User:OttawaAC/Essay/Cross-culture collaborating

Cross-culture collaborating is a wordy title, but since culture clash happens between editors on Wikipedia, and it has happened to me, I thought it was worth some reflection. (Title subject to revision of course.)

Some things are universal; a lot aren't. I'm clearly not the first person to make that observation. What's changed is the extent to which cultures interact today. With global travel, global business, and tools like the Internet, we are more open to meeting people from vastly different backgrounds than our ancestors could have ever dreamed possible. And there are culture clashes. And a lot of assumptions and hasty conclusions are made, many times because the people involved in the clash don't realize what is at the root of the miscommunication, or how it happened. Rather than work at improving communication and collaborating more effectively, we stumble into personal attacks and so on,

I've put together some rough concepts related to differences in communicating between cultures. I've gathered these from a handful of sources: some online, a bit of reading, and some notes from a seminar I attended. Please read through them if this topic is of interest to you, and maybe they will help serve as a starting point towards understanding how to better collaborate with our fellow editors with different cultural backgrounds and different cultural expectations.

Collectivist cultures and individualist cultures
As I've thought about culture-clash concepts recently, I've considered that the differences between collectivist cultures and individualist cultures may be a fundamental source of conflict between Wikipedia editors. Actually, it would be nearly impossible for this not to be the case.

"Collectivist cultures" and "individualist cultures" aren't references to Communism or socialism or libertarianism or political philosophy. I'm using the terms in the sense that they are used in sociology, anthropology, and related fields. Most cultures can be put into one of those categories, although these are of course generalizations. Cultures could perhaps be better described as being on a spectrum between the two poles). In broad terms, Westerners tend to be part of individualist cultures, and most other global cultures tend to be identifiable as more collectivist in their orientation. Here's a short list of culture characteristics associated with each:

So how does this impact people's behaviour? It can affect whether or not someone believes it is appropriate to even ask for a promotion; whether or not someone is willing to directly raise an objection to a procedure or initiative; whether or not someone is comfortable contradicting someone in a senior position or pointing out a problem without being asked. It's been researched a lot in workplaces, but it isn't too difficult to see how work habits can be carried over to Wikipedia collaborations:

"Christopher Earley, an American management researcher, gave 48 management trainees from southern China and a matched group of 48 management trainees from the USA an ‘in-basket-task’ consisting of 40 separate items requiring between two and five minutes each (Earley, 1989). The task involved such activities as writing memos evaluating plans and rating job candidates’ application forms. Half of the participants from each country were given an individual goal of 20 items; the other half were given a group goal of 200 items to be completed in one hour by 10 people. In addition, half of the participants from either country, both from the group and from the individual goal subsets, were asked to mark each item with their name; the other half turned them in anonymously. The Chinese, collectivist, participants performed best when operating with a group goal and anonymously. They performed worst when operating individually and with their name marked on their work. The individualist American participants performed best when operating individually and with their work attributed to them personally, and performed very poorly when operating as a group and anonymously."

Active voice and passive voice
Active voice and passive voice are English grammar terms. They can apply to many languages, though, and they are important distinctions, especially with respect to critiquing another editor's contributions.
 * "Active voice" is essentially direct, and focuses on criticizing the other person, or the actions of the other person: "You did this wrong", "You shouldn't do that".
 * "Passive voice" is essentially indirect, and focuses on the object of discussion, not the listener/reader: "This quote needs a source citation", "We have a better forum for this topic".

The significance lies in the fact that "saving face" is so important to self-identity in many collectivist cultures. Being singled out for blame, even if it seems trivial to the critic, is awkward at the very least for someone with that cultural background. "Individualist" cultures are in a small minority in this world, so it's worth remembering that a Westerner's casual blunt remarks can be quite alien and offensive to many other people.

Space and time
The Western worldview is so ingrained in us from childhood, that we often aren't aware that what we "know" as true may just be a theoretical concept that has yet to be proven. Or may even be incorrect. The next table shows some "spatial vocabulary" used by colonial "explorers" to New Zealand in the 19th century. This new vocabulary didn't reflect indigenous concepts of that place:

Western concepts of time are not universal, either. The article on the use of past tense lists the many language groups that do not recognize past, present, or future tenses of verbs, or none of the three. And there are a lot more people speaking those languages than English. Westerners, since the 19th-century colonial period, have often fallen back on the stereotype of other cultures as being "devoid of work habits", and "native people" as being "lazy, indolent, with short attention spans".

And doesn't Einstein's Theory of Relativity suggest that the passing of time could be just an illusion anyway? (-; I'm not a physicist, that's for sure. I'm just pointing out, that our Western ways of thinking and doing tasks, and interacting with one another, are relatively new to this tired old earth. If we're going to communicate better with each other and with editors from other cultures, it's worth remembering that we are in fact the minority. Others do view us very differently from the way we view ourselves.