, specific personal relationships will influence behavior rather than observation of impersonal rules. He suggests that nations have different starting points for dealing with such dilemmas, and that they may be more or less universalistic, depending on what the rules are about.
From our own position, these conclusions are conflationary, in that they attribute to 'countries' properties and powers which can only belong to human agents. They also elide beliefs, which are part of the cultural system, with behavior. This kind of account is also potentially deterministic, suggesting that being born in a particular country will lead to an adherence to a particular set of values. However, we would concede that, as constraints operating at the level of social settings, certain routinized and sanctioned expectations about matters such as those investigated may demonstrate a tendency to vary among different societies in accordance with the findings of studies such as these.
The relevance to Joanne's experience thus bridges the domains of situated activity (how her fellow students and others she encountered actually behaved in interactions), and social settings (established practices, many of them institutionalized). The education system is one such social setting, and comparative research in different countries can highlight contrasts in the ways similar overall goals, such as the socialization and education of the next generation, are realized in very different ways. Thus, Alexander (2000: 540), for example, concludes from his study of primary schooling in five democracies that:
[e]very element of teaching which we explored, from task, activity, organization and routine, to judgement, interaction and discourse, raised questions of value, priority and purpose. Pedagogy connects the apparently self-contained act of teaching with culture, structure and mechanisms of social control.
The countries where Alexander did his research did not include Germany or Australia, but Boas, citing House, claims that the former sets greater store on the transmission of knowledge than on the development of the students' characters. This is consistent with Alexander's finding that teachers in the anglophone classrooms he observed (in England and Michigan, USA) gave a higher priority to pupils' personal and individual development than did those in France or Russia. Attention to distinctions at a national level, however, takes us into a more macro domain, that of contextual resources.
