The Psychology of Culture Shock

Colleen Ward, Stephen Bochner, Adrian Furnham

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134716692
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: History & Theory in Psychology

Crossing cultures can be a stimulating and rewarding adventure. It can also be a stressful and bewildering experience. This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Furnham and Bochner's classic Culture Shock (1986) examines the psychological and social processes involved in intercultural contact, including learning new culture specific skills, managing stress and coping with an unfamiliar environment, changing cultural identities and enhancing intergroup relations.
The book describes the ABCs of intercultural encounters, highlighting Effective, Behavioural and Cognitive components of cross-cultural experience. It incorporates both theoretical and applied perspectives on culture shock and a comprehensive review of empirical research on a variety of cross-cultural travellers, such as tourists, students, business travellers, immigrants and refugees. Minimising the adverse effects of culture shock, facilitating positive msychological outcomes and discussion of selection and training techniques for living and working abroad represent some of the practical issues covered.
The Psychology of Culture Shock will provide an essential reference and textbook for courses within psychology, sociology and business training. It will also be a valuable resource for professionals working with culturally diverse populations and acculturating groups such as international students immigrants or refugees.

Part I

The psychology of intercultural contact

The aims of this volume are to describe and explain the psychological consequences of exposure to novel and unfamiliar cultural environments. The book sets out to look at the assumptions people hold about such experiences, to describe the theories that have been proposed to account for the effects of intercultural contact, to present a systematic review of empirical research on the causes and consequences of ‘culture shock’, and to consider strategies that might be used to diminish the problems associated with intercultural interactions.

These are largely the same aims as those of the original edition of this book, Culture Shock, published in 1986. However, much has changed in the intervening years. First, there has been an enormous increase in research on intercultural contact. The rapidly growing psychological literature on tourists, sojourners, immigrants and refugees has been associated with changing demographic, social and political trends, including a worldwide increase in migration, growing numbers of refugees and displaced persons, the expansion of international tourism and education, and globalisation of the workforce. But changes have emerged not only with respect to the quantity of research undertaken. The quality of research has also dramatically improved. More sophisticated theories, more robust research designs, including longitudinal studies, and more powerful statistical analyses, including causal modelling, are now being employed. All of this augurs well for the present and future.

Despite these advances, the theory and research on the psychology of intercultural contact have not been well integrated. The literature on tourists, sojourners, immigrants and refugees has largely emerged in parallel streams with limited cross-referencing or cross-fertilisation. In addition, scholars working within specific social scientific paradigms often appear unaware or ill-informed about alternative theoretical contributions and how these may lead to a more comprehensive analysis of their own works. So, in addition to reviewing theory and research on ‘culture shock’, we also attempt to provide a broader integrative framework for the study of intercultural contact.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a general introduction to the psychology of cross-cultural interaction. Chapter 1 sets the scene, raising key issues and discussing fundamental concepts that have been used to make sense of this complex area. We start by describing social systems in terms of inputs, throughputs and outputs, paving the way for a later discussion of the antecedents, correlates and consequences of intercultural contact. We also make explicit distinctions between culture contact that occurs between and within societies and discuss how different research traditions have evolved in these domains. In addition, Chapter 1 foreshadows the reasons why intercultural encounters may be difficult—giving particular attention to the role of individualism and collectivism in shaping and influencing intercultural interactions.

Chapter 2 continues with an introductory overview and distinguishes four ways in which the process of intercultural contact can be understood: in reference to the types of groups studied (e.g. tourists, immigrants), relevant situational variables (e.g. purpose, time span and type of interactions), the outcomes of intercultural contact (on both the individual and group level), and the major conceptual frameworks underlying the empirical research. Both the historical and current literature is reviewed, and the major contemporary theories —culture learning, stress and coping, and social identification—are introduced. The chapter concludes with a framework for the study of intercultural contact.

Part II focuses on the major theoretical approaches to understanding and explaining intercultural contact. Here we introduce our ABC model of ‘culture shock’. That is, we consider the Affect, Behaviour, and Cognitions relating to intercultural contact and elaborate the theoretical traditions that guide related research. Chapter 3 concentrates on Behaviour. It reviews culture learning theory, emphasising that effective intercultural interactions are often hampered by the fact that participants are unaware of the subtle, culturally-defined rules and regulations that govern social encounters. These include verbal and nonverbal forms of communication as well as etiquette, the use of time, and strategies for resolving conflict. The chapter also includes a discussion of intercultural communication theory, social relations in multicultural societies, and the assessment of sociocultural adaptation.

Chapter 4 is concerned with Affect. It elaborates the stress and coping perspective on intercultural contact, making particular reference to those factors that facilitate and impede psychological adjustment. This approach emphasises the significance of life events and changes, stress appraisal, and coping styles during intercultural encounters. It also makes reference to the influence of personal and interpersonal resources such as self-efficacy, emotional resilience, and social support, as well as culture-specific variables such as culture distance and acculturation strategies.

