UNDERSTANDING INTERCULTURAL

COMMUNICATION

Understanding Intercultural Communication provides a practical framework to help

readers to understand intercultural communication and to solve intercultural prob-
lems. Each chapter exemplifies the everyday intercultural through ethnographic
narratives in which people make sense of each other in home, work and study loca-
tions. Underpinned by a grammar of culture developed by the author, this book
addresses key issues in intercultural communication, including:

•• the positive contribution of people from diverse cultural backgrounds;

•• the politics of Self and Other which promote negative stereotyping;
•• the basis for a de-centred approach to globalisation in which periphery ­cultural
realities can gain voice and ownership.

Written by a leading researcher in the field, the new edition of this important text
has been revised to invite the reader to reflect and develop their own intercultural
and research strategies, and updated to include new ideas that have emerged in
Holliday’s own work and elsewhere. This book is a key resource for academics, stu-
dents and practitioners in intercultural communication and related fields.

Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Education at

Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.
UNDERSTANDING
INTERCULTURAL
COMMUNICATION
Negotiating a Grammar of Culture

Second Edition

Adrian Holliday
Second edition published 2019
by Routledge
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Names: Holliday, Adrian, author.
Title: Understanding intercultural communication: negotiating a
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Description: Second edition. | Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon;
New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014117 | ISBN 9780815352389 (hbk) |
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Subjects: LCSH: Intercultural communication.
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CONTENTS

Lists of figures viii

Preface ix
The grammar of culture and reconstructed ethnographic narratives xi
Reflection xii
Further reference xiii
Acknowledgements xiv

1 The grammar of culture 1

Cultural negotiation  2
Underlying universal cultural processes  2
Particular social and political structures  3
Particular cultural products  5
How the grammar is used  5
Further reference  6
Note 7

2 Cultural practices 8
‘Foreigners’ and ‘newcomers’  9
Examples and factors  9
How to behave  12
Anna visiting Beatrice’s family  12
Dima and Christoff: future in-laws  18
Misunderstanding, Othering and achieving interculturality  23
Further reference  29
Notes 30
vi Contents

3 Investigating culture 31
Approaching the unfamiliar and foreign  31
Francisca, Gita and Hande: looking for an intercultural methodology  33
A constructivist qualitative approach  40
Ivonne preparing to go abroad  42
Ivonne, Jung and Lan: using previous experience  48
Ivonne and Lan: complex views about eating  53
Ethnographic narrative writing  55
Further reference  55
Notes 59

4 Constructing culture 60
Abi and Tomos: making a cultural event  60
Engineering conformity in the workplace  66
Self and Other  69
Small culture formation on the go  72
Reflection 74
Further reference  75
Notes 75

5 Dialogue with structure 77

Essentialist statements versus observation  77
Jenna and Malee and critical thinking  80
Essentialism 84
Jenna, Bekka and Malee: ‘assimilation’ and ‘Westernisation’  86
Loss or development  89
Further reference  93
Notes 95

6 Grand narratives of nation and history 96

Ivonne, Chung and Ning: simple things about food  96
Invention 99
Stefan, Alicia and Roxana: ‘it’s what you wear’  101
Kay and Pushpa: sociological blindness  106
Types and solutions  109
Alicia: critical reading  110
Taking stock  113
Orientalism 114
Further reference  115
Notes 117
 Contents  vii

7 Discourses of culture 118

Discourses 118
Ramla, Ed and Jonathan: sticking to principles  123
Nada, Jahan and Osama: getting it wrong?  130
Nada, Osama, Theobald and Jahan: ‘shall we share our cultures?’  136
Alphonse and Bernice: the problem with talking about ‘culture’  141
Managing and undoing discourses  144
Further reference  145
Notes 146

8 Prejudice 148
Naïve discourses of culture  148
Martha and Katya: behaviour in meetings  150
Francisca, Hande and Gita: missing home, belief and disbelief  154
Alicia, Stefan and banter  160
Further reference  163
Notes 164

