How to Build a CrossCultural Identity
Whether we like it or not, globalization is changing our lives and the businesses we work for. It's not only affecting multinationals: think about Milano's public transport drivers, traffic cops, baristas and cabbies having to deal with the millions of tourists arriving in the city and Italy for Expo in the next few months from all over the world.
The value of such encounters, and for them to be meetings of cultures, rather than clashes, depends on our intelligence. Experts have isolated our IQ in cultural intelligence, the so-called CQ. The fact the cultural intelligence is being studied and measured reflects at least two things: that you need a lot of it to navigate the complexities of relating with cultures different from ours, and that managing to do it well makes us better persons. More intelligent, in fact. It's a long and gradual process, and not devoid of difficulties. You must learn not to fall between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, there is the danger of universalism, i.e. the idea that cultural differences are not relevant, due to the convergence in cultural mores engendered by globalization, so that cultural variables are said to count less than professional, income, or educational levels. Dominant classes and society's elites, those who constitute the overclass, in Michael Lind's words, have historically been universalistic: overclass members recognize themselves as part of the same community beyond national origins and boundaries. This seemingly positive universalistic notion hides a pernicious error: cultural relativism, which can be an alibi for tolerating abhorrent practices such as genital mutilation or forced marriage of young girls, which in our culture are decidedly forbidden, and rightly so.
The Thin Line between Us and Them
Conversely, less well-off and educated social strata are often inspired by narrow-minded ethnocentrism, opposing to mounting universalism the particulars of their mores and habits, which they naturally regard as divergent and better from anybody else's. Along with positive things such a sense of cultural identity and tradition, there are dangers in this attitude which are at the root of growing xenophobic sentiment. Distinguishing between cultures and groups has always meant drawing a line between "us" and "them". Whoever feels insecure and threatened in his/her identity by the economic crisis attributed to globalization, and the extraordinary growth in inequality that is its ferocious corollary, clings to national identity, the motherland, even the race, to seek salvation from an invisible yet oppressive enemy. When we despise those who are different from us, by parodying, caricaturing, and stereotyping another culture, we are making armed conflict a likely possibility. It should make us pause and think the fact that "Ukraine" means "on the border". Distinguishing without understanding is discrimination, and it can kill.
If we leave contemporary history aside and turn to management, I think we have made a few mistakes in business education. Twenty years ago, cross-cultural management was all the rage, and classes were shown a popular video titled "Going international: managing the overseas assignment". The story being told was simple: a US manager (parody of the typical North American manager) had to negotiate with a series of potential clients from different cultures: the Mexican, late at meetings and fond of talking about anything but work, the Arab or the Japanese team, rigidly tied to internal hierarchy based on seniority. The stereotypical American executive ended up making every faux pas possible with the representative of each culture, causing disorientation and irritation. The message was clear and reassuring: learn to recognize and respect cultural differences and you'll be successful. It was the same message that available management theories supported and still support.
From Cultural Perception to Cultural Intelligence
In the model developed by Geert Hofstede, or in the Globe Project, in Fons Trompenaars' studies, and in the list compiled by Israeli sociologist Shalom Schwartz of isolated cultural values in the World Values project, the basic idea is to have various dimensions (e.g. how much people in a culture respect power differences, whether they are more affected by individualism or collectivism etc.) on the basis of which a given culture can be distinguished from another. However this also amounts to pigeonholing on the basis of cultural stereotypes, given that variance in individual behavior can hardly be predicted by virtue of the subject being Italian, Mexican, or Japanese. However labeling simplifies and reassures, and that's why participants in those classes laughed at and saw themselves portrayed in characters. Had we stopped there, we would have risked causing intellectual harm. But luckily research and teaching have progressed beyond the simple perception of difference.
In fact, what is perceived must be elaborated. Cultural intelligence is the product of direct experience and what we learn about another culture's norms, practices, and conventions, by truly immerging ourselves in the other culture (cognitive experience). It is constituted by our will to invest our attention and energy in learning how to function in a situation of cultural difference (motivational dimension). It is made by our ability to interact, verbally or not, with the other culture in an appropriate way (behavioral dimension). Finally, cultural intelligence contains a meta-cognitive dimension: when we arrive at interpreting multiple cultural identities, by reflecting on how much each contains something useful and true, and play them in the encounter with others. We should be aware that culture means the way according to which each human group has learned to respond to the challenges of life and the environment, by altering either one. This way, maybe one day we'll learn to look at the border line as a segment that connects worlds.