Communication and PR from a Cross-Cultural Standpoint: Practical and Methodological Issues

Communication and PR from a Cross-Cultural Standpoint: Practical and Methodological Issues, edited by , presents nine concise chapters emerging from an ongoing research project embedded within the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA) network. Although the chapters display significant variations in argumentation forms and writing styles that move between the factual, the descriptive and the evocative, they all circle around the contemporary challenges facing practitioners and researchers as they grapple with understanding, exploring and forming communication and public relations (PRs) practice in the twenty-first century. The book, which is aimed at scholars conducting micro-level research or professional studies, appears at a time when the multi-dimensional and multi-directional processes of globalization and their interplay with intercultural communication and PRs demand a reappraisal of the notion of culture and the associations made to it. Globalization processes surface the perils of cultural stereotyping and oversimplification in situated intercultural encounters, and necessitate practitioners and researchers to consider and legitimize alternative understandings of culture, communication and PRs. In this form, the book is a welcome addition to a number of recent publications within management, communication and cross/intercultural studies that tackle a complicated world such as Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives (Bardhan and Weaver, 2011), Global Collaboration: Intercultural Experiences and Learning(Gertsen et al., 2012), Culture and Public Relations (Sriramesh and Vercic, 2012) or Intercultural Communication and Ideology (Holliday, 2011).

The book’s arrangement works smoothly in its symmetrical sequencing of three parts containing three chapters each. The first part establishes the inadequacy of equating cultural differences solely with national cultural differences and argues the need to pay attention to the contextual and multi-layered details of intercultural or cross-cultural interaction. Reid and Spencer-Oatey’s chapter provides an empirical example of multicultural teamwork in the Sino-UK e-Learning Programme to demonstrate such inadequacy. They argue, and this is taken up in different intensities by later chapters, that although national cultural traits and values may prove useful for understanding intercultural encounters, researchers cannot remain blind to the individual’s attachment to other forms of regional, organizational and professional cultures. Furthermore, individuals have and develop different competencies for navigating within multicultural situations.

Frame’s chapter, which draws attention to the centrality of specific contexts to understand intercultural and cross-cultural communication, offers a “semio-pragmatic model” that is constructed by drawing on identity theories from social psychology. Frame similarly appeals to a decentring of national culture to include other elements of individuals’ multiple identities influenced and developed by class, ethnicity, religion and their professional communities of practice. Gregory’s chapter takes a “pragmatic, but rigorous approach” and outlines five practical processes – initiating, framing, implementing, maintaining, completing – that are considered valuable in securing a commonality of understanding among participants in cross-cultural research projects. Apart from providing a basic and generic checklist for the management of any project, a brief discussion of Galtung’s taxonomy of four intellectual styles is given. The taxonomy differentiates the “Gallic”, “Saxonic”, “Teutonic” and “Nipponic”. Although such differentiation is useful to understand the varieties of epistemological approaches and writing practices within research, the labels unfortunately carry strong associations to images of national cultures.

The second part of the book shifts to advocating the values and promises of interdisciplinary, qualitative research practice. Carayol’s chapter relates how the configurations of a globalizing world require forms of reflexive research that allows itself to be troubled by history, colonialism and population movements. Carayol argues that quantitative research, where countries are used “as proxies for cultures” avoid addressing the interference of ideology, power disequilibrium, affect and the politics of representing the subjects of research. A divergence perspective of globalization, which privileges the differences in sense-making and meaning construction by individuals and groups, is argued to be best equipped to address communication issues. The key concerns of qualitative research are expressed and the reader is reminded that such concerns, including the displacement of the notion of “culture” as a master trope, have circulated vividly in “anthropology, social psychology and humanities” since the mid 1980s. Judging by the tone of urgency evident in Carayol’s chapter, it appears that although PRs research may have turned towards culture, the “cultural turn”, which also renders research as a cultural practice, is still in a nascent phase.