9 Cultural travel and innovation 165

Reflection 166
John abroad: politeness and space  166
Reflection 168
Safa and her friends: cherries, paying and serving  169
Reflection 173
Making innovation work  173
Reflection 175
Contestation, acceptance and rejection  175
Safa – ‘when are you going back?’  176
Achieving interculturality  179
Further reference  180
Notes 181

References 182
Index 191
LIST OF FIGURES

1.1  The grammar of culture 1

3.1  Developing a thick description 50
6.1 Orientalism 114
7.1  Competing worlds 128
7.2  False structural-functional model of culture 135
7.3  Development of the false essentialist discourse of culture 135
8.1  Ambivalence and struggle 158
9.1  The architecture of cultural travel 166
PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to attempt an understanding of the intercultural.

It is designed to make us better informed when we encounter people and prac-
tices in unfamiliar cultural settings, but also to help us understand ourselves
as intercultural travellers throughout our lives. The particular position that I
bring to this understanding is that the cultural that we encounter every day is
always, in effect, intercultural. A major focus throughout is small culture forma-
tion on the go, which is the constant, creative negotiation with which we go
about this intercultural process, and which is intercultural because we do this
through making sense of and finding new understandings about both ourselves
and others.
The way in which we present ourselves culturally and deal with unfamiliar
cultural realities is complex. It is partly to do with how we are brought up in dif-
ferent national contexts, but it also has a lot to do with how all of us negotiate the
intercultural realities of everyday life in very similar ways. This book focuses on
these shared cultural skills. The knowledge of how these cultural skills operate
helps us understand and engage with cultural behaviour wherever we find it and
helps us to understand the way in which cultural behaviour is always somehow
intercultural. Hence, throughout, as already the case in this opening paragraph,
there will be a constant shifting between talking about the cultural and the
intercultural.
The content is a basic sociology about how culture operates everywhere. It
capitalises on the universal knowledge of social life possessed by people from all
cultural backgrounds. Addressing this content requires a laying bare of everyday
processes, many of which pass by without notice, and some of which occupy our
minds as niggling problems, but which are often not thought of as the building
blocks of intercultural engagement.
x Preface

Purposes for this understanding are therefore:

•• to bring together people from different backgrounds to collaborate in under-

standing and pooling their diverse experience and contribution;
•• to promote a universal core in cultural competence through which people
from diverse backgrounds can find common intercultural ground while at
the same time preserving the most positive aspects of cultural diversity;
•• to see all of this within the context of the global politics and ideology which
underpin intercultural misunderstanding.

This is by no means the first book to have these purposes, but its approach is
different to those that tend to compare national cultures so that we can predict
and explain how ‘our’ behaviour will be different to that of foreigners. While
the focus is how to behave in foreign circumstances, this will not be informed
by characterisations of particular foreign cultures, which I believe would result
in over-simplistic and perhaps damaging, and indeed neo-racist, stereotypes.
Instead, the tone of this book is to encourage engagement across what we often
think of as cultural boundaries, finding common ground and sharing experience.
The content of the second edition is updated to take in concepts that have
developed since the writing of the first edition. One such concept is that of find-
ing threads that connect us – that we draw from our own trajectories in order to
resonate with the trajectories of the people we encounter. Whether we strive to
do this or whether we instead project blocks that divide us is a matter of choice
and personal action. Choice and action therefore also become a major focus. The
concept of interculturality, that builds on the finding of threads, was implicit in
the discussion in the first edition and is now explicitly dealt with and developed.
Discourses of culture were introduced in Chapter 7 in the first edition very much
as a novel concept which I had not yet developed elsewhere. In the new edition,
these have now been introduced from Chapter 3, where they first become rel-
evant, leaving Chapter 7 to provide a more detailed discussion of their nature.
This has resulted in changes to Chapter 7 that incorporate my competing worlds
concept, first introduced in Holliday (2011a) and then developed in more recent
work. There is also a fuller discussion of multiculturalism, the third space and
hybridity in Chapter 7.
THE GRAMMAR OF CULTURE
AND RECONSTRUCTED
ETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVES

The book is driven by a grammar of culture which is a loose device for explaining
how different elements of culture relate to each other within an open dialogue
between the individual and social structures. This is looked at in detail in Chapter 1
and becomes a model through which the rest of the book is conceived. Each chap-
ter is built around reconstructed ethnographic narratives. Their methodological
underpinnings are explained in Chapter 3. To avoid national stereotypes, and to
emphasise what people share, the nationalities of the characters are only revealed
on a need-to-know basis. The emphasis is more on processes than the particulari-
ties of location. However, as an author who is rooted in Britain, I have located
some of the narratives there, and I must myself avoid falling into the trap of familiar
stereotypes. The narratives are each analysed through reference to domains within
the grammar. Through this analysis, the grammar is explained and explored, and
its complexities revealed.
REFLECTION

Throughout, the reader is encouraged to engage with their own ideas,

­recollections and possibilities for doing research. It is a major feature of this
second edition that this reflective involvement is invited through discussion
of options and possibilities that are for the author as well as the reader to
interrogate the ideas and cases presented. A function of these invitations is to
generate discussion about the many loose ends in the text and to prevent the
authorial voice from getting above itself. In some cases, there are suggestions
for full research projects for the purpose of practising and sharpening the dis-
ciplines for looking at culture. They might also suggest working with others,
perhaps from different backgrounds, and might therefore move in the direc-
tion of actual instances of the intercultural. Research of course may be formal
or informal – useful for research papers and dissertations, for more personal
blogs and posts, or just to aid thinking about everyday life. Chapter 3 focuses
particularly on the research disciplines necessary to carry out research and
generally to understand the intercultural. Readers are encouraged to use these
disciplines to write or perhaps just think their own ethnographic narratives.
For educators, these invitations for reflection and research can feed into class-
room activities and assignments for students.
FURTHER REFERENCE

In an attempt to unclutter the authorial voice, there is very little reference to

literature in the body of each chapter. In cases where concepts and the discus-
sions behind them need to be referenced, these are picked up in the further
reference section for each chapter, which also directs readers to reading mate-
rial on the internet that will enable them to explore themes further. In the
second edition there is no longer an Epilogue chapter. All the discussion and
referencing that was there has now been moved either to the main body of the
remaining nine chapters or their further reference sections. The second edi-
tion is also written in a more traditional prose style. It is designed to be read
and discussed rather than to be a selection of classroom activities, which, it is
felt, intruded too much into the flow of ideas in the first edition. To ease read-
ing, figures and tables have been reduced in number and simplified. To reduce
cross-referencing between pages, tables are embedded in the paragraphs where
they are first referred to.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Asya Draganova, Ritu Mahendru, Sadia Ali and Yeonsuk
Bae for being informants and for making particular contribution to aspects of
the ethnographic narratives. Ardeshir Yousefpour, Duan Yuping, Joanna Hair,
Fereshteh Honarbin, Gong Yafu, Haesoon Park, Sanam Rostami, and Shabnam
Holliday and Brieg Powel, and their family and friends, also contributed to the
observed material. Ismatul Zaharin, Amira Oukraf, Zhao Liang, Nour Souleh,
Amina Kebabi, Victoria Odeniyi, Asmaa Madagh, Yasmine Sadoudi, Malcolm
Macdonald and Nadia Seemungal provided invaluable and insightful ideas
regarding the structuring and content of the text for the second edition. Working
with Simon Hoult and colleagues and students in the Language & Intercultural
Education research group, and conversations with Katarzyna Gasiorowski, Fred
Dervin, Sara Zafar Khan, Teti Dragas and Iga Lehman, also gave me ideas and
confidence. I am immensely indebted to my co-researcher, Sara Amadasi, for
helping me to make continued and more sense of the intercultural. My grand-
children Aara and Anoush provided endless examples of rich cultural learning in
three languages. Staying with Safa Kassab-Hassan, Osama Jradeh and their fam-
ily and colleagues in now war-torn Damascus also provided rich data for cultural
travel and creativity. Sage Publications kindly allowed me to use the grammar
of culture diagram, first published in my 2011 book. I am forever indebted to
my wife and friend for life, Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, for giving me purpose
and inspiration.
1
THE GRAMMAR OF CULTURE

