An E-Portfolio
In a rapidly growing world with an abundance of civilizations and languages, writers must adapt to the variance of cultures in order to effectively communicate their message. When discussing culture, it is important to understand the breadth of each facet, and how it ultimately intertwines and becomes shaped into a more integral and thorough concept. Disquisition from authors such as Hoft, Cardon, Hofstede et al., and Hunsinger has substantiated the need for awareness and proficiency in the approach to culture when generating technical documentation. For this international audience analysis, I will focus on the elements necessary to understand as the author of an informational guide on healthcare products and services for consumers of the majority culture in China. I will explore Hoft’s seven cultural variables and their impacts on the audience’s comprehension of the guide, along with correlating Hall’s Theory of Contexting and Hofstede’s cultural value dimensions to demonstrate how the way individuals in a culture interact with each other constructs the foundation of the culture itself. I intend to provide a comprehensive evaluation of how and why the author of this particular healthcare document should be methodical and cognizant in the writing process due to observable differences in the Chinese culture.
In the beginning stages of the writing process, the author should examine Hoft’s seven key cultural variables that she describes in International Technical Communication: How to Export Information about High Technology. The variables are listed as the following: political, economic, social, religious, educational, linguistic, and technological (Hoft, 62). Likewise, the author must identify if the culture is high-context or low-context, according to Hall’s Theory of Contexting, and whether cultural dimensions exist within the culture, as described by Hofstede et al. in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. All of these components are vital to acknowledge, as they heavily influence how the document is written and may also help predict how it will be perceived.
To help understand Hoft’s seven variables, the author may ask themselves the following questions regarding their targeted cultural audience: Are there any safety or intellectual property right laws that I should know? What types of products can the average citizens afford? What are the social roles and attitudes that exist? Are there specific religious values, beliefs, or traditions that I should be mindful of? What is the literacy rate, and is education centralized? How many different languages are spoken and understood within the country? Is technology accessible to these citizens? The document only becomes lucrative if the author is able to sufficiently answer these questions and tailor their document to the needs of the citizens in that particular culture. When concentrating these themes on a culture however, the author must be vigilant of all of the subcultures and variances that are present across the country as a whole. For this reason, it is best to base the focus group on the majority culture of that country. The seven questions regarding Hoft’s variables can easily be asked and answered by an author looking to write a technical document for Chinese citizens who want to gain information on healthcare products or services, as I have described in further detail below.
The political variable should be considered as whether the Chinese government has any laws or regulations on the particular healthcare item under question. According to Boslaugh’s Health Care Systems around the World: A Comparative Guide, “China has a social insurance and mandatory individual account health care system…Several different programs cover different individuals, depending on their locations and types of employment” (4). In 2017, China’s State Council proposed ideas for new drug regulations in hopes of optimizing care. In the web article, “China CFDA (now NMPA) Medical Device and Pharmaceutical Regulations”, some of the proposed changes are listed as “acceptance of foreign clinical trial data for drugs and devices, which should reduce the need for local trials in China”, and “strengthening of intellectual property (IP) protection, to address the severe IP theft issue amongst Chinese manufacturers”. When writing the technical healthcare guide, the author should very much be aware of these kinds of components, as they could potentially impede the readership of the document based on the subject matter, and whether the healthcare item is welcomed or viewed as unacceptable.
The type of items that citizens can afford falls under the economic variable. China is a very large country with a wide range of jobs and incomes. This ties into the political variable slightly, as the type of job and income the citizens have reflect upon the type of insurance they receive, therefore placing possible restrictions on them if they are not eligible to receive the healthcare item. In her work, Boslaugh states,
Employees in state-owned enterprises are covered by the maternity insurance program; employees in urban areas working in nonprofit organizations, enterprises, social groups, and government organizations are covered by the urban medical insurance program…and farmers receive basic coverage through a rural cooperative medicare program. Rates of contribution to an individual’s medical savings account are determined by local governments but are in the range of 2 percent and cover medical benefits only.
Given China’s broad scope of economics, the author should really pinpoint the target audience, and recognize their needs and the areas in which they are lacking, which then connects into the next two variables – the social and religious variables.
The social variable lies in the way the culture works and what makes it tick. Certain roles and structures may hinder the audience’s ability to understand or access a technical document. Likewise, there may be taboos, customs, or values in place that affect how the document is perceived. The author should familiarize themselves with social norms or cues that could assist in getting the message across. Historically, Chinese culture is male-centered and traditional. This may make the audience more or less receptive to the document depending on if the verbiage is biased towards one gender or another. Also studying the majority religion can help to provide clarification. According to the CIA World Fact Book, China is “18.2% Buddhist, 5.1% Christian, 1.8% Muslim, 21.9% folk religion, less than .1% Hindu or Jewish, .7% other (including Daoist), and 52.2% unaffiliated” as of February 2019. With most citizens being unaffiliated, folk, or Buddhist, the author may assume that the audience may be more responsive to a healthcare document that provides information on alternative forms of medicine and management.
