Mediation through an Intercultural Communication Lens
Mediation through an Intercultural Communication Lens
Siobhan Brownlie
University of Manchester
Oxford Road M139PL
ph. (0161)2753237
s.brownlie@manchester.ac.uk
Abstract:
The article examines intercultural communication theory for the purpose of considering to what extent this theory may be useful to mediation practitioners and researchers. Early theory associated with Hall (1959, 1976) and Hofstede (2003/1991) which posits cultural differences associated with national groups has been very influential in intercultural training, including training for mediators. A second area of theorization is prescriptive. This includes two very different but related approaches: theorization about intercultural competence, and social justice approaches. The uses and drawbacks of Hofstedian and prescriptive approaches for mediators are considered. Two further intercultural communication theories are explored. ‘Small culture’ (Holliday 1999) is about the developing norms and practices in a possibly ephemeral group. Intercultural discursive practice (Zhu Hua 2015) comprises two key areas: examining how participants in an interaction ascribe cultural categories to one another, and how they negotiate cultural matters. It is proposed that ‘small culture’ and intercultural discursive approaches could be productive for culture-focussed mediation researchers as well as useful for trainers and practitioners.
Keywords: intercultural communication studies, mediation practice, mediation research, mediation training, intercultural discursive practice
Article word count: 7,133
Biography: Dr Siobhan Brownlie is a lecturer in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester where she is joint programme director of the Masters in Intercultural Communication. She is also a volunteer mediator in the university’s mediation service. Her recent research has focussed on memory, mediation, intercultural relations and migration.
Mediation through an Intercultural Communication Lens
Defining ‘culture’ for the moment as normative practices and outlooks of a particular group of people, it is evident that culture can be important to mediation in various ways. There are age-old traditions of mediation in different parts of the world: Africa, the Middle East, East Asia and Oceania (Brigg & Bleiker 2011; Busch, Mayer & Boness 2010) as well as the more contemporary style of mediation that we are concerned with which was developed from the 1970s in the United States. The diversity of practices indicates that preferences in conflict resolution styles and procedures are culturally shaped. More generally, communication styles are culturally shaped, including decision-making approaches and non-verbal behaviour. There are culturally shaped orientations towards time, affect, power, uncertainty and hierarchy, and culturally shaped sets of customs, traditions, symbols, beliefs and values. All of these may enter into mediation. With regard to individuals, the situation is complex since individuals affiliate with multiple groups and change over time as a result of life experiences (Barrett et al. 2013). In mediation, cultural differences may be a (causal) element in a conflict, and they may be apparent in behaviour in the mediation room. Cultural differences and similarities concern not only the parties, but also the mediator’s identity, therefore necessitating his or her self-awareness. When cultural differences are salient to a case, navigating such differences takes on importance in mediation meetings. The academic discipline which it is appropriate to look to for theoretical and practical guidance on these matters is the discipline of Intercultural Communication Studies.
In this article I will examine the extent to which theories and approaches from Intercultural Communication Studies (henceforth abbreviated as ICS) may be useful to mediation practitioners and researchers. Intercultural Communication Studies is a vast field, so any discussion will necessarily present a selection of approaches in accordance with the researcher’s perspectives and background. From the field’s beginnings in the 1950s there was a focus firstly on national/ethnic cultural difference and secondly on intercultural competence. The early approaches have remained the basis of training initiatives today, including intercultural training for mediation practitioners. Mediation theorists and trainers have adopted notions of cultural difference and intercultural competence, but have barely engaged with some recent thinking in ICS. In what follows I will progressively discuss the various approaches in three main sections and link them to literature and studies on mediation. I will critique the early approaches for their generality and potential for promoting stereotypes, and present approaches which examine ‘culture’ in a more particular way at the level of small emerging groups and actual communication practice. These approaches that I have grouped under the terms ‘small culture’ and ‘intercultural discursive practice’ provide useful ways forward for culturally-focussed research on mediation which could be used in mediator training.