The book is driven by a grammar of culture which is represented in Figure 1.1.1

In the same way that linguistic grammar provides a structure which enables
us to understand sentences, the grammar of culture provides a structure which
enables us to understand intercultural events. However, it is also an invention –
a map which can do no more than guide us, and which must not be mistaken
for the real terrain which is too complex and deep to be mapped too accurately.
Throughout, whenever mentioned for the first time in a particular discussion the
items of the grammar are in bold.

Negotiating individual vs. social structure

PARTICULAR SOCIAL & PARTICULAR CULTURAL

POLITICAL STRUCTURES
Cultural resources:
Nation, education,
language, government, the TRAJECTORIES
media, religion, ideology
Global positioning &
politics:
Affluence, power,
economies, juxtaposition
with others
Grand narratives of nation
& history
PRODUCTS
UNDERLYING UNIVERSAL
CULTURAL PROCESSES Artefacts:
PERSONAL Small culture formation: Art, literature, the media,
cultural practices
Reading and making
Family, culture Statements about
ancestry, culture:
peers, Constructing rules and
meanings Discourses of and about
profession
‘culture’, ideology,
Imagining Self and Other prejudice
Cultural acts: outward
expressions of Self and
Other

Action resisted by social structure

FIGURE 1.1  The grammar of culture.

2  The grammar of culture

With the unfathomable complexity of culture in mind, the grammar com-

prises loose relationships which represent a conversation between its different
domains. This conversation is sometimes harmonious and sometimes ridden
with difficult conflict. The grammar is spread across three broad domains with
arrows that indicate movement and influences between them. On either side
are particular social and political structures and particular cultural prod-
ucts. Broadly, these domains relate to what has commonly been referred to as
national, ethnic or large culture. This is however by no means straightforward,
and the emphasis in the grammar is more on how the concept of large culture
is constructed and imagined. It is the interaction between these particularities
and the underlying universal cultural processes, in the middle of the gram-
mar, fed by personal cultural trajectories, which will be the basis for much
of the discussion throughout the book. This interaction becomes more acute
because, perhaps counter-intuitively, the particular domains relate more to the
large, and the universal relate more to the small and personal. The grammar is
therefore a collection of diverse domains, each of which is in conversation with
all of the others.
Also, there is both a potential for greater understanding and a dark side in the
universal domain in that:

•• It is what we all share, which enables us all to make sense of, read and inter-
act with the particular wherever we encounter it.
•• However, the universal also underpins the architecture of the prejudice that
divides us.

Cultural negotiation
The arrows across the top and the bottom indicate a dialogue between the power
of underlying universal cultural processes possessed by the individual and the
influences of the particular cultural realities which derive from national structures.
Here I am particularly interested in the potential for newcomers to be cultural
innovators. However, these arrows involve all parts of the grammar and do not
run from one precise part of it to another. The more promising negotiation of the
individual versus structure runs left to right at the top because of the possibility that
the personal helps to reduce particular structures and allow more understanding
of the constructed nature of cultural products. The more restrictive curtailing of
the personal by structure runs right to left along the bottom because the particu-
lar cultural products can construct essentialist forces that strengthen the power of
structures. Implicit in cultural negotiation is the notion of individuals taking social
action on a daily basis, which is a theme that runs throughout the grammar.

