PART FIVE
CULTURE AND CONFLICT
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE ALCHEMY OF CHANGE Cultural Fluency in Conflict Resolution
Michelle LeBaron
Imagine a conflict that matters in your bones. It may be a social injustice. It may be a family knot that has proved difficult to untangle. Or perhaps it is an internal struggle that resists rational analysis. The toughest problems are not easily amenable to rational dissection and linear problem solving. If they were, we would need fewer psychotherapists and mediators. Computers could tumble the factors together, producing the most promising way forward. But humans are complex, and human conflict—deep in our very bones—is always about what lies below the surface as well as what can be found above. Intractable conflicts meld history, identity, face, worldviews, sacred meanings, and personal filters in a mélange that always includes culture as an unacknowledged yet very important player.
The complex interrelatedness between conflict and culture is well documented and has been the subject of many conferences, volumes, and special issues. Yet while many have acknowledged its importance, culture and cultural fluency (CF) are arguably still not at the heart of conflict resolution practice, education, and theory. The field tends toward the parochial, as unexamined, unarticulated, and culture-specific assumptions about conflict, engagement, and resolution continue to infuse programs both within and outside the United States.
Multiple conflict resolution projects exist in thousands of sites around the world, fueled by USAID and other funding. North American conflict resolution programs are in the midst of their own life cycles, some flourishing and others withering as technological shifts and the institutionalization of programs in civil and administrative justice yield a range of changes. Professionalization and standardization of practice have sometimes amounted to challenges to the meaningful integration of CF into conflict resolution, squeezing creativity to the sidelines as uniformity is accented.
At the same time, the field is graying as founders retire, seminal thinking branches out, and organizations refocus. In the midst of so much change, what can be said about the relationship between culture and conflict? Is there more awareness of the importance of culture now than there was ten or twenty years ago? Are there more practitioners and scholars from a wide range of ethnocultural groups? Do training materials feature embedded understandings of cultural dimensions of conflict, and have simulations moved beyond stereotype-ridden chasms that would trap the unwary novice in caricatures? Finally, does CF animate and inform policy, process, and system design approaches, or are they being guided in more facile ways by either sequestering culture as an optional extra or forgetting it altogether, yielding approaches based on privileged experiences of agency, mobility, capacity, and maneuverability?
There are some encouraging signs. The waters on neutrality have been troubled, with Mayer, Wing, and others emphasizing how a discourse of neutrality masks systemic inequities and culturally enacted partiality. The worldviews that have shaped conflict resolution theory and spawned unacknowledged culture-specific approaches to pedagogy have been questioned in a thoughtful four-volume series, Rethinking Negotiation Teaching (Honeyman, Coben, and De Palo, 2009, 2011). The personal qualities—and with them, the cultural lenses—of mediators have been highlighted by Bowling and Hoffman in their seminal work, Bringing Peace into the Room (2003). John Paul Lederach (2005) and others have long emphasized the importance of cultural and contextual adaptations born of careful observation and respect for different conceptions of the nature of conflict and context-sensitive ways of engaging it.
At the same time, Peter Adler and other thought leaders have argued that it is essential to move beyond the rigidly analytical orientations so important to the field’s establishment to a more protean, dynamic, and complex way of conceptualizing and actualizing change. Such an approach situates culture as central to analyses of conflict and nudges us toward a more complex mental model of change. All conflict resolution work is ultimately about change, and change requires creativity as well as sensitivity to culturally informed ways of achieving it.
In this chapter, I explore relationships between conflict and culture as they relate to theory, practice, and pedagogy. Beginning with a summary of theoretical starting points, I examine recent multidisciplinary work to inform a discussion of culturally fluent ways to enliven theory, infuse practice, and invigorate pedagogy in conflict resolution. I argue that recent findings in neuroscience underline the importance of drawing from work on creativity, expressive arts, and multimodal experience to inform CF. My thesis rests on three simple assertions:
Cultural fluency—familiarity and facility with cultural dynamics as they shape ways of seeing and behaving—is essential to effectiveness in all aspects of theorizing, practice, and pedagogy in conflict resolution.
The field is not “there yet.” We very much need the infusion of work from multiple arts and science disciplines to inform culturally fluent progress.
The most promising route to inculcating CF in conflict work draws on art and science as equal progenitors of effective practices and pedagogies that are respectful and relevant across difference while featuring immediacy and protean adaptability.
DEFINING CULTURE
Before describing cultural fluency in more detail, it is important to lay a foundation by defining culture itself, a definition that has been approached in multiple ways. The definitions span the prosaic—culture is the way we do things around here—to the poetic—culture is an underground river, always present yet seldom tasted—to the semiotic—culture is our grammar of being. While culture is omnipresent, it is not explanatory in relation to every facet of conflict. Political, sociological, historical, and other macrodynamics always interweave with culture, as do personal factors that shape patterns of behavior and habits of attention. At the same time, culture is implicated in all conflicts and is always shaping common sense and ideas of fairness, as well as the range of possible avenues and approaches that might constitute resolution.