Cultural dimensions: Hall and Hofstede
It is generally agreed that the founder of the field of Intercultural Communication was Edward T. Hall. Hall developed his ideas between 1950 and 1955 when he was working at the Foreign Service Institute and tasked to provide training for US diplomats and other State personnel in order to assist them in successful communication overseas. Since Hall’s background was in anthropology, he initially set up training based on that field, but met with dissatisfaction from his trainees. This led him to devise a comparative approach based on the theme of cultural difference: people in different countries have different cultural practices and this may well lead to relationship and communication difficulties when they come into contact (Rogers, Hart & Miike 2002). Three well-known areas of cultural difference proposed by Hall are high and low context communication, polychronic and monochronic time (chronemics), and difference in the use of personal space (proxemics). High/low context communication refers to whether people are implicit in their talk (that is, high context – the speaker depends on shared contextual knowledge of the interlocutor) or explicit (low context). Polychronic people do many things at once and have a flexible attitude to time, whereas monochronic people tend to do one thing at a time and are concerned with schedules and deadlines. Proxemics includes the matter of whether an interlocutor is comfortable with a person standing close by or not when communicating (Hall 1959, 1976). Probably given the context of training diplomats and state personnel who were travelling to different countries, Hall associated these cultural differences with national/ethnic difference.
Geert Hofstede continued in the line of Hall with the aim of mapping national cultures in terms of cultural dimensions. Whereas Hall’s published work had been largely anecdotal, Hofstede aimed for a strong evidence base. This consisted of a large body of survey data about the attitudes of people in 50 countries and three regions; the people worked in subsidiaries of the multinational corporation IBM. The surveys took place around 1967 and 1973. A statistical analysis of the survey data led Hofstede to propose four central bi-polar dimensions of national culture as follows. ‘Small versus large power distance’ indicates the extent to which unequal distribution of power is accepted; ‘weak versus strong uncertainty avoidance’ is the extent of tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity; ‘individualism versus collectivism’ indicates the extent to which the emphasis is on the individual or the collective unit; and ‘masculinity versus femininity’ refers to assertiveness and competitiveness versus modesty and caring. Later a fifth dimension was added: ‘short-term orientation versus long-term orientation’ which describes whether the focus is more on the present (and past) or the future (Hofstede 2003). For each cultural dimension Hofstede established a score and a rank for each country. Here, for example, are the results for two countries, Great Britain (GB) and Pakistan in terms of ranking. For large power distance Pakistan ranks 32nd and GB 42/44th; for individualism Pakistan ranks 47/48th and GB 3rd; for masculinity Pakistan ranks 25/26st and GB 9/10th; for strong uncertainty avoidance Pakistan ranks 24/25th and GB 47/48th (Hofstede 2003). From these figures one may conclude that on average the British are more individualist, assertive and have a higher tolerance for uncertainty than Pakistanis (I will come back to this example).
Hofstede’s work has been highly influential both in academia and in intercultural training courses, particularly in the field of Business and Management (Brewer & Veniak 2012). Hofstede has been taken up by practitioners and theorists of mediation. Mayer and Boness (2005, 91) argue that “it is indispensable for intercultural mediators that they know and deal with the variances in individual cultural orientations”. The particular context that Mayer and Boness are interested in is mediation taking place in Southern Africa between Africans and Westerners. They make use of Hofstede’s country charts to explicate the cultural dimensions of Southern Africa, and compare Southern African and Western orientations whose divergence may be relevant in conflicts. An example given is the weak uncertainty avoidance index in Southern Africa (eg. there is no great need for formal rules, neither at work nor in other areas of society) compared with the higher uncertainty avoidance in Western countries (eg. there is an emotional need for rules, even if they do not work or are superfluous) (Mayer & Boness 2005, 119-120). Similarly, Ting-Toomey (2010) refers to Hofstede’s dimensions when discussing mediation taking place with East Asian and Western parties (she draws on research findings in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the US). Ting-Toomey finds that four conflict approaches are linked to combinations of the individualism-collectivism and the large-small power distance dimensions. In most Asian countries managers practice a ‘benevolent approach’ (the combination of collectivism and large power distance) in dealing with a conflict; they play authoritative parental roles in approaching and motivating their employees, and it is rare that the employee will directly challenge the manager’s authority during a conflict interaction. With respect to mediation, Asian ‘vertical collectivists’ may expect a mediator to be benevolently authoritative with a directive style (Ting-Toomey 2010, 87-88).