Underlying universal cultural processes

The source of the social action which is implicit throughout the grammar is in
the underlying universal cultural processes in the very centre of the grammar.
 The grammar of culture  3

These processes are shared by all of us. They are common across all cultural
settings. They involve skills and strategies through which everyone regardless
of background participates in and negotiates their position within the cultural
landscapes to which they belong. This is the basis upon which we are able to
read, engage with and take part in the production of culture.
Small culture formation is the major domain where these universal pro-
cesses take place. Small cultures are cultural environments, small social group-
ings or activities wherever there is cohesive behaviour. Examples of groupings
are families and leisure and work groups. They can be as small as two people in
some form of relationship. They are the basic cultural entities from which all
other cultural realities grow. However, more important than being places, they
are the locations of social action. Small culture formation is the process in which
people form rules for how to behave. Wherever we go, we automatically either
take part in or begin to build small cultures. In this sense, small culture forma-
tion happens all the time and is a basic essence of being human. Small culture
formation on the go is therefore the everyday process that takes place all the
time, everywhere, with whoever we meet or even think about and where we
make choices about positioning and engaging or not engaging – creating, join-
ing, leaving, conflicting with, encouraging, changing. It emphasises how tran-
sient and changing small cultures can be.
Also, in the centre of the grammar, personal trajectories comprise the indi-
vidual’s travel through society, bringing histories from their ancestors and ori-
gins. Through these trajectories we are able to step out from and dialogue with
the particular social and political structures that surround us and even cross into
new and foreign domains. This category thus provides the everyday experience
for the underlying universal cultural processes.

Particular social and political structures

On the left of the grammar, these are structures which in many ways form us and
make us different from each other. They provide the backdrop for personal cultural
trajectories and small culture formation on the go. The first domain is cultural
resources, which is to do with how we are influenced by and draw upon particular
social and political structures in our daily lives. It is here where there will be differ-
ences between us because of the particularities of how we are brought up in differ-
ent societies, and it is this sort of difference that relates most closely to what many
of us refer to as ‘our culture’. The way we were educated, our national institutions,
the manner of our government, our media, our economy, and so on are different
from nation to nation and will undoubtedly impact in the way we are as people.
These resources may be imagined as mapping precisely onto each other, for
example, where a nation state corresponds largely with one religious group, one
language and one economic system. This might just be possible where isolated
communities have been relatively untouched by global influences. However,
this synchrony is likely to be more imagined than actual, residing in our exotic
idealisation of the ‘tribe’, or the lost civilisations of travellers’ tales, where we
4  The grammar of culture

might be seduced by the idea of a single ‘culture’ where all the members share
things that no one else does. Archaeology increasingly tells us that even in pre-
history there was far more wide-ranging geographical exchange than we might
have imagined. The relationships will therefore be more complex, and religions
and languages will transcend nations or be minorities within them, even though
nationalist statements may say otherwise. Economic systems may well be con-
trolled by the nation state, but the variations of the other domains will mediate
the extent to which they can be culturally defining.
I therefore prefer to label these elements as resources that we draw on, rather
than constraints that confine what we do and think. Even where they are imposed
upon us, we have personal resources that enable us to resist within the personal
cultural trajectory category. It also needs to be remembered that many of us
are between or are separated from nations.
Next, global positioning and politics concerns how we position ourselves
and our society against the rest of the world. A major mechanism here is grand
narratives of nation and history. These are large stories about who we are that
relate to idealisations of nation and are often located in the valorisation of histori-
cal events and trajectories – wars, revolutions, stories of liberation or oppression,
heroes, and so on. They are reinforced and constructed by the media, educa-
tion, the statements of politicians, economists and other forces in the cultural
resources domain. They are powerful resources because our opinions are not
only moulded by them, but we also choose to employ them in different ways and
at different times depending on circumstances. We play different ‘culture cards’
to suit how best to present ourselves in the particular circumstances that we face.
An example that underpins a number of the ethnographic narratives in this book
is how we label ourselves as Western or non-Western, and the values that we
attach to these labels. Since the time of writing the first edition, we have seen
a massive polarisation of constructions of global positioning around particular
political phenomena. In the British referendum regarding leaving the European
Union and its aftermath, grand narratives of ‘leave’ (Brexit) or ‘remain’ have
been produced and manipulated by political parties and the media, and then
splintered into the personal statements of individuals in social media and face-to-
face forums. Conflicts in the Middle East and the presidency of Donald Trump
have brought about both the demonisation and idealisation of nations, migration,
particular religions and sects, and so on. Readers might reflect here on similar
examples that pertain to their own social and political environments.
It is a major tenet of this book that almost everything intercultural is under-
pinned by this positioning and politics, which is very hard to see around because
of the degree to which we are all inscribed by long-standing Self and Other
constructions of who we are in relationship to others in our histories, education,
institutions, upbringing and media representations, and that these are rooted
profoundly in a world which is not politically or economically equal. A discus-
sion of grand and personal narratives will begin in Chapter 3, and grand narra-
tives will the major focus of Chapter 6.
 The grammar of culture  5