Social identification theories are reviewed in Chapter 5. Here we assess both inward-looking Cognitions, i.e. how one views oneself in terms of social and cultural identity, as well as outward-looking perceptions, i.e. how an individual perceives and makes judgements about members of other ethnic, cultural or national groups. This chapter includes a discussion of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination both within and across societies.

Part III distinguishes different types of culture travellers: tourists (Chapter 6), sojourners, particularly international students (Chapter 7) and international business people (Chapter 8), immigrants (Chapter 9), and refugees (Chapter 10). In this section we have attempted to identify the common and the unique aspects of the culture-contact literature across the various groups. For example, immigrant populations have provided us with some of the best on research on intergenerational changes in values; studies of refugees have been heavily concentrated on the effects of premigration trauma and resultant clinical diagnoses; research with tourists has included studies of the impact of cross-cultural travellers on indigenous populations; and international students have offered us access to valuable longitudinal investigations monitoring changes in psychological and sociocultural adjustment over time. Despite the differences in emphases, the material presented here is interconnected with the theoretical underpinnings elaborated in the preceding section. Issues pertaining to culture learning, stress and coping, identity and intergroup relations are interwoven throughout these chapters.

Part IV, the final section, considers applications and evaluations. In Chapter 11 we review strategies that may be used to reduce stress and enhance the effectiveness of intercultural interactions. Again the three theoretical perspectives are revisited; however, the majority of the material in this chapter on selection, preparation and training procedures is derived from culture learning theory and supported by work from industrial and organisational psychology.

Although we suggest a model for culture training, including the knowledge, skills, attitudes and abilities required to function effectively in a new cultural milieu, we acknowledge that the majority of culture travellers do not receive systematic assistance. Finally, in Chapter 12 we conclude with a brief review and evaluation of the field, a comparison of past and present research, and a cautious forecast for the future.

1
Introduction and overview: Setting the scene

Contact between culturally diverse individuals is as old as recorded history. People brought up in one culture have always visited other societies to trade with, learn from, or exert influence in foreign lands. Most societies have experienced visitors from abroad, welcoming them if their motives were seen to be benevolent, or resisting the newcomers if they came to invade, pillage, or exploit. The journals of Xenophon, Marco Polo, Columbus, Drake, Captain Cook, Burton, and Lafcadio Hearn provide excellent accounts of what nowadays we would call intercultural contact. They also touch on some of the interpersonal and sociopolitical difficulties such contacts often create. The difference between then and now is merely one of scope, that is, the quantum increase in the movement of people across national and ethnic boundaries due to factors including mass access to jet travel, globalisation of industry, expansion of educational exchanges, increasing affluence supporting a burgeoning tourist industry, and growing migrant, refugee, and foreign worker movements. All of these developments involve some contact between culturally disparate individuals. The aim of this book is to explore the psychology of culture contact, the term we use to refer to the meeting of individuals and groups who differ in their cultural, ethnic, or linguistic backgrounds.

In this chapter we will raise some of the key issues, concepts and distinctions that have been proposed to make sense of what is a complex and often controversial area. The rest of the book is an elaboration of these ideas.

SOCIAL SYSTEMS AS INPUTS, THROUGHPUTS AND OUTPUTS

In the language of systems theory (Emery, 1969) as well as modern computer-speak, social systems and processes are defined by inputs or what starts the process; throughputs, or how the inputs are transformed by various influences; and outputs, or what outcomes are produced by the input-throughput sequence. This provides quite a useful analytic approach and highlights the need to define the outcomes or, in the language of experimental psychology, the dependent variables which constitute the key end-products of intercultural contact. Basically, these include the participants’ behaviours, perceptions, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and self-references.

In turn, these outcome variables are embedded in various theoretical and research traditions, and what particular studies measure is a function of the theoretical predilections of the investigators. Thus cognitive theorists will concentrate on perceptions; social psychologists will attend to attitudes, beliefs and attributions; psychologists with a behavioural bent will study intergroup processes and social skills; communication theorists will concentrate on the verbal and non-verbal messages that participants send and receive; and personality theorists may prefer measures of feelings, states and traits. One of the aims of this book will be to try to integrate these various theoretical domains, because they all have a contribution to make in helping to get a grasp on the phenomena under scrutiny.

On the throughput side, we propose a fairly rigorous definition of what constitutes contact by limiting the term to refer to social interactions that have the characteristics of a critical incident (Flanagan, 1954), that is, an event that matters and is regarded by one or both of the participants as being of some importance and as having a significant, non-trivial impact on their lives.

CULTURE CONTACT WITHIN AND BETWEEN SOCIETIES

Intercultural contacts can be classified into two broad categories: those that occur among the residents of a culturally diverse nation or society and those that take place when a person from one society travels to another country with a particular objective in mind; for example, to work, play, study, exploit, convert, or provide assistance (Bochner, 1982). Most of the research on culture shock has dealt with the latter, between-society category of contact, and this book reflects this emphasis in the literature. However, the incidence of within-society intercultural contacts has become much more frequent in recent years and is now a prolific target of both research and social/political action.