Culture is a dynamic and changing set of shared patterns reflexively interweaving with knowing, being, perceiving, behaving, and sense making in a given group of people. It relates in multifaceted ways to many aspects of identity, including, among others:
Territory
Language
History
Religion
Migration
Region
Ability/disability
Sexual orientation
Gender
Generation
Organization
Socioeconomic status
Ethnicity
Race
Culture always informs starting points—those ways it seems natural to engage with others. We explore these in more depth later in this chapter. Culture also necessarily invokes the symbolic dimension—that place in which sense is made of our own and others’ behaviors and ideas. As we will see, the symbolic dimension is largely below the surface of observable behavior; therefore, accessing it requires symbolic tools including ritual, metaphor, and narrative. The concept of cultural fluency deepens our exploration, offering specific ways to increase individual and collective abilities to bridge differences.
CULTURAL FLUENCY: WHAT IS ITS IMPORTANCE, AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
Cultural fluency is a developmental process never fully attained, yet whose pursuit is vitally important. The term was first used in relation to conflict resolution in Bridging Cultural Conflicts (LeBaron, 2004) and elaborated by Tatsushi Arai (2006) in Conflict across Cultures (LeBaron and Pillay, 2006). It has also been applied in a number of other fields, including business and education (Scott 2010; Mount St. Mary’s College, n.d.). It refers to awareness of culturally shaped worldviews—our own and those of others—and the capacity to pay attention to how these cultural lenses affect what we see, interpret, and attribute in conflict. Cultural fluency involves readiness to internalize, express, and enact culturally sensitive meaning-making pr
ocesses in engaging conflict. The process is a dynamic feature of interdependent social contexts, enhancing our capacities to
Anticipate a range of possible ways to navigate communication and relationship in unfamiliar and diverse cultural contexts
Become and remain conscious of cultural influences embedded in meaning-making processes
Express cultural assumptions transparently to others unfamiliar with particular meaning-making patterns
Navigate sometimes turbulent cross-cultural dynamics to cocreate functional and constructive processes, systems, and ongoing engagements
Meaning-making processes are the constant brain-body activities that connect experiences to our existing mental schemas. We make narratives of our lives, resisting our lives as a series of non sequiturs. Conflicts are no exception: we excavate our own and others’ intentions, reasons for behavior, justifications, aspirations, and attributions in the context of social and relational structures, patterns, and past experiences. Thus, we conclude that an interaction is “not fair” or a way we have been treated is “unjustified.” Cultural fluency means accounting for meaning making in two ways: by examining the constructed contexts in which experiences occur and by using a series of tools to prevent or bridge misunderstandings and enhance communication.
Cultural fluency is best illustrated through examples. Consider an experience of traveling to a new place for the first time. Did people seem abrupt or relaxed? Polite or impolite? Did they stand too close or too far away? When gates opened, did they line up or crowd in? Were directions you received easy to follow or impossible? Air travel gives us the opportunity to literally land in another world in a few short hours. But even if we know the language, we may miss cultural cues, violate unspoken cultural norms, and find ourselves in the midst of opaque situations. We may miss the subtleties that could have been identified had we a greater fluency of the culture or cultures of the new destination, and we may even instigate conflict without realizing it.
On a trip to Switzerland to offer conflict resolution training to the worldwide staff of an international organization, a colleague and I staged a conflict to illustrate different strategies of engaging difference. As our conversation became more heated, audience members had a variety of responses. Some disengaged, finding our behavior unseemly and uncomfortable. Others became activated, cheering one or both of us on to more dramatic engagement. Still others were perplexed, unsettled, or amused, watching closely to see what would happen next.
When we took a break, several members of the group approached us. Some congratulated my male colleague’s aggression toward me as a show of “putting her in her place.” Others remonstrated him for treating me disrespectfully. Only later did those for whom pretending to be in conflict made no sense at all surface their discomfort. They came from cultural contexts that privilege authenticity and transparency above artifice, cultures that precluded even the prospect of taking on synthetic roles for pedagogical purposes. Their concern was how we would be able to repair our relationship now that we had lost face publicly with each other and the group. Thus, a technique we had used many times in North America became a lens that refracted a wide spectrum of ways of making meaning. We had some repair to do as we moved forward with the group!
Clearly, cultural fluency is not only about navigating around a new setting; it also enhances capacities to prevent, engage, and resolve conflict and to be more credible, effective teachers. One of the ways cultural fluency can assist us in pedagogy is in its emphasis on the metalevel. It prompts us to examine teaching strategies according to the cultural assumptions that infuse them and to make these explicit in diverse groups. For example, when using a simulation or other experiential activity, describing some of the culturally influenced ideas of the what, how, and why will give participants a context that facilitates their participation. Effective and thorough debriefing that poses questions about culturally shaped perceptions and experiences can buttress and model cultural fluency in teaching settings.
