Cultural Knowing As Practicing

Abstract

A program of research designed to provide understanding of effective cross-cultural interaction in international joint ventures led to anomalous findings. Through a grounded theory process, consideration of the anomalies led to exploration of alternative conceptions of the constructs of culture and cultural knowledge. Contemporary conceptualizations of culture and of cultural knowledge represent individual cognitions about broad cultural assumptions underlying behavior. Drawing on anthropological literature, the authors suggest that culture in such joint venture settings is in the making. Borrowing from Anthony Giddens’s ideas of practical consciousness, the authors call for new concepts of cross-cultural knowing, portraying cultural understanding as locally situated, dominantly behavioral, and embedded in mundane and evolving social practices that are jointly negotiated by actors within specific contexts, constituting situated learning. This emergent perspective recognizes the fragmented, improvisational, and contested nature of culture and the increased overlapping and intermixing of people from diverse social settings around the globe. Consequently, cultural knowing can be conceptualized as socially produced, dynamic, practical, and locally situated.