A Cross-cultural Analysis of Value Concept between China and America-Based on American Vaccine Mandate Policy 中美价值观跨文化比较——以美国疫苗强制令政策为例文献综述

 2023-05-05 09:05

文献综述

2. Literary Review2.1 Overview of cross-cultural communication and value concepts2.1.1 Cross-cultural communicationWhen a message is produced by a person from one culture to another person from another culture, cross-cultural communication occurs. This circumstance can be problematic. Because culture forges and shapes the individual communicator as we have already seen. Culture is largely responsible for the construction of our individual social realities and for our individual repertories of communicative behaviors and meanings. The communication repertories people possess call vary significantly from culture to culture, which can lead to all sorts of difficulties. Through the study and understanding of cross-cultural communication, however, these difficulties at the least can be reduced, and at best nearly eliminated.The term cross-cultural communication is most generally and widely used. All forms of communication between members of racial, ethnic or other cultural groups can be included．A more comprehensive definition is offered by Lustig and Koester: Cross-cultural communication is a symbolic, interpretive, transactional, contextual process in which the degree of difference between people is large and important enough to create dissimilar interpretations and expectations about what are regarded as competent behaviors that should be used to create shared meanings.Cross-cultural communication has aroused the interest of scholars in many different fields and terms refer to this discipline vary in the research literature. The most commonly used terms are intercultural communication, cross-cultural communication and international communication. Because the impacts of culture and communication have caused many problems, which directly lead to these seemingly confusing terms from a different standpoint. Intercultural communication refers to communication between people from different cultural backgrounds. Cross-cultural communication usually refers to the contrastive study of patterns of communication between speakers from two cultures. While intercultural communication is to study interactions among people from different cultural backgrounds in more general terms, cross-cultural communication is to make a comparison of interactions among people from two cultures on a specific aspect. The term International communication refers to communication between people from different nations. Since nations are political entities, the term international communication involves communication between countries rather than between individuals. This term is most often used in discussing international problems in the political arena and not commonly adopted in cultural studies．2.1.2 Value conceptsCultures differ in what they value. Value concepts are values that tend to permeate a culture. People from different cultural groups differ in their judgment about what a culture regards as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unfair, just or unjust, beautiful or ugly, appropriate or inappropriate, and valuable or worthless. Value concept is the system of criteria for conduct and evaluation. It functions as the desired objectives or goals of the culture. Value concept is the desired characteristic of a culture. It does not necessarily describe its actual behaviors and characteristics. The definition of cultural value is widely cited: a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action.Cultural value gets translated into action and transmitted by a variety of source, such as family, media, school, church, company and etc. Therefore, it tends to be broad-based, enduring, and relatively stable and guides both perception and communication. It is universally acknowledged that understanding of cultural values helps us appreciate the behavior of other people．Many theorists have attempted to provide insights into a culture range of values. Milton Rokeach provides two types of values---instrumental values and terminal values. Instrumental values describe good way of behaving, or ways to be, and include such attributes as honesty, love, obedience, ambition, and independence. Terminal values refer to the end-states of existence that most of the members of a culture desire, or things to have or achieve. And it includes such attributes as freedom, a comfortable life, wisdom, a world at peace, and true friendship.Different cultures have different values on the dimensions of valence and intensity. Valence refers to the direction of the value, or whether the value is seen as positive or negative. Intensity indicates the strength or importance of the value, or the degree to which the culture identifies the value as significant. For example, in American cultures, the respect for elders is negatively valenced value and the perspective is held with intensity modestly. Many Americans value the young rather than the old. While in China, the respect for elders is a positively valenced value, and it is very intensely held. It would be impossible to study any particular culture without determination of each values valence and intensity．Cultural value is quite different from cultures value. Cultures value indicates how a culture influence people, or put another word what the function of culture is and whether it is good for or bad to its people, which is not to be discussed here．What the present dissertation expects to discuss is cultural value which manifests itself in the mode of behavior or in the end-state of life of its people．2.2Previousstudiesathomeandabroad In 1980, Geert Hofstede from the Netherlands published a book, Cultures Consequences： International Difference Work-Related Values, which takes a different approach to analyze cultural differences in values from Kluckhohns. Instead of categorizing values, he began to conduct opinion surveys of people in companies around the world. Then he used statistical methods to analyze the responses to the surveys. From the analysis he singled out four pairs of contrastive values that he used to compare values across cultures. Each country he surveyed was assigned a score for each pair of contrasting values. Compared with Kluckhohns classification, the advantage of this method is that it makes it possible to identify differences in cultural values more precisely. The limitation of this method is that he did not identify differences with nations and cultures. Because he assign each country or region a score for each value, it is not possible to know how much variation exists within a country or region. In other words, Hofstedes work emphasizes national cultures rather than the layers of culture within nations.The four pairs of contrasting values Hofstede identified are: individualism versus collectivism, high versus low uncertainty avoidance, large versus small power distance, and masculinity versus femininity. These highlight the most important differences for organizations.Individualism versus collectivism: individual interests and goals are held as most important in individualism-oriented cultures and therefore an I consciousness prevails, while group interests and goals precede over interests and goals of the individual in collectivism-oriented cultures and a we consciousness prevails. People of individualism cultural background are penchant for loose knit social networks. They define themselves primarily as independent individuals and focus on taking care only of themselves and their immediate families. Compared to individualism, collectivists rank themselves as members of groups. They strongly distinguish between own groups (in-groups) and other people (out-groups) and expect members of their particular group to take care of them and protect them.2.3 Summary Culture is invisible and pervasive and it is one of the most favored vocabularies of man. The word culture has been used in almost every human society. Culture is difficult to define. Almost everyone has a definition of culture. Everyone communicates and has a preconceived notion of what communication is and how it takes place. Communication, our ability to share our ideas and feelings, is the basis of all human contact. Cross-cultural communication occurs whenever two or more people from different cultures or micro-cultures come together and exchange verbal and nonverbal symbols. The world is changing, and the times are changing. All the changes have transformed the earth into the global village forecast by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. Improvements in transportation technology, developments in communication technology, globalization of the economy, and changes in immigration patterns have produced major transformations in both worldwide and local patterns of communication and interaction and thus intercultural communication becomes more and more important in todays society.

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