Despite its popularity, Hofstede’s research and general approach have been strongly criticized from various perspectives. McSweeney (2002) points out a range of methodological flaws in the initial research design. Hofstede (2003, 251) recognizes that IBMers do not constitute representative samples from national populations, but says that this does not matter, since samples for cross-national comparison need not be representative as long as they are functionally equivalent. In other words, since the IBM employees are functionally matched with the same corporate employer and the same professions, any systematic difference in values for national groups must be due to national cultural differences. McSweeney (2002, 95-99) argues that this reasoning falls down, since it is well nigh impossible that there will be perfect matching across subsidiaries in different countries with respect to corporate cultures and professional groups. Brewer and Veniak (2012) stress a very important issue which Hofstede himself pointed out. The survey data were collected from individuals but were used to calculate mean values for each country. Hofstede (2003, 253) warns, therefore, that the country scores should not be applied automatically to individuals since this would result in stereotyping. To take our earlier example, reasoning that Mr Kahn is Pakistani, therefore he holds collectivist values, and Mr Smith is British, therefore he holds individualist values is unwarranted. Unfortunately Hofstede’s ideas have often been applied to groups below country level as well as to individuals, including by himself (Brewer & Veniak 2012, 678).
Further criticisms of Hofstede’s approach engage with conceptions of ‘culture’. Holliday (1999) refers to Hofstede’s approach as ‘large culture’ thinking. In large culture thinking, typically associated with the unit of the nation and ethnic groups, the cultural unit is reified, becoming a thing with fixed attributes. Once a group of people is thought of as being or having ‘a culture’ locked into a set of fixed characteristics, apparent patterns are exaggerated at the expense of variations and variability. Then when ‘culture’ has been reified, it is prone to be used as a causative agent (‘their culture leads them to do X’). The over-emphasis on a set of reductive cultural differences of a particular group which are seen to have the strength of causative agents easily leads to the naturalisation and institutionalisation of stereotypes, to the reinforcing of barriers and otherisation. The simplistic conception of ‘cultures’ is also used as a political tool as both dominant and dominated groups in society/the world resort to using the culture card.
What may be the usefulness and drawbacks of the Hall-Hofstedian approach for mediators? As mentioned above, Mayer and Boness (2005) and Ting-Toomey (2010) find that knowledge of Hofstedian dimensions is important for mediators in understanding parties’ cultural orientations and preferred conflict approaches which impact on their behaviour and expectations. Similarly, in the International Mediation Institute’s document detailing criteria for approving programmes that deliver IMI Inter-Cultural Certification, it is stated that “understanding culturally shaped norms and expectations can help explain parties’ different perspectives and possible impasses that these perspectives may create” (IMI 2011, 4). The IMI ‘cultural focus areas’, which indicate areas where culture may impact on mediating intercultural disputes, include items taken from Hall and Hofstede’s works. It is indeed interesting and potentially useful for mediators to know about findings regarding Hall-Hofstedian cultural dimensions as well as other generalizations about cultural difference when they are doing mediations which involve parties from different cultural backgrounds. However, this information needs to be applied very cautiously to individuals for fear of stereotyping or imposing pre-conceptions which are not in fact relevant to the particular case. Knowledge of cultural generalizations can be kept in the back of the mediator’s mind as a potential source of understanding. The IMI (2011, 4) advocates that mediators should use cultural theory frameworks while avoiding stereotyping when setting up and participating in mediations. In addition to outright criticisms of the Hofstede-Hall approach, another tack is to maintain the notion of behavioural dimensions and conflict styles without linking them to national or regional difference. Hammer (2005), for example, singles out direct/indirect communication and emotional restraint/expressiveness as key dimensions of culturally-shaped conflict style without stipulating national patterns. Awareness of such behavioural variations may be useful for mediators.
