The Summary of

CHAPTER 8 – Adapting Communication to Cultures and Social Communities

Name : Yohana Margareth Harianja
NIM : 00000022307
Class : Communication International Batch 2016

The value people assign to individualism and collectivism influences how they communicate.
Effectiveness in social and professional life demands that you understand and adapt your
communication to people of varied cultural backgrounds.

Relationship Between Culture and Communication

Communication is closely linked to culture because communication expresses, sustains, and

alters culture. Your culture directly shapes how you communicate, teaching you whether and when
interrupting is appropriate, how much eye contact is polite, and how much distance should be kept
between people.

Culture is a way of life – it is a system of ideas, values, beliefs, customs, and language that is
passed from one generation to the next and that sustains a particular way of life. Because cultures are
holistic, no change is isolated from the over all system.

Five central relationships between culture and communication:

 We learn culture in the process of communicating. By observing and interacting with

others and being exposed to mass communication, we learn language and what it means. In
learning language, we learn the values of our culture. We learn what ideal bodies are from
media and from others’ talk about people of various physical proportions.
 Communication is a primary indicator of culture. One way to distinguish cultures is by the
extent to which they value individualism or collectivism.
 Individualistic cultures regard each person as distinct from other people, groups, and
organizations. It values personal freedom, individual rights, and independence.
Communication in individualistic cultures tends to be assertive and often competitive.
Rituals and roles celebrate successful individuals. Self-reliance is highly valued, as are
personal initiative, accomplishment, and growth. This culture relies on a low-context
communication which is very direct, explicit, and detailed. Everything must be spelled
out carefully and clearly.
 Collectivist cultures regard people as deeply connected to one another and to their
families, groups, and communities. It values intergroup order and harmony, group
welfare, and interdependence. Communication tends to be other-oriented and
 cooperative, and collective accomplishments are more valued than personal ones.
Cultural rituals and roles tend to celebrate communal achievements more than individual
ones. This culture relies on a high-context communication style which is indirect and
undetailed and which conveys meanings more implicitly than explicitly. Communicators
assume that others will understand what isn’t stated and will be able to use shared
knowledge of situations and relationships to interpret vague statements.
 Multiple social communicites may coexist in a single culture. We may identify social
groups with national culture, a religious tradition, a gender, an ethnic-racial group, and
perhaps other groups. These identifications affects who we are and how we communicate. We
are affected not only by the culture as a whole, but also by our membership in social
communities or groups within the culture. A culture includes a number of social communities
which are the groups of people who live within a dominant culture yet also belong to another
social group or groups.
Standpoint theory illuminates the importance of social communities. It claims that social
groups within a culture distinctively shape members’ perspectives – their perceptions,
identities, expectations, and so forth. Belonging to a particular social community may lead
members to deelop a standpoint that is political awareness of the social, symbolic, and
material circumstances of the community and the larger power dynamics that hold those
circumstances in place. Standpoints reflect power position in society.
 Communication expresses and sustains cultures. Each time we express culture values, we
also perpetuate them. Communication is a mirror of a culture’s values and a primary means of
keeping them woven into the fabric of everyday life.
 Communication is a source of cultural change. Communication helps propel change by
naming things in ways that shape how we understand them. Cultures us communication to
define what change means and implies for social life.

Guidelines for Adapting Communication to Diverse Cultures and Social Communities

1. Engage in person communication

Uncertainty reduction theory explains that because we find uncertainty uncomfortable, we try
to reduce it. Reducing uncertainty by learning about other people and cultures allows us to
engage in person-centered communication. Person-centeredness requires us to negotiate
between awareness of group tendencies and equal awareness of individual differences. We
must assume that each person with whom we communicate fits some, but not other,
generalizations about his or her social communities.
2. Respect other’s feelings and ideas
One of the most disconfirming forms of communication is speaking for others when they are
able to speak for themselves. We shouldn’t assume we understand how they feel or think.
 Although it is supportive to engage in dual perspective, it isn’t supportive to presume that we
understand experiences we haven’t had.
3. Resist ethnocentric bias
Ethnocentrism encourages negative judgements of anything that differs from our ways. It can
lead one group of poeple to feel it has the right to dominate other groups and suppress other
cultures. To reduce ethnocentrism, we should remember that what is considered normal and
right varies between cultures. Cultural relativism recognizes that cultures vary in how they
think and behave as well as in what they believe and value. Cultural relativism reminds us
that something that appears odd or even wrong to us may seem natural and right from the
perspective of a different culture.
4. Reconize that adapting to cultural diversity is a process
4.1. Resistance occurs when we reject the beliefs of particular cultures or social communities.
It denies the value and validity of particular cultural syles. It also motivate members of a
culture or social community to associate only with each other and to remain unware of
commonlities among people with diverse backgrounds. Members of social groups may
also resist and deny their group identities to fit into the mainstream. Assimilation occurs
when people give up their ways to adopt the ways of the dominat culture.
4.2. Tolerance is an acceptance of differences whether or not one approves of or even
understands them. It involves respecting other’s rights to their ways even though we may
think their ways are wrong, bad, or offensive. Judgement still exist, but it’s not actively
imposed on others. It doesn’t actively foster a community in which people appreciate
diversity and learn to grow from encountering differences
4.3. Understanding that differences are rooted in cultural teachings and that no cultural
teachings are intrinsically best or right. Rather than assuming that whatever differs from
our ways is a deviation from a universal standard, a person who understands realizes tahat
diverse values, beliefs, norms, and communication styles are rooted in distinct cultural
perspective.
4.4. Respect differences. We don’t have to adopt other’s ways in order to respect them on
their terms. Respect allows us to acknowledge genuine differences between groups yet
remain anchored in the values and customes of our culture. Respect avoids ethnocentrism.
4.5. Participation is when we incorporate some practices and values of other groups into our
own lives. People who respond to diversity by participating learn to be multilingual, shich
means they are able to speak and understand more than one language or more than one
group’s ways of using language (also termed code switching).

Tangerang, 5th of October 2016