The following chapters by Rittenhofer and Tsai provide two detailed and empirical exemplifications of how qualitative methods work in practice. Privileging perspectives from practice theory that focus on culture as a series of constantly emerging practices, Rittenhofer discusses “transgressive” research designs that actively work to steer away from reducing and analysing participants in intercultural encounters solely in terms of their “category membership”, for example “gender and ethnicity”. Rittenhofer argues that these forms of imposition often conclude in reproducing both the differences that researchers may have wanted to dismantle and the stories we associate with these differences. In reference to interviews made “at the level of the signifier”, Rittenhofer demonstrates how care is taken in the way respondents are chosen, in the analysis of what is said, and how such a strategy avoids telling respondents “who they are”. This thread of relinquishing total control and allowing research subjects to give “accounts of themselves”, being troubled by how subjects are represented, and being wary of imposed categories, is maintained in Tsai’s chapter. The classic concerns of ethnography emerge here through sensitive accounts of work amongst asylum seekers. Tsai outlines the “affective turn” that facilitates an approach to research that takes embodiment, sensation and emotion seriously. Affect, or “the power to affect and be affected” relates to and has consequences for how research is negotiated and practiced within asymmetrical power relations between researchers and subjects. Tsai argues that this is amplified in cross-cultural research. Tsai’s chapter stands in stark contrast to Gregory’s chapter, which insists, “great care has to be taken over the critical issues of reliability, replicability, validity and generalisability”. Tsai’s version appears drastically different when research is described as being “bedeviled with inconsistencies and ambiguities”. Tsai’s version also appears more realistic.

The core topic of the book – Communication and Public Relations Practice and Research – finally surfaces in the third part. The three chapters by Hodges, Nastasia and Sterne situate the problems of rigid cultural stereotyping and the challenges of qualitative inquiry within three empirical studies of PRs in Mexico, France and Romania, and New Zealand, respectively. Hodges’ chapter refers specifically to the “cultural turn”. Taking a Geertzian approach to culture as a “historically transmitted pattern of meaning”, Hodges discusses how the PR profession is in itself a cultural phenomenon and how PRs practitioner are also cultural agents engaged in different forms of intercultural communication. The chapter succeeds on two fronts. First, it provides a useful introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of ethnographic research practice through an account of PR practitioners in Mexico City. Second, it describes an alternative PRs practice that challenges the models of ideology-free professionalization and excellence that privilege a western orientation.

The ideological dimensions of PRs practice and research further unfold in Nastasia’s mixed methods research that makes a comparative analysis of PR practice in national and international firms in Romania and France. The author concludes that the more independent firms are of US dominated understandings and approaches of good PRs practice, and the more willing firms are to find alternative locally based possibilities, the better chances they stand in pursuing PR successfully. This general turning of the tide away from American and western biases, which are heavily infused with their own cultural and ideological logics and assumptions, is further demonstrated in Sterne’s chapter. The reader is encouraged to develop an appreciation of viewing PR as more than a profession, practice or industry. Sterne argues that this leads to an “impoverished view” that absences practices not based on words and mass media. Conceptualizing PR through Maori cultural protocols such as sensitivity to the sacred, and being careful to stress that there is no single model of Maori PR, Sterne effectively argues how a greater respect to indigenous communication protocols not only aids communication with minorities, but also offers valuable and alternative insights into issues of history, dignity, sensitivity and respect. These, after all, influence and structure the relations in PRs.

The book successfully leads the reader into revisiting the instability of the terms “culture”, “cross-cultural” and “Public Relations”. The chapters by Reid and Spencer-Oatey, and Frame emancipate the notion of culture from the grip of a nation-based logic that is impoverished in globalizing contexts. But they rightfully do this without ignoring that such logics also operate. The contrasts between heterogeneous foci on culture are very apparent. Frame articulates culture as “abstract mental idealisations”, which is further explained in a footnote that although “reflected in certain material artefacts”, culture has “no true material existence”. This appears distant to Rittenhofer’s articulation of culture as practices and as systems of “doing” and Carayol’s articulation of culture as systems of dynamic meaning-making. In this way, whether thinking, doing or constructing meaning, the reader is made aware of the “culturedness” of definitions.

Although the book’s title points to the “cross-cultural”, the term is often substituted with “intercultural” by a number of the book’s contributors. A clarification between the two terms only emerges in Carayol’s chapter in the second part of the book where the “cross-cultural” is related to comparative research, while the “intercultural” is related to face-to-face interactions. However, expressing research in terms of “cross-cultural” is often associated with etic approaches that are generally oriented to quantitative methodologies. Yet the mission of the majority of the book’s chapter has been to explicitly advocate qualitative methodologies. For this reason, the reader may be left wondering whether the book’s content would have been better served with a title that advocated an “intercultural standpoint” instead.

The book unfolds a narrative that exposes the culturedness of professional and organizational PR research and practice and locates it as emerging from a western, and more specifically US centred, modernity that has traditionally been gripped by adulation for “rigorous” methodologies and the search for excellence. However, there is a steady realization of other sensibilities. The first acknowledges that our globalizing world is composed of multiple centres, and the second appreciates and respects that the meanings, logics and practices of excellence in PR are fluid and heterogeneous over time and space. This book provides fine reading to sensitize those who may remain unconvinced.