Prescriptive approaches in research: intercultural competence and social justice
With its historical foundations bound to training (see above), it is not surprising that ICS has always been linked to the practical application of prescribing how intercultural competence can be developed. I will take up a representative conceptualization of the topic by Barrett et al. (for a broad coverage see Deardorff 2009). Barrett et al. (2013, 7-11) define intercultural competence as a combination of attitudes (importantly openness to otherness), knowledge (including knowledge of cultural norms and dimensions) and communicative skills (eg. accommodating one’s communication style) which facilitate interaction with people who are perceived to have different cultural affiliations from oneself. Intercultural competence should enable one to respond appropriately and effectively when communicating with diverse people, establish positive and constructive relationships, and understand oneself and one’s own multiple cultural affiliations through encounters with cultural difference. ‘Cultural fluency’, named by LeBaron and Pillay (2006), depends on the ability to be aware of one’s own cultural lenses and to be open to discovering and internalizing other perspectives. One aspect of intercultural competence contradicts the ‘openness to others’ discourse and that is recognizing attitudes and behaviours which contravene human rights (as defined by UN benchmarks), and willingness to take action by intervening with regard to acts of discrimination and by challenging cultural stereotypes and prejudices (Barrett et al. 2013, 10).
This latter domain has resonances with an approach which has risen in the United States in recent years known as Critical Intercultural Communication Studies (Halualani & Nakayama 2010). Rather than espousing the anthropological notion of culture as a site of shared meanings, this approach considers culture as a site of contested meanings in an ongoing struggle of power relations and ideologies. Attention is paid to how macro conditions and structures of power (economic, historical, institutional, legal, economic, mediated) and hierarchical power differentials across dimensions such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, region, socioeconomic class, generation, abilities and diasporic status are a part of micro-acts of communication between individuals and groups. The researcher’s task is to highlight the role of power, contextual constraints and inequalities in communication in order ultimately to work towards a more equitable and socially just society. Sorrells (2013) calls this intervention in communication and in the world ‘intercultural praxis’. Communication is seen to be imbued by social forces, but not determined, since re-signification is always possible (Halualani & Nakayama 2010, 7).
With respect to mediators, in addition to issues of human rights, equality and diversity, intercultural communication theorist Busch (2010, 41) proposes that mediators could do well to challenge cultural categories which are used to signify oppositional differences. Busch suggests that the mediator should try to reveal the socially constructed nature of cultural categories being used by parties, helping them to verbalize and reflect on them. One use of this may be that if parties realize the constructed nature of cultural differences and boundaries, such distinctions may appear less fixed and insurmountable.
Let us consider to what extent the above theorization is useful to mediators. With regard to intercultural competence, the capacity to be aware of and as far as possible set aside one’s own cultural norms, traditions, preferences and biases, espousing openness to otherness, seems to be a necessary quality of non-directive multipartial mediators. Equally, encouraging respect for cultural others on the part of all participants seems a worthy mediator’s goal in mediation meetings. In its list of knowledge and skills to be taught to intercultural mediators for certification, the IMI (2011) includes the following abilities that relate to intercultural competence: the mediator’s ability to recognize his or her own cultural influences and their possible effect on the mediation; the ability to recognize each party’s culturally shaped perspectives on behaviours and events; the ability to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity and mistakes that may occur in multicultural situations; the ability to find the most appropriate way to deal with multiple perspectives in terms of mediation processes; and the mediator’s ability to adjust his or her communication style and to help parties to adjust the way they communicate during the meetings. One aspect of value of this approach is that of learning. Mediation can be conceived as a site for potential cultural learning, both for mediators and parties through mediators encouraging parties to explain and comprehend each other’s practices and values (see Fisher-Yoshida 2005 on intercultural conflict). The Critical Intercultural Communication Studies approach is valuable in highlighting the role of historical and social macro-level forces in creating power differentials which are present in micro-level interactional encounters. It is useful for mediators to be aware of this, since providing a safe environment where there is a level playing field in terms of power is the aim of many non-directive multipartial mediators (see CMP Resolutions 2015).
With regard to challenging discrimination and prejudice, an initial step is to recognize instances of these attitudes in concrete discursive interaction. This is not always easy because attitudes may be veiled to some extent and dependent on interpretation. In her study of mediator/client interactions, Stokoe (2015) speaks of ‘possible –ism’, a speech item which is possibly racist, sexist or otherwise prejudiced because it could be interpreted as such. When exactly a ‘neutral’ cultural category becomes associated with a cultural stereotype and when a cultural stereotype becomes an –ism depends on interactants’ sensibilities and meanings created in specific cases of interaction. For mediators it might be thought that an obstacle in challenging cultural categories/stereotypes/possible –isms in a party’s utterances, is mediators’ professional neutrality. However, Greatbatch and Dingwall (1999) have shown that although mediators generally adopt a ‘stance of neutralism’ (defined as refraining from the direct expression of their opinions and refraining from overt affiliation or disaffiliation with those expressed by parties), they are not necessarily ‘substantively’ neutral and may express opinions indirectly.
