Starting with Culture

Someone once described culture as a "monster" because it was messy, too big to handle, and scary when you don't know what you are dealing with.  This chapter should help us apply a framework to organize culture so that as we identify values, we can start to see why various norms, and behaviors reflect the worldviews of a people.  The Values Orientation Theory proposed questions that all cultures must answer as they develop.  The Dimensions of Culture Theory gave us important dimensions that can be measured for comparisons across cultures.

From a communication process standpoint, the culture can be found in senders/receivers as well as the message, channel, and context.  Unsurprisingly, culture plays a role in how you view yourself and the identities you willingly adopt or the identities that a culture will assign to you.