The social and political structures domain raises difficult questions about the
relationship between how we construct the concept of culture and reality. Here
we need to think carefully about the circumstances under which we talk about
‘a culture’, and what we mean when we do this. We need then to consider how
far this notion matches reality. A useful mental exercise here is to consider two
countries with which we are familiar and compare how their social and political
structures interact and overlap. How might the concept of ‘culture’ be thereby
used in each case? What factors would act against an easy use of the concept of
‘culture’? We then need to think about how we position ourselves in relation to
these two countries.

Particular cultural products

On the right of the grammar, these are the outcome of cultural activity. The
first domain, artefacts, includes the ‘big-C’ cultural artefacts such as litera-
ture and the arts. They also include cultural practices, which are the day-to-
day things we do which can seem strange for people coming from foreign
cultural backgrounds – how we eat, wash, greet, show respect, organise our
environment, and so on. These are the things which are most commonly asso-
ciated with ‘our culture’ or national culture, but they also differ between small
groups within a particular society and can be carried and learned across cul-
tural locations.
The second domain, statements about culture, is perhaps the hardest of all
the domains in the grammar to make sense of. It is to do with how we present
ourselves and what we choose to call ‘our culture’ – how we position ourselves
and how we choose to play the ‘culture card’. There is a deep and tacit politics
here which means that what we choose to say and project may not actually rep-
resent how things are, but rather our dreams and aspirations about how we would
like them to be, or the spin we place upon them to create the impact we wish
to have on others. This is not to do with lying or deceiving, but with a genuine
presentation of Self which involves a sophisticated manipulation of reality. These
are the locations and products of discourses about culture that are at the core of
discussions throughout the book.

How the grammar is used

The ensuing chapters do not deal with each part of the grammar one by one.
Instead, the interconnection and conversation between the parts are demon-
strated within the theme of each chapter. Reference to particular domains
in the grammar will help break open what is going on in the narratives to
expose the key forces which are at play. It is hoped that these forces will be
recognisable to outsiders to the narratives and help them to read culture
wherever it is by referring them back to forces they can find within their
own society.
6  The grammar of culture

