{"id":28733,"date":"2022-09-07T14:00:37","date_gmt":"2022-09-07T21:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=28733"},"modified":"2022-09-07T14:00:37","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T21:00:37","slug":"scales-over-our-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/scales-over-our-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"“Scales” Over Our Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Erin Meyer’s work compiles cutting edge research into one location as it pertains to cultural mapping and cross-cultural communication. Meyer’s book The Culture Map<\/em> focuses primarily on cultural competency within the context of business, however, her work is applicable to a variety of industries and contexts. She distills cultural difference into an applicable tool that relativizes and charts cultural differences based eight scales – those scales are communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing<\/em>, and scheduling<\/em>. Each scale has two poles between which all cultures can be charted. For example, the two poles of the evaluating scale are\u00a0direct negative feedback\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0indirect negative feedback. <\/em>Similarly scheduling <\/em>is polarized by linear-time <\/em>and flexible-time. <\/em>\u00a0Erin mixes both extensive research and personal stories and anecdotes to enable to reader to understand the vast differences, many of which are unseen, that cultures carry, and why understanding these differences, at least in part, can build better cross-cultural relationships on a variety of levels.<\/p>\n

I was most struck by the scale of communicating<\/em>, and its poles of high context and low context. High context implies that most of what is communicated is done so around and between what is actually spoken. Low context cultures are quite explicit and direct, and these differences, when unconscious to either party, can lead to miscommunication and relational discord. This is certainly crucial when dealing in business across cultures such as the Japanese and the British, as Meyer provides as an example. However, I want to focus on how this may play out within the US.<\/p>\n

Erin Meyer offers an excellent gift in cultural mapping tool. Though she’s explicit about being anti-reductionistic, I feel she conflates culture and country (I’m certainly open to pushback and discussion here). For example, she is clear that French people are not all the same, and warns against characterizing people based on country of origin or residence. However, in such a highly globalized world, I’m not sure grouping culture by country provides an accurate, or even appropriate, picture of how people think, feel, act, and believe. From a US perspective I see an issue with grouping the entire country together. Even if the USA’s cultural map is an average or central point, the fact that the United States is seen as a single culture under Meyer’s research while various African countries are separated, is problematic to me.<\/p>\n

For example, one of the Africa countries she highlights is Kenya, which has a population of roughly 53 million people (2020). The US however, has a population of 329 million (2020). How can these two countries be compared apples to apples as only two cultures? Obviously Meyer’s work focuses on international business relationships, and she does make it clear that various groups within a culture fall in different places on a culture map, so I know the reductionistic leanings are not her intent. I do think there are some implicit bias in how countries\/cultures are broken down and analyzed. In some ways, I feel this book offers a template for doing more in depth work in our local, regional, and national context. I would be curious has cultural mapping would work strictly within a US context.<\/p>\n

These is currently much polarization on religious, political, economic, social, and relationship issues within the US, and I feel Erin Meyer’s cultural mapping tool would be helpful for seeing commonalities, differences, and find a way to engage across the scales to address the needs and assumptions of people from various parts of the United States.<\/p>\n

As a shadow-work facilitator, I always look for how a person, group, or even nation presents itself, then I look for what kind of shadow that presentation creates. The United States of America is an odd name for a country, isn’t it? What is the name presenting? At face value it is presenting an image of unity, so my question for our collective shadow would be, tell me about where you feel disunity.\u00a0<\/em>In order to arrive at an answer, I feel this culture mapping tool could clue us in to how vastly different people in the US think, feel, communicate, and behave.<\/p>\n

As Christian leaders this may be most valuable within the context of theology, where there is so much difference, disagreement, and perhaps unnecessary strife. For example, how do evangelicals, mainliners, exvangelicals, agnostics, and Jungians (for that matter), fall on Meyer’s eight scales? This would help us relativize our positions and perhaps have meaningful conversations moving forward.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Erin Meyer’s work compiles cutting edge research into one location as it pertains to cultural mapping and cross-cultural communication. Meyer’s book The Culture Map focuses primarily on cultural competency within the context of business, however, her work is applicable to a variety of industries and contexts. She distills cultural difference into an applicable tool that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2338],"class_list":["post-28733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-meyers","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28735,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28733\/revisions\/28735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}