Several studies indicate that specific context is an important factor with regard to mediators’ strategies concerning parties’ utterances that contain cultural categories/stereotypes/ possible –isms, since mediators orient to different institutional settings. Institutional ‘interaction ideologies’ which comprise preferred forms of interaction between professional and client (Arminen 2005, 38) are shaped by the goals of the mediation encounter in the institutional setting. Brownlie’s (forthcg) analysis of recorded initial meetings with single parties in a National Family Mediation affiliated service in the south of England shows that the mediators display empathy for rapport-building when the party is recounting their story, but a mediator will not engage in any direct or indirect challenging behaviour about how one party conceives of the other. The mediators therefore do not encourage reflection on cultural categories or stereotypes used by one party to conceptualize themselves and the other party. This strategy is adopted because in family mediation the mediator’s institutional role is not to engage deeply with the parties’ past and present personal relationship, but rather to help sort out practical matters regarding finance, property and children. This role is stipulated in National Family Mediation documents and training courses (Morris 2015).
In a second study, a different context, UK community mediation, was investigated by Stokoe (2011, 2015). Recordings of initial inquiry calls were analyzed. The aim of the mediator in these calls is to ask the caller for a summary of the problem, explain what mediation is, and offer mediation services. Analysis shows that upon hearing utterances which could be taken as expressing cultural prejudice, mediators generally prefer to ignore these utterances or to neutralize them through reformulation. These strategies can be explained by contextual factors: mediation is not a well-known activity in the community, so mediators who believe in its benefits need to ‘sell’ the service; and mediators may also feel the need to convert callers to clients in order to justify the service’s funding which is somewhat precarious. In these circumstances mediators will not want to antagonize callers. Brownlie (forthcg) examined a further context, a university mediation service in the north of England, through observation of mediation meetings and discussion with mediators. The study shows that for mediators from the university mediation service, improving the parties’ working relationship is a key aim of mediating conflicts between university staff, and as part of that process it is necessary for the mediator to “open the door” to the other person’s perspective. Opening the door means that the mediator may ask questions about and indirectly challenge discursively-expressed perceptions and constructions (including cultural categories and stereotypes) that one party presents about the other as well as about him/herself. Furthermore, the university mediation service is part of the Equality and Diversity section in the university, and as such mediators recognize that they are sensitized to issues which relate to questions of discrimination and diversity and where significant for the case will not remain silent on these matters. What becomes clear is that mediation covers a variety of contexts and circumstances which are associated with a variety of mediators’ approaches, so the tendency in some Intercultural Communication discourse towards generalized prescriptive statements about challenging cultural categories, stereotypes and –isms is not tenable.
Overall, prescriptions about appropriate behaviour regarding intercultural matters may be useful to mediators as general guidelines, but different contexts and particular cases call for context-sensitive behaviour. Recent work on Intercultural Competence has indeed placed more emphasis on context sensitivity. Baker (2015, 163-4), for example, prefers a concept of intercultural awareness which privileges performative competence in complex cultural settings, that is, the ability to put into practice awareness of culturally based frames of reference (including forms emerging in the interaction) and the ability to negotiate between them in a flexible context-specific manner. The next section will cover some ICS theorization which gives a large place to the creation of contexts and the discursive activities of interactional encounters.
Small culture thinking and intercultural discursive practice
In contrast to large culture thinking mentioned in the discussion of Hofstede above, ‘small culture’ thinking (Holliday 1999) is associated with any dynamic (emerging) cohesive social group at any level; this could just as well be a geographically local group or an association spread across the world and linked via electronic means, a well-established or an ephemeral grouping. Small culture thinking is a perspective which is concerned with the complexity of practices and processes within groupings as they change over time and establish their cultures constituted by evolving understandings and norms of behaviour. The mobility, mixing and ever-changing complexity of the contemporary world would militate for a small culture mode of thinking to be applied to all posited social units.