Further reference
Chapter 6 of my (2011a) book Intercultural communication and ideology describes the
grammar of culture with examples. Also, throughout, there are ethnographic
narratives which are analysed in a similar fashion to this book. The idea of small
cultures was the starting point for developing the grammar of culture and is
originally introduced in my ‘small cultures’ article (1999; 2011b).
My use of the term ‘grammar’ can be traced to the pencilled underlinings that
I made as an undergraduate sociology student in C. Wright Mills’ The sociological
imagination. He refers to what social scientists do to ‘imagine and build’ ideas and
analysis as ‘the very grammar of the sociological imagination’ in which individu-
als become aware of their location in the bigger picture of society and history
(1970: 234–5).
As imaginary, Mills also warns against allowing the grammar to ‘run away
from its purposes’ (1970: 235). I take this to mean that it must not be reified –
to become more than a temporary, operational attempt to make sense. This
really is a case where ‘the map is not the territory it represents’, but is hopefully
‘useful’ through some sort of similarity in structure which has constantly to be
tested through use (Korzybski 1933: 58, his emphasis). This warning also reso-
nates strongly with Anderson’s (2006) statement about ‘imagined communities’:
and my allegiance to the sociology of Max Weber, who provided me with the
social action element of the grammar, brings also the notion that coherent ideas
about societies should be regarded as ‘ideal types’ – imagined models or heuristic
devices (i.e. for the purpose of investigation) – which might be used to imagine
what society might be like but which should never be taken as descriptions of
how things actually are (Strå th 2008: 33–4; Weber 1968: 23).
Following the central theme of cultural negotiation, in my recent work with
Sara Amadasi, we begin to understand small cultures more as highly negotiated
social actions rather than as places. Through our exploration of the identities
of university students, schoolchildren and others as intercultural travellers, we
have found a complex politics of personal positioning in which all parties nego-
tiate multiple and sometimes conflicting discourses and narratives (Amadasi &
Holliday 2017; 2018; Holliday & Amadasi forthcoming).
While small cultures can certainly be associated with social groupings, from
neighbourhoods or communities to work, friendship or leisure groups (Beales et
al. 1967: 8), the New London Group’s emphasis on such smaller entities which
we all engage with as we move through life (Lankshear et al. 1997), and even
with the highly instrumental educational notion of communities of practice
(Wenger 2000) (though the small cultures idea distances itself from any instru-
mental educational purpose), my focus in the second edition is more on how
small cultures are built from the micro basics of how individuals manage image
within the group (e.g. Goffman 1972).
Small cultures as places of social action through small culture forma-
tion on the go, informed and mediated by personal cultural trajectories, also
 The grammar of culture  7

resonates with the notion of independent groups resisting the grand narratives of
mass society in Kornhauser (1959).
Stuart Hall’s two chapters (1991a; b) in King’s edited collection Culture, glo-
balisation and the world-system describe the politics implicit in the global posi-
tioning and politics category, and the impossibility of defining culture as a
neutral, objective, measurable entity. Pages 44 onwards of Nathan’s book (2010)
Social freedom in a multicultural state present another picture of culture which might
be compared to the grammar, especially in relation to complexity.
Max Weber’s social action approach (e.g. 1964: 115–17) projects the idea that
the precise nature of human behaviour can never be determined. While Weber
did much to describe the social structures of Protestantism and Confucianism,
it was made very clear that the social action of individuals could be expressed in
dialogue with them (Bendix 1966: 261; Dobbin 1994: 118). While political and
other circumstances may severely reduce the degree to which individual social
action can be acted out, this does not mean that the potential is not there.
An interesting parallel to my use of Max Weber is Nathan’s (2010) use of
the sociological theory of Wilhelm Dilthey, who might be said to share with
Weber an interpretivist opposition to the positivism inherent in structural-­
functionalism. I think that particularly related to the complexity of my gram-
mar of culture, especially with regard to the global positioning and politics
domain, is Nathan’s emphasis on Dilthey’s interest in the multiple nature of any
society, as no matter how homogeneous it may appear on the surface, a society
is always mediated by histories and struggles for power within smaller groups
(2010: 45, citing Benhabib).

Note
1 This figure is adapted from Holliday (2011a: 131). There are a number of other
versions in use, each adapted, simplified or re-worded for the particular discussion
to which they belong, but all with the same basic domains. To be able to adapt the
­g rammar in this way is at the core of its transient purpose.
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