Social domain theory: interpreting intercultural communication
Culture and cultures
The starting point for this kind of definition is, implicitly, a claim that human beings can be classified into 'distinctive groups', and that these cultural groups are recognizable by the practices of those who belong to them. As we saw with' ethnicity', there is a persistent danger that the categorization of people into groups of this kind will do violence to the complexity of human experience. In the singular, 'culture' denotes something which is common to the experience of all human beings; yet the plural form 'cultures' denotes categories by which to distinguish groups from each other. Even when hedged with a rejection of generalizations and stereotypes, definitions almost invariably imply a degree of homogenizing of 'culture' within a group, and a demarcation of separate 'cultures' between groups.
A further conceptual problem with the term is that of circularity. When 'culture' is used in the classification of groups of people, the implicit argument usually runs along the following lines. People can be identified as members of 'Culture A' because they come from one of the territories associated with 'A' people, and engage in certain practices. What are these practices? They are whatever people from Territory A are held to do. The argument is a closed one, in that it supposes that all people of Culture A must do these things, and any body from Territory A who does things differently becomes an anomaly, simply because they have flouted the a priori definition of what being a person of Culture A entails. As Blommaert (1998) points out, it is common to associate a 'culture' with a group of people bearing a name, such as 'the Japanese', despite the fact that 'there is no way in which nationality or ethnic membership would guarantee the salience, the relevance or indeed the presence of "culture" or "ethnicity" in communication'.
The defining practices of each culture, moreover, are very wide in scope. Scollon and Scollon (2001: 139) group together such potentially disparate elements as 'customs, worldview, language, kinship system, [and] social organization'. It is quite possible to participate in, and reproduce, some of these elements and not others. In such cases, it becomes very difficult to determine whether or not an individual continues to qualify as a member of Culture A. On the one hand, anything he or she does should by definition constitute a Culture A practice; on the other hand, deviation from the dominant norms of behavior identified with members of the culture identifies the person as somehow not a full or typical member.
Our position calls for an explicit recognition that conventional conceptions of culture in the tradition, for example, of Parsons and structural functionalism tend to assume that social homogeneity is brought about by cultural homogeneity. Such conceptions contain two questionable assumptions. The first of these is 'the notion of a cultural pattern with an underlying unity and a fundamental notion of coherence'. That is to say, what makes Culture A distinct from Cultures B, C and so on, is that each exists as a separate and consistent entity. The second dubious assumption is 'the notion of uniform action ... produc[ing] social homogeneity' (Archer 1988: 4). That is, when people belonging to Culture A follow its practices, they act in accordance with its normative patterns, which is what produces the social homogeneity of Culture A. Archer continues: '... to view culture as "a community of shared meanings" mean[s] eliding the community with the meanings'.
Whether we focus primarily on practices or on worldview, or on the one as determined by the other, we are likely to take the circularity problem with us, along with what Archer terms 'the Myth of cultural consistency' (ibid.}, unless we disentangle some of these elements from each other.
This problem applies as much to 'small cultures' (Holliday 1999), such as institutions (schools, universities, commercial organizations, the police force), as to 'national cultures'. That is to say, institutions, strictly speaking, cannot possess cultures, since the term 'institutions' refers to relatively stable and bounded social spaces, elements of social structures, whereas to possess culture means to possess the understandings that are available only to human beings. This is not to say that we reject outright the informal use of the idea of an 'institutional culture'. We recognize that persistent, stable social interactions clearly do generate interaction orders (Goffman 1983), which are not reducible to individual interactants or interactions. Such interaction orders lead to particular kinds of expectation about how interactions within the institution are to be conducted, and subsequent interactants do what they do and say what they say within the constraints affecting these contexts. Thus it is that human decision-making shapes institutional practices, often reinforcing socially dominant beliefs and patterns of behavior such as, for example, racism and discrimination. Nevertheless, we would insist that culture is an emergent human product, constituted by and through human meanings, which are therefore not available to 'nations' or 'institutions'.
