INRODUCTION

  • Venture into unfamiliar cultural terrains
  • Even relatively short time sojourners must at be at least minimally concerned with building a healthy functional relationship to the host environment in a way similar to the native population
  • Confrontation of cross cultural predicaments
  1. People adapt naturally and continually as they face challenges from their environment / a drastic and disorienting experience leads to transformation of one’s life sense of agent / internal changes/ human is never a finished product, but instead is in the business of growing and maturing
  2. Adaptive changes in the view of input and out messages – intentional-unintentional, verbal-nonverbal. Individual adaptation activities occur as long as one lives. Grounded in the theory of Watzlavick et al. (1967) that “one cannot not communicate.”
  3. Co-participation between a person and his/her environment for the goal of a person’s adaptation / this adaptation is has multiple dimensions and facets / change in one part is likely to have functional consequences in many other parts.
  • This approach goes beyond to applying independent and dependent variables to explaining cross-cultural adaptation based on the underlying assumption of linear causality (response to the U curve model)
  • Uses broad and abstract terms  cross-cultural adaptation

strangers

heuristic and parsimonious concepts

for analyzing the social processes of individuals

who confront a new and unfamiliar milieu

  • SCOPE OF THE THEORY / BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

-the strangers must have had a primary socialization in one culture or subculture and have moved into a different and unfamiliar culture or subculture

-the strangers are at least minimally dependent on the host environment for meeting their personal and social needs

-the strangers are engaged in continuous firsthand communication experiences with that environment

THE PROCESS OF CROSS-CULTURAL ADAPTATION

CULTURE:

An imprinted pattern of knowledge attitudes values mindsets perceptions and a set of behaviors that permeate all life activities.

Culture has a pervasive role in shaping individual behavior

ENCULTURATION: culture gives status and assigns the role of an individual in the life of the community

ACCULTURATION: the process of learning and acquiring the elements of the host culture

UNLEARNING/DECULTURATION: losing or putting aside some of the old cultural habits / new responses are adopted in situations that previously would have evoked old ones

STRESS-ADAPTATION-GROWTH DYNAMIC

STRESS:

Personality disintegration because of the experiences of acculturation and deculturation / the generic response that occurs whenever the capabilities of the individual are not adequate to the / demands of the environment  personality disintegration, state of disequilibrium manifested in many emotional lows, uncertainty, confusion anxiety  activation of a defensive mechanism to minimize the effects of the disequilibrium  selective attention, denial, self-deception, avoidance, withdrawal, or, hostility, cynicism, compulsively altruistic behavior

Adaptation:stress is temporary; it leads to adaptation because strangers strive to meet and manage the challenge by acting on and responding to the host environment

Growth: internal transformation / creative responses to new circumstances  the stress-adaptation experiences bring about change and growth  a crisis once managed by the strangers presents an opportunity for a strengthening of their coping abilities

Overtime the stress-adaptation-growth dynamic plays out not in a smooth linear progression, but in a cyclic and continual draw-back-to-leap pattern

Dialectic relationship between push and pull, engagement and disengagement in the psychological movements of strangers

Even those who interact with the natives with the intention of confining themselves to only superficial relationships are likely to become – given sufficient time – at least adapted to the host culture “in spite of themselves

INTERCULTURAL TRANSFORMATION:

  • As strangers experience a progression of internal change they are likely to undergo a set of identifiable transformations in their habitual patterns of

COGNITIVE AFFECTIVE and BEHAVIORAL responses

  • Due to acculturation and deculturation old cultural habits are replaced by new habits

 three interrelated aspects of the strangers’ intercultural transformation are specified in this theory as the outcomes of the cross-cultural adaptation process

  1. INCREASED FUNCTIONAL FITNESS:

Synchrony between their internal responses and the external demands in the host environment through repeated activities resulting in new cultural learning and internal reorganizing

Successfully adapted strangers have accomplished a desired level of proficiency in communicating and developing a satisfactory relationship with the host society

  1. PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH

Ability to communicate and the accompanying functional fitness in host society

Concentrates on the emotional feeling of the stranger

  1. INTERCULTURAL IDENTITY

Adversarial cross-cultural experiences

Individuals

Redefine the sense of connection to their original cultural groups

Accompany growth

ADLER: intercultural identity is based not on belongingness which implies either owing or being owned by a single culture but on a style of self-consciousness that situated oneself neither totally a part of nor totally apart from a given culture

INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION:

  • the capacity of strangers to appropriately and effectively receive and process information (decode) and to design and execute mental plans in initiating or responding to messages (encode)
  • host communication competence facilitates their cross-cultural adaptation process in the most direct and significant way. It serves as an instrumental, interpretive and expressive means of coming to terms with the host environment

SOCIAL COMMUNICATION:

  • HOST INTERPERSONAL COM: every host social communication event offers the stranger an opportunity for cultural learning. Crucial importance of host interpersonal activities in facilitating cross-cultural adaptation. In some case the degree of the host interpersonal communication has been accepted as an indicator of cross-cultural adaptation itself

Opportunities for more personalized and thus meaningful involvement with members of the host culture  feedback

quick exchange of information is maximal.

  • HOST MASS COMM: participation in vicarious learning through “para-social” interactions with the host environment at large beyond the ordinary reaches of their daily lives.

Governed by a lesser sense of mutual obligation and effort facilitates early phases when host communication competence is low.

  • ETHNIC INTERSPERSONAL AND MASS COM SYSTEMS: provide strangers with access to their original cultural experiences

Serve adaptation-facilitating for new immigrants or sojourners during the initial phase of their adaptation process.

They compensate for the lack of support they are capable of obtaining from host nationals

Easy, stress free communication  offer refuge

Beyond the initial phase ethnic social communication has been to be important for group identity maintenance and negatively associated with adaptation to the host country.

ENVIRONMENT:

  • The host society exerts influence on adaptation

The nature of that influence is shaped by the various characteristics of the host society.

THREE ENVIROMENTAL CONDITIONS

are identified as affecting the individual strangers’ adaptation process

  1. HOST RECEPTIVITY:

The degree to which a given environment is structurally and psychologically accessible and open to strangers. Different locations in a given society may offer different levels of receptivity toward different group of strangers.

  1. HOST CONFORMITY PRESSURE:

The extend to which the environment challenges strangers to adopt the normative patterns of the host culture and its communication system.

Expectations the natives have about how strangers should think and act / tolerance to strangers and their cultural characteristics.

  1. STRENGHT OF THE STRANGER’S ETHNIC GROUP:

In the long run a strong ethnic community is likely to exert stronger social pressure to conform to its own cultural practices and to maintain the strangers’ ethnic group identity.  discourages their participation in the host social communication activities that they are necessary for their adaptation to the larger society

PREDISPOSITION:

  • The process of cross-cultural adaptation is affected by the internal conditions of the strangers themselves prior to resettlement to the host society.

PREPAREDNESS:

Mental, emotional and motivational readiness to deal with the new cultural environment including understanding of the host language and culture

Formal and informal learning activities prior to moving

Media exposure / positive expectations / willingness to participate voluntary

Individual experiences with members of the host culture / prior intercultural adaptation experiences

ETHNICITY:

The term is used inclusive here and refers to various characteristics of strangers pertaining to their distinctiveness as a people

Ethnicities affect the ease or difficulty with which the stranger is able to develop communication competence in a given host society and participate in its social activities.

Strangers of different ethnic backgrounds embark on their cross-cultural journey with different levels of advantage or handicap (see also privileged-disadvantage dialectic, Martin & Nakayama).

PERSONALITY TRAITS:

Resources that would help the strangers’ adaptation by enabling them to endure stressful challenges and to maximize new learning both of which are essential to their intercultural transformation

OPENNESS: minimizes resistance and

maximizes a willingness to attend to new and changed circumstances / less rigid ethnocentric judgments / optimism and affirmative orientation in the stranger’s basic outlook on life / self trust in the face adverse circumstances / helps strangers to acquire compatibility with the natives.

STRENGTH:

Resilience, risk taking, hardiness, persistence, patience, elasticity, resourcefulness / strangers’ inner quality that absorbs shock from the environment and bounces back without seriously damaging them.

Inner resources for working toward developing the host competence so as to facilitate strangers’ intercultural transformation and growth.

CONCLUSION:

  • This theory portrays cross-cultural adaptation as a collaborative effort in which a stranger and a receiving environment are engaged in a joint venture
  • Cross-cultural adaptation is ultimately the gift of the individuals
  • Cross-cultural adaptation is not an extraordinary phenomenon that only exceptional individuals can achieve. Rather, it is a simply incident of the normal human mutability manifesting itself to the work of ordinary people stretching themselves out of the old and familiar