Starting with Culture

Introduction

What is culture? A simple answer to that question might be: It is the way we do things around here. This answer implies that as members of a particular group of people we do things one way and other groups of people might do and view the same activity differently. Culture is a more complicated construct than that simple example. It influences every part of our lives and interactions with others. This reading explores the concept of culture, explains the principles of culture, and ways to examine or investigate cultures. These principles along with the Values Orientation Theory and Hofstede's Dimensions of Culture will provide the framework for the majority of this course. Our investigation and application of intercultural communication competence starts here.

There is a challenge to understanding other human beings because of the immense variations - and similarities–within human societies. Often, we use the term "culture" describe these variations and similarities, which makes the term "culture" itself very difficult to define. Academics have yet to come up with a uniformly adopted definition of culture, but the definition that we will use comes from cultural communication researcher, Donal Carbaugh (1988) who suggested that culture is "a learned set of shared interpretations and beliefs, values, and norms, which affect the behaviors of a relatively large group of people". It is within this framework that we will explore what happens when people from different cultural backgrounds interact.

Source: https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/comm115/chapter/chapter-2/
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