Finding an answer to the question “What is intercultural communication?” doesn’t seem very difficult: it’s the communication between different cultures. But what is culture exactly? And how can it be defined?
Culture is seen as something abstract and inaccessible by a lot of people. Instinctively, we all know what culture is, but when we are asked to describe it, we block. However, a certain insight into the concept of culture is essential to understand the meaning of intercultural communication. In the following paragraphs, I’ll try to describe culture and make it a bit more concrete.
Culture can be defined as the total of beliefs, values, attitudes and ways of thinking and acting shared by a certain group of people. Or, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz stated: “Culture is a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions – for the governing of behavior”. The Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede defined culture as “the collective mental programming of the people in an environment”.
When asked, people often say that a culture is shared by those who speak the same language, or those who have the same nationality. Still, the term ‘culture’ doesn’t only apply to national or ethnic groups. It also applies to groups within a society, at different levels. People from the same age can share a culture, just as people with the same profession or the same belief and people who work for the same company. The variety of cultures is enormous: national culture, corporate culture, age culture…
That variety of cultures implies that intercultural communication is a very large domain. It doesn’t only imply communication between people who don’t speak the same language, but it also implies communication between people of different ages or between two companies with a completely different corporate culture. Welcome to the fascinating and continuously expanding world of intercultural communication!
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