The term ‘multiculturalism’ is being increasingly used to describe this form of intercultural contact. For instance, Fowers and Richardson (1996) use this term in their description of racial and minority issues in the United States, and most of the references they cite also deal with intra-society intercultural interactions. Although there exist very few, if any, completely monocultural nations today, some societies are obviously more culturally diverse than others. For instance, Japan and Korea are often cited as examples of relatively culturally homogeneous societies (Kashima and Callan, 1994) as contrasted with more culturally diverse societies such as Australia, the United States, or Canada (Berry, 1997; Berry, Kalin and Taylor, 1977; Bochner, 1986; Bochner and Hesketh, 1994; Hesketh and Bochner, 1994; Triandis, Kurowski and Gelfand, 1994). Underlying themes in this area relate to judgements about the degree of actual or perceived cultural diversity that characterises a particular society, whether such heterogeneity is desirable or undesirable, and whether it leads to positive or negative outcomes. Some of these issues will be referred to later in this book.

The term ‘sojourner’ has been used to describe between-society culture travellers (e.g. Ady, 1995; Klineberg and Hull, 1979). This label reflects the assumption that their stay is temporary, and that there is the intention to return to the culture of origin once the purpose of the visit has been achieved, assumptions which are often incorrect, as we shall see. People with whom the visitors enter into significant contact have been referred to as host nationals (e.g. Schild, 1962) which draws attention to the imbalance in the power, rights, territorial claims, and role expectations that distinguish temporary sojourners from permanent members of the host nation. Examples of sojourner categories include business people (Torbiorn, 1994), overseas students (Klineberg, 1981), technical experts (Seidel, 1981), missionaries (Gish, 1983), military personnel (Guthrie, 1966), diplomats (Dane, 1981), and even tourists (Pearce, 1982a,b, 1988). Distinctions are often drawn, however, between sojourners and more long term intercultural travellers such as immigrants and refugees. The intercultural literature on all of these groups will be reviewed in more detail later in this book.

Outcomes of contact

There is the need to put some content into the abstract categories we have described. Ady’s (1995) extensive review of the literature found that studies of the empirical outcomes of intercultural contact fit quite neatly into the following six categories:

1. The general satisfaction of the sojourners with their new lives, often defined in terms of their well-being (e.g. Dunbar, 1992).
2. Changes in emotional adjustment over time. This conceptualisation goes back to Oberg’s (1960) definition of the successful sojourner progressing through four stages of ‘culture shock.’ Many writers have subsequently extended this idea with some asserting that adjustment follows a U-shaped curve over time. This has been further elaborated as a W-curve if re-entry into the host culture is included in the process (e.g. Bochner, Lin and McLeod, 1980). To foreshadow, more recent empirical findings and theoretical speculation about the nature of time-based changes have been equivocal with respect to the U-curve hypothesis. This issue will be dealt with later in this book.
3. The extent to which sojourners interact with and engage in the host culture. One way of measuring this aspect empirically is to study the social networks of sojourners (e.g. Bochner, McLeod and Lin, 1977).
4. The adverse psychological (or indeed psychopathological) consequences of failing to adjust to the new culture. This variable also has a long tradition, going back to Stonequist’s (1937) discussion of marginality as one of the possible outcomes of culture contact. Contemporary versions use the concept of ‘stress’ to describe the more extreme negative experiences of some culture travellers (e.g. Ward, 1996).
5. The ability of the sojourner to manage the transition, to ‘fit in’ (e.g. Black, 1990). This is a major issue and will receive extensive treatment later.
6. The degree of competence sojourners achieve in negotiating their new setting. This idea is more precisely articulated in terms of the construct of culture learning (e.g. Bochner, 1986) and will be developed in much greater detail in this book.

Clearly, there are other ways of cutting this particular cake. For instance, Ward and colleagues (e.g. Ward, 1996) regard culture contact as a major, stressful life event, a view that would be shared by many of the writers in this field. Their particular contribution is to make an explicit distinction between the affective, cognitive, and behavioural responses to contact, which they suggest lead to two distinct types of outcomes, psychological and socio-cultural. This model will be described in greater detail later in this book.

Although it may be somewhat of an oversimplification, the overriding dependent variable in intercultural contact is whether the outcome tends to be positive or negative or, in plain English, whether the participants, as a result of the contact, liked or hated each other; trusted or viewed each other with suspicion; enjoyed each other’s company or found the interaction awkward; were willing to work with, play with, or marry the other-culture individual; gained a sense of self-enhancement or humiliation in the company of culturally disparate individuals; and all the other cognitions and emotions that individuals experience when they engage in social interaction, and the behaviours that reflect these feelings.

It is therefore necessary to establish what actually occurs when individuals from different cultural backgrounds meet. Another task is to uncover the determinants of the various outcomes, or in the language of exper...

Table des matières

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• PART I: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INTERCULTURAL CONTACT
• PART II: THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO CULTURE SHOCK
• PART III: VARIETIES OF CULTURE TRAVELLERS
• PART IV: APPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
• REFERENCES