What's your generational frame of reference?

An inaugural concept of intercultural communication is the notion of cultural frame of reference. The idea is that people bring their cultural frame of reference to bear during any intercultural encounter. This cultural frame of reference is generally taken-for-granted, unconscious behaviours, expectations, habits, and practices. These include how and whether we shake hands, make eye contact,  the bodily distances we observe, the volume of our voice; indeed, key verbal and non-verbal communication cues which 'travel' between two (or more) people during the intercultural encounter. It also includes social and cultural aspects as whether we respect social hierarchy or prefer egalitarianism, use speech styles that are direct or assertive or ones that are indirect and that spiral in their logic. 

It is making these behaviours, expectations, habits and practices that has to be the first step in any intercultural communication. Before you can set about 'knowing' another culture, it behooves you to know your own.

This begs the question of what is culture. In most intercultural communication research and in everyday parlance, we think of cultures as bounded entities which may or may not be attached to ethnicities, racialized groups and/or nationalities; e.g., American, Canadian, Indian, Chinese, British, Filipino, African American, Swedish, Moroccan, Latino/a, Korean, and so on. The list is endless. 

What we often don't think about is the dynamic nature of cultures and how they evolve over time; say, within a span of a generation. 

This was made clear to me when recently teaching intercultural communication to undergraduate students who had diverse geographical, ethnic and racialized identities and yet, for the most part, shared a youth culture with its own spoken and unspoken expectations, behaviours, and rituals. While I might have shared my own diasporic Indian and raised-in-Canada identities with a range of my students, I did not share this youth culture, be it verbal cues, bodily movements, forms of dress, the list goes on. 

As such, even though I was supposed to teach intercultural communication, I had to consider my own cultural frame of reference, not merely in my communication styles with students with other cultural identities but also between me as a Generation Xer and my Generation Z students. You could argue that these represent two different cultures, with different expectations, habits, practices, colliding in the classroom, and in the workplace, among other sites. As such, it represents a different kind, but equally salient, terrain for intercultural (mis)communication.

In terms of workplace culture, as Mark Frein details in a recent LinkedIn Post, The House of Culture, there are norms, values, and behaviours that people create and adapt to their work environments. If we are to be successful in intercultural communication in the workplace and beyond, we will have to consider, seek to understand and engage with these cultural formations; but more importantly, we will have to take stock of our own taken-for-granted assumptions about the workplace and the implied values, behaviours, practices that don't make it into shiny mission and vision statements. We will have to take stock of our own cultural frame of reference, which is not merely marked by ethnic, racialized or national culture, but a generational culture as well.