научная статья по теме THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION ON ECONOMICS Экономика и экономические науки

Текст научной статьи на тему «THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION ON ECONOMICS»

The Influence of Culture and Intercultural Communication on Economics

T.V. Naumenko,

д-р филос.наук, профессор, профессор факультета глобальных процессов, Московский государственный университет им.М.В. Ломоносова (119991, Россия, г. Москва, Ленинские горы, 1; e-mail: t-naumenko@yandex.ru)

A.I. Grinyuk,

аспирант, Московский государственный университет им.М.В. Ломоносова (119991, Россия, г. Москва, Ленинские горы, 1; e-mail: t-naumenko@yandex.ru)

Аннотация. В статье рассматривается роль культуры и межкультурной коммуникации в экономическом развитии. Представлены взгляды различных исследователей относительно взаимовлияния культуры и межкультурной коммуникации, их проникновения во многие области научных исследований. Анализируется роль глобализации в развитии культуры, межкультурной коммуникации и экономики.

Abstract. The present article evaluates the role of culture and intercultural communication in the economic development. It provides views of different researchers on the interdependence of culture, intercultural communication and their penetration into many fields of scientific knowledge. It also analyses the role of globalisation in development of culture, intercultural communication and economics.

Ключевые слова: культура и экономика, межкультурная коммуникация и экономика, глобализация, экономическое развитие, парадигмальный кризис.

Keywords: culture and economics, intercultural communication and economics, globalisation, economic development, paradigm crisis.

In today's world, science that by logics of its development has come to the stage which is commonly named as postnonclassical, demonstrates some new and specific features. One of them is interdisciplinaty approach in studies of our reality. This approach allows to make vastly important conclusions in any area and, in pellicular, in economics. These conclusions have an immense potential in promoting and developing economics and in defining the way out of the paradigm crisis which now dominates the field. These conclusions state that we need to consider the cultural factor that impacts economics more seriously - because of cultural differences similar official institutions produce results with diferrent levels of success. Culture is the heart of the mechanism through which the institutions of past influence the institutions of present. Moreover, inofficial institutions which are closely tied to culture and intercultural communication play an extremely important role that yet needs to be understood - the understanding of this role is the key to finding the more effective way of economical development and modernisation of national economies as well as the global economic growth.

As a form of cooperation between people, intercultural communication appeared many centuries ago along with trade relationships between different nations. However it is only now that intercultural communication started to play such an important role in the development of the world community. Intercultural communication owes its special status to several factors. Innovation technologies in

transport and telecommunications have practically erased boarders and distances. Travels which used to take weeks and months now take only several hours. Moreover, nowadays we can travel even without leaving homes. Interactive space maps and virtual tours around most famous places in the world have made possible that what not so long ago seemed to be just a dare fantasy.

Communication also does not have boarders any more. The Internet offers a whole range of modern communication means - electronic mail, social networking, chats, forums, video conferences and etc. All these Internet services are free or require minimum financial expenses from the users. This powerful development of telecommunication technologies has allowed millions of people on the planet Earth to stay in touch no matter where they are - in a room next doors or on a different continent.

Globalisation has become an important part of our life, due to it we have more interest in the representatives of various nationalities and cultures. It has given growth to a new subject which is now winning an increasing amount of attention - intercultural communication.

Intercultural communication is not a science about human communication as it might seem at first sight. E. Vereshagin and V. Kostomarov define it as "proper mutual understanding between two communicants who belong to different national cultures" [1, 26]. It appears that the key phrase in the given definition is mutual understanding as the meaning it has is very important - intercultural

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communication builds up on the cooperation of its participants, i.e. the participants are equal. Another important fact is that the given definition states that it is the national culture which influences the suc-cessfulness of intercultural communication.

Another important aspect in understanding the phenomenon of intercultural communcation is that we can only consider communication as intercultural when "the communicants represent different cultures and admit all cultural phenomena that are not present in their cultures as foreign" [2, 103]. A. Sadokhin states that "the relationships are intercultural if the communicants do not only stick to their own traditions, customs, views and modes of behaviour, but also get acquainted with others' rules and norms of everyday communication. In this process they discover typical and unfamiliar characteristics of other cultures, conformity and nonconformity, customary and new in relationships, views and feelings of the communicants" [2, 103].

As a science, intercultural communication was formed by integration of intellectual efforts of representatives of various scientific fields - linguistics, anthropology, psychology, ethnology, storiology and etc. As a result, three different approaches have been formed in the area of intercultural studies. They are functional, explanations! and critical approaches.

The functional approach is based on the belief that any national culture can be measured and described if a necessary methodology is elaborated and applied. The key feature of this approach is that it is exceptionally "down to earth", emphatically practical. That is why its adherents claim that success and failure of any communication can be predicted in advance just by evaluating the cultural background of its participants.

The adherents of the explanational approach do not try to predict the behaviour of a person. Their sphere of interests is built around understanding of the motives driving the communicants. They believe that the communicative behaviour of a group of people is directly dependent on their cultural values.

The critical approach in crosscultural communication is based on the assumption that any communication process is a fight between the dominant and the suppressed powers. The analysis of this process allows to understand the mechanisms and the underlying motives of a person's behaviour and at the same time apply the obtained results to change the quality of a person's life [3, 53-54].

Despite some crucial differences between the abovementioned approaches, all specialists in crosscultural communication have a common opinion that the cultural background of the communicants determines the communication. In a human life culture represents a law, it determines the way we see our environment. The meaning of culture is well defined by L. Samovar and R. Porter who say that culture makes our life easier, thank to culture

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the world around us becomes more predictable, less mysterious, and, as a result, less frightening [4, 6-7].

The analysis of the role of culture in intercultural communication led to creation of several theories that now determine the development of the discipline. The most popular ones are E. Hall's theory of low and high context cultures, G. Hoftede's theory of cultural dimensions and E. Hirsh's theory of cultural literacy.

E. Hall came to the conclusion that any event and any situation have some unstated information that the representatives of a given culture are familiar with. This information was coined as context and all cultures were classified as the ones having low or high levels of context. The more information you need to understand a situation or a social behaviour, the higher the lever of context is and, thus, the more complicated the culture is. This means that it will be extremely difficult or even impossible to understand situation and explain the behaviour for the "outsiders", people who belong to other cultures.

The countries that are characterised by a high level of context include Spain, Italy, France, Japan, Russia and Middle Eastern countries. It is worth mentioning that high cultural context supposes high level of connectedness between the members of society. While communicating they do not need to go into detail since, as a rule, they are aware of the ongoing events. E. Hall believes that these societies are resistent to changes.

Cultures with low context level, as a rule, have a strict distinction between interpersonal communications. The representatives of these countries do not normally tend to mix their formal and informal contacts. Low context countries involve Germany, USA, Switszerland and Scandinavian countries.

Low and high context cultures are also differentiated by their attitudes to perception of time. E. Hall states that we can perceive time in monochronous and polychronous ways. High context cultures have a polychronous vision of time, which can be seen in their ability to perform several activities at one time. Representatives of low context cultures prefer to spend a given amount of time to complete only one task, thus, time in these cultures has linear character.

G. Hofstede came to the conclusion that all cultures can be classified acc

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