Mediation has been described in somewhat similar terms to the notion of small culture with respect to creation of a common culture through interaction. Avruch (1998, 99) writes of mediation as a process by which a new culture of shared understandings, a ‘metaculture’, is created, allowing the parties to forge “a new image of their world”. Similarly, Kimmel (2000, 453) proposes that to achieve a successful outcome conflict resolution needs to involve the creation of a ‘microculture’ formed through developing commonalities in meaning and behaviour over time among the parties; this involves learning about each other’s ways and beliefs which are used as a joint resource for finding conflict resolution solutions appropriate to the context. The concept of ‘small culture’ can also be used to focus on the role of the mediator in his/her interaction with the parties. Mediation can be conceived as creating a small culture, since mediations comprise a series of interactional encounters during which norms of verbal and non-verbal behaviour emerge in a co-creation by the participants. The mediator may play an important role in establishing/encouraging type of content and modes of interaction in the small group of mediation participants. From the start in joint meetings, for example, mediators commonly set ground rules for the session and through the ensuing interactions these rules may be reinforced or developed. In the culture-building process of mediation, mediators guide the mediation in accordance with their style of mediation and their goals. They employ a range of strategies and discursive moves such as summarizing back, de-escalating emotion, reframing, providing insightful comments, asking circular questions, and encouraging direct communication between the parties where advisable. Thus the mediator can be considered to be leading a Wittgensteinian ‘language game’: the mediator follows certain procedures, uses language in a carefully controlled manner, and encourages parties to follow the explicit and implicit rules and norms of the normative mediation behaviour being established (Woolford & Ratner 2009).
It can be useful for the mediator to be aware of the small culture way of conceiving their role as it provides a framework for self-affirmation and self-reflection. The IMI (2011) adopts this approach when encouraging mediators to be flexible with regard to their preferred procedures and style of intervention in light of the needs of the parties, and suggesting that where appropriate mediators help generate a new set of behavioural norms for the mediation meetings in a particular case. Studying the intricacies of particular small cultures of mediation could also be a productive aim for empirical mediation research.
Holliday (1999, 253) points out that group members may make statements about their emerging small culture, showing how they construct the image of their own small culture. In their interactions they may also use cultural categories circulating in discourse in the wider community as commonly known knowledge, and members will bring ‘cultural residues’ from past experiences (ibid 249). Thus, interaction within the small culture brings into play cultural meaning-making discussions. Continuing in this vein, two ICS approaches, ‘interculturality’ and ‘cultural negotiation’ will now be discussed. They are grouped under the term ‘intercultural discursive practice’ because of their close attention to interactional processes.
Belatedly some researchers in the field of ICS have adopted an ethnomethodologically inspired stance. It is likely that this late uptake is due to the stranglehold that the Hall-Hofstedian approach has had on the discipline. The latter’s emphasis on broad cultural differences creating communication problems has been used as an a priori assumption which is now felt by some to obscure the very topic the research seeks to illuminate, the nature of intercultural communication. In contrast, an ethnomethodological approach eschews a priori theorization by the researcher, and seeks to explore the interactants’ point of view by examining how and why interactants themselves make relevant or irrelevant attributed cultural differences and how they negotiate cultural understandings in the course of the encounter. In other words, in intercultural discursive practice not only do people use culture to accomplish certain purposes during interaction but cultural categories and issues are viewed as ‘talked into being’ (Brandt 2008). A specific approach inspired largely by Harvey Sacks’ membership categorization analysis (see Schegloff 2007) has been named ‘interculturality’ (Zhu Hua 2015). Early applications (Nishizaka 1995, Mori 2003) followed comparable work by Day (1998) in focusing on ethnicity. Nishizaka (1995) uses data from a radio talk show featuring a Japanese host and a Sri Lankan student. He shows how the categories ‘Japanese’ and ‘foreigner’ were made relevant and sometimes irrelevant through topics of talk. An example of the latter case occurred when the host suggested that learning and speaking Japanese would be difficult for the student as a foreigner, and the student replied that he had mastered Japanese technical terms for his work, thus making the ‘Japanese’/‘foreigner’ categories irrelevant and the categories ‘specialist’/‘layperson’ relevant at this point. These latter categories indicate an opening up beyond the issue of ethnicity, a salutary step beyond an inherited view of what the (inter)cultural is and thereby towards the richness of interactive communication. In this multi-identification approach Higgens (2007) examines a conflictual interaction among a group of Tanzanian journalists. In the course of the interaction and for particular purposes a range of identity categories are self- and other- ascribed or resisted by one of the journalists, related to profession, age, as well as ethnicity. Since all such categories are constructed culturally, there is no reason to restrict discussion to ethnicity. Thus, ‘interculturality’ becomes the complex and shifting play of various cultural categories and their associated features and activities that are used and refuted in the course of a stretch of interaction.