For instance, many conflict resolution teaching materials contain embedded assumptions about the usefulness of direct, explicit communication. A learner from a cultural context where indirect, high-context approaches are expected may find these techniques difficult and uncomfortable. Welcoming a spectrum of communication strategies, an effective teacher can frame this difference as a catalyst for dialogue about how communication approaches can be usefully adapted across a range of settings and parties.
Let’s take a look at cultural fluency in practice. As we saw earlier, culture shapes expectations and ways of engaging far below conscious awareness. Lederach (1996) has written about whether an “insider partial” or “outsider neutral” is desirable as an intervenor depending on cultural context. The degree of formality of a setting is also related to culture, varying with the kind of issue as well as with the generation and the relational history of the parties. In child protection mediation, for example, a setting that is too formal may have a distancing effect on youth parties, while a setting that is too informal may be uncomfortable for state officials. Cultural fluency means anticipating and addressing parties’ needs, wants, and comfort levels in relation to setting, timing, roles, style of practice (such as facilitative, settlement, or problem solving; also the mix of caucusing and face-to-face meetings), manner of engagement, and myriad other elements.
The following example comes from an estate mediation held between two Chinese brothers. After agreeing to a division of most of their father’s property and assets, one building remained. Neither was willing to yield it to the other, and the fate of the entire agreement stood in the balance. The mediator shifted her facilitative approach, asking the brothers if she might make a suggestion. She then floated the idea that they might sell or manage the building as a revenue property, donating the proceeds to an educational scholarship in their father’s name. This culturally fluent mediator knew that education had been a strong value of their father, that honoring his name was important in their ethnic and family cultures, and that this would allow both to save face by not giving in to the other. They agreed, and the settlement was complete.
Moving beyond anecdotal evidence, we examine empirical evidence for the usefulness of cultural fluency as a tool in conflict resolution and negotiation. Michele Gelfand and Naomi Dyer (2000) suggest that flaws in research design have made it difficult to draw conclusions in relation to cultural dynamics negotiation. They observe that researchers have limited generalizability and utility of results by conflating culture with geographic location, failing to incorporate complex understandings of psychological processes as they interact with culture, and studying limited numbers of proximal conditions in negotiations. Gelfand et al. (2011) went on from these observations to follow their own advice, investigating so-called tight and loose cultures across thirty-three nations in relation to social structures, psychological dynamics, and related conflict-handling behaviors. In recent work, Gelfand, Leslie, Keller, and de Dreu (2012) examine conflict cultures in organizations, exploring how group and organizational cultures constellate socially shared and normative approaches to conflict.
And what of cultural fluency? Has this construct been the subject of empirical research other than that done on the theoretical elements on which it rests (Hall, 1990; Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, 2000)? Michele Gelfand (Imai and Gelfand, 2006) details work done in the past ten years on a related phenomenon, cultural intelligence (CQ), defined as a “person’s capability for successful adaptation to new cultural settings” (Earley and Ang, 2003, p. 9). CQ has four elements, described below and related to components of CF:
Metacognitive: level of mindfulness and skills applicable in the new culture; closely connected to the embeddedness component of CF
Cognitive: degree of specific knowledge about the new culture; closely connected to the navigational capacity of CF
Motivational: evidence of self-efficacy and persistence in adapting to a new culture; related to the anticipatory capacity of
CF
Behavioral: adaptive verbal and nonverbal behaviors; connected to the navigational component of CF
In examining cultural intelligence in relation to organizational negotiations across cultures, Imai and Gelfand (2006) found that CQ measured a week before a negotiation was a valid predictor of value creation in the process. They also found that CQ was a more powerful predictor than other common psychological constructs and that only one high CQ score in a dyad was enough to lift the results for each negotiator. As more work is done replicating and extending these findings, both CQ and CF will become better understood. For now, we consider traps that may inhibit cultural fluency and ways to cultivate it.
BUILDING CULTURAL FLUENCY
As we have observed, cultivating self and other awareness is a good start in developing cultural fluency. But given the submerged influence of many cultural factors, it may be insufficient and even problematic. This is in part because of the ubiquitous traps that await the novice. Such traps may arise from taxonomy, universalism, separation, and automatic ethnocentricity.
The taxonomy trap posits that cultural characteristics can be reliably ascribed to a given group in short, generalized lists. These lists are generally prescriptive and include such behavioral do’s and don’ts as bowing, kissing, or shaking hands on greeting. The difficulty is that these lists do not account for in-group variability, rapidly changing dynamics, or generational and other differences.
The universalism and separation traps are opposites of each other, with the first overascribing similarity across cultures and the second underestimating that similarity. To the universalist, we are all alike under the skin and share the same origin. While it is true that we have basic human needs, the way we experience and pursue these needs—and how we act when they are frustrated—varies a great deal. To the separationist, members of one group are so different from others that no understanding or rapprochement is possible. This is obvious in writing about gender, which would lead the naive reader to imagine that men and women can never have healthy, functional relationships (Grey, 1992). Many narratives from parties in intractable conflict feature separationist rhetoric, ranging from dehumanizing others to diminishing or disregarding them through a variety of discursive devices.
The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed) Page 86