With regard to mediation research, questions following this paradigm that could be investigated are: to what extent does interculturality play a role in mediation?; how is interculturality enacted in mediation meetings?; and for what purposes? Brownlie (fthcomg) has undertaken several analyses of family mediation initial meetings which examine interculturality as presented from one party’s point of view. The recordings come from a family mediation service in the south of England. In the first case the husband who is the party in the meeting ascribes to himself the categories of ‘British’ and ‘well-educated person’ with the attribute of being a good manager of his autistic son, while he ascribes to his wife the categories of ‘foreigner’, ‘non-proficient English speaker’ and ‘person with a difficult communication style’ with the causal attribution of triggering bad behaviour in the autistic boy and thus problems in the marriage. In the second case the wife ascribes to herself the categories of ‘woman’, ‘emotional person’, ‘good communicator’, and to her husband the categories of ‘man’, ‘non-emotional person’, ‘deficient communicator’ with the causal attribution of being ineffective as a marital partner. In the third case the husband recounts how when he first met his wife she was an ‘estate dweller’ eating beans on toast, and through his hard work as a ‘family man’ during thirty years of marriage he gave her a charmed life such that she became ‘a lady of leisure’. He thus argues that it would be unfair that she would be awarded the full equity in the family home. As can be seen, the cultural categories involve ethnicity, communication style, language proficiency, educational level, gender, socio-economic class, emotionality and family roles. It becomes clear in an examination of the three meetings that, although veiled in an aura of factuality, each narrative based on categorial ascription to self and other is constructed in order to blame the other party and/or to present a claim for a favourable financial deal for the party in the meeting.
An additional focus in examining intercultural discursive practice has been the topic of ‘cultural negotiation’. Rather than interaction among people of differing backgrounds being taken to be automatically difficult and/or being a matter of reductive labels, it has been shown empirically that on the contrary communication is often the site of explaining, learning, comparing across differences, revealing complexities, challenging assumptions, working out accommodations and solving problems (Kecskes 2014, Zhu Hua 2015). All these actions can come under the term ‘cultural negotiation’. In this view common ground is a major necessity of communication, and since common ground cannot always be presupposed and taken for granted in encounters of people from different backgrounds, it needs to be explicitly constructed (Kecskes 2014). Zhu Hua (2015) uses data from the VOICE corpus of spoken English as a Lingua Franca to show how in interactions various speakers in the group bring in cultural knowledge from their prior experience to contribute to the emerging development of a new shared cultural frame of reference. In an example given a group of international students from Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Albania and Peru pooled bits and pieces of knowledge in a protracted discussion to finally establish that a hat one was wearing was probably an Austrian hat. In some interactions the cultural assumptions of one participant are challenged/corrected/complexified by another, thus providing an opportunity for intercultural learning (Fisher-Yoshida 2005). In the same group of students mentioned above the student from Kyrgyzstan made a comment which expressed an assumption that Albanian people are Muslim; the Albanian student explained the actual complexity of the situation with regard to faith and eating/drinking practices in her country.
The cultural negotiation perspective would seem to offer interesting possibilities for further research, among which the investigation of mediation meetings and mediators’ strategies. In Brownlie’s (fthcg) study university mediators in a UK university service recounted that cases they had mediated involved a number of areas of diversity, most commonly nationality/ethnicity/native language (perceptions of impoliteness due to differing communication styles, and issues of language proficiency); gender (issues around a male having a female boss, and a male manager not understanding a female staff member’s family responsibilities); disability; and educational level/profession (involving different hierarchical levels). Mediator discussions and observations revealed that when such categories are brought up by parties or are implicitly part of the conflict, the mediators use questioning to delve further with the aims of: teasing out the details, getting parties to reflect on and acknowledge why behaviours were different, getting them to reflect on the impact of behaviours, getting them to express their feelings and react to those of the other party, and getting them to think about perceptions and intentions. Such an approach can facilitate mutual understanding of cultural differences and similarities, challenge ascribed oppositional barriers, and construct commonality. As a later stage in the mediation meeting the university mediator asks the parties how they would like the working relationship to be, and asks both parties about how each of them could modify behaviour in order to achieve that. If all goes well, the mediator plays a bridging role and depending on the case might bring the parties to accept reciprocal accommodation (see Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005). An example of this that was observed by the researcher concerned a party (not raised in Britain) recognizing that her communicative behaviour was “strident” as compared with British norms and accepting to tone down that behaviour in her workplace relations with the other party, and the other party recognizing that she needed to be less avoidant and more self-affirmative in her communicative behaviour with the first party. The university mediator may thus facilitate cultural negotiation in the sense of helping to clarify ascribed or implicit cultural differences, promoting new mutual understandings and brokering accommodation. In discussions with university mediators, Brownlie (fthcg) found, however, that they were not always fully conscious of this role.
I have indicated that interculturality and cultural negotiation approaches could be used by researchers as a framework for the analysis of mediation meeting data and mediators’ discourse. These approaches have not been taken up hitherto by mediation theorists nor have they been adopted by trainers, yet they would be useful for mediation practitioners. It would be useful that mediators too are conscious of adopting an ethnomethodologically inspired approach in respecting the complexity of the parties’ use of discursive cultural constructs by observing and paying close attention to what participants actually do, say, imply and infer during interaction. Such an approach provides a strong basis for mediators’ interventions in conjunction with their reflection during action about their prior experience and understandings in light of the phenomena at hand (Schön 1995/1983). Depending on the mediation context, the mediator as reflective practitioner (ibid) also needs to be conscious of their potential role as a broker between people who categorize themselves and the other as different, and as a facilitator of cultural understandings.
Concluding remarks
I will conclude with a few remarks on intercultural training for mediators. In the preceding discussion, I have aimed to emphasize two issues: firstly context-specificity, and secondly close attention to discursive interaction. Given these emphases, the most appropriate intercultural training for mediators involves the use of recordings of authentic mediation sessions. Stokoe (2011) has done pioneering work with her Conversation-Analytic Role-Play Method (CARM) whose primary mechanism is to play a recording turn by turn and to get workshop participants to anticipate and reflect on what is said. Among other matters, Stokoe has focused on how mediators deal with ‘possible -isms’, parties’ utterances which may potentially be taken to be discriminatory. CARM could be extended to be employed in intercultural training by focusing on how parties use an array of cultural categories for particular purposes and on how mediators respond, and by examining instances of cultural negotiation and learning which may in some cases be facilitated by the mediator. Importantly, what Schegloff (2007) has called ‘interactional threads’ need to be traced across lengthy face-to-face mediation meetings. ‘Threads’ are persistent themes or projects of the talk which surface now and again. There is, however, an obstacle with regard to using recordings of mediation meetings in that many mediation services will not accept that meetings are recorded (E. Malcolm chair College of Mediators, personal communication). This is primarily because confidentiality is a fundamental principle of the mediation process. In a context where recording of meetings is not permitted, potentially useful training material may be provided by a different kind of recording or live discussion where experienced mediators discuss their practice, giving concrete examples from their past experiences. Brownlie’s (fthcomg) data comprising discussions of specific examples of practice revealed, for example, the interesting practical point that the university mediators pick up on serious instances of prejudice and also stereotypes which are central to the case, but if a ‘throw-away’ –ism comment is not significant to the particular case and addressing it will not advance progress of the mediation, mediators will let it pass.
This article has brought together approaches from the field of Intercultural Communication Studies and mediation theory and practice. I have shown the shortcomings of early ICS theorization (Hall, Hofstede) which is nevertheless still influential today, and needs to be used cautiously. I have also discussed the uses and drawbacks of the prominent prescriptive tradition in the discipline concerning intercultural competence and social justice. I have emphasized the potential usefulness of new approaches in ICS (small cultures, intercultural discursive practice) for both theorists and practitioners of mediation. Further research based on recordings of mediation meetings and mediator discussions could be carried out in order to reveal the complex patterns of use and interaction with regard to cultural categories and cultural negotiation in specific contexts. This research could in turn enrich intercultural training for mediators.
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