The final three variables, educational, linguistic, and technological, may be the most vital to examine during the writing process. The educational variable gauges how literate the citizens are, which ultimately determines if the document will be comprehensible at all. The CIA World Fact Book lists China’s literacy rate as 96.4%, which means that the citizens are highly likely to understand the material, but that may depend on the language it is written in. The linguistic variable measures the amount of languages spoken in the country. English is often the second if not first language in most places, but the author should always be sure to verify the majority language. The CIA Fact Book states that the official language of China is “Standard Chinese or Mandarin”, but among these are different dialects and minority languages. This is where images or pictorial references may come in handy. Lastly, the technological variable may dictate the medium in which the technical document is delivered. If the culture is highly technologically advanced, then the author can assume that computer access is feasible. On the other hand, if the country is mostly impoverished, then access will clearly be limited, and the document may either need to be written or even orally delivered if the culture faces inadequacy in both technology and literacy.
Hall’s Theory of Contexting is another important method in helping to analyze an audience. The theory is defined by how significantly each culture depends on either implicit or explicit cues within a communicative encounter. For example, people in some cultures may require a greater framework of communication with less context but direct verbal cues to understand the true message. On the other hand, others may only need the context itself, and can understand using cues that are unspoken, maybe through gestures or glances. These types of cultures are referred to as low-context and high-context respectively. On page 401 of Cardon’s article, “A Critique of Hall’s Contexting Model: A Meta-Analysis of Literature on Intercultural Business and Technical Communication”, Hall’s own definitions of each context are cited as, "A high-context (HC) communication or message is one in which most of the information is either in the physical context or internalized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message. A low-context (LC) communication is just the opposite; i.e., the mass of the information is vested in the explicit code." In addition to originating these ideas of contexting, Hall also provided an extensive list of behaviors that he found common within each culture. According to Cardon,
[Hall] explained that cultures could be arranged on a continuum from extremely LC to extremely HC cultures. He classified the following cultures on such a continuum in order of lowest to highest context: Swiss-Germans, Germans, Scandinavians, Northern Americans, French, English, Italians, Latin Americans, Arabs, Chinese (added in Hall &
Hall, 1987, 1990), and Japanese (401).
In reference to my own analysis, Hall placed the Chinese culture at the tail end of the list, denoting that it is an extremely high-context culture. This seems like a valid argument, as it is a common belief that the Chinese culture is very close-knit and traditional in many ways. However, there are many different factors that come into play when categorizing a culture’s desired level of context. While Hall procured a great deal of information from his research, critics often contend that his approach was based too much upon personal observation, instead of using more rigorous qualitative data collection methods. Cardon states, “[Hall] did not describe how he conceptualized or measured these rankings [of cultures from LC to HC]…several of his comments suggest that he did so primarily though qualitative interviews and observation” (402). Additionally, “Hall emphasized his desire to help American executives understand the often confusing behavior of executives from other cultures” (Cardon 402). It seems that Hall’s initial research was to be more focused on the business subculture within the entire culture itself, and he actually did a study in 1987 in hopes of describing Japanese business culture. As Japan lies right beside China on Hall’s continuum, it can be inferred that the study would yield nearly identical results if completed on businesspeople from China.
In the 1980s and 1991, Hofstede established his cultural value dimensions, which were characterized under four main organizational patterns. In the text Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, it is stated that,
The four basic problem areas defined by Inkeles and Levinson and empirically found in the IBM data represent dimensions of cultures. A dimension is an aspect of a culture that can be measured relative to other cultures…They have been named power distance (from small to large), collectivism versus individualism, femininity versus masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance (from weak to strong)” (Hofstede et al. 28).
Power distance “reflects the range of answers found in the various countries to the basic question of how to handle the fact that people are unequal” (Hofstede et al. 40). It is measured by a term called the power distance index, which is a score that reveals the level of dependence relationships within a culture. As a result, “Power distance can therefore be defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally” (Hofstede et al. 43). Based on his research, China fell in the category of a high power distance index, meaning that there is much value placed on the status and power of a person.
Collectivism vs. individualism is another organizational pattern that represents how a culture is viewed. As defined by Hofstede et al. in their book, individualism refers to “societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him- or herself and his or her immediate family,” whereas, collectivism, on the other hand, “pertains to societies in which people from birth onward are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty (57). Historically, China has been known to be an extremely collectivist society, often putting high worth on group mentality and familial relations and loyalty. This is validated by Hofstede’s results, showing China to be on the much more collectivist scale, along with most other Asian countries.
Femininity vs. masculinity refers to the gender roles put into place within a culture. Since the beginning of time, there has been a tangible gap between men and women, no matter the culture or country. Hofstede et al. credit gender roles as a “part and parcel of every society”, as “a society’s gender role pattern is daily reflected in its media, including TV programs, motion pictures, children’s books, newspapers, and women’s journals” (72). In a graph that shows both scales of collectivism vs. individualism and femininity vs. masculinity, China is nearly right in the middle of the collectivist masculine square. While it is clear that the society is mostly male-dominated, collectivist, and places power unequally, it does show that there are still cultures more extreme than that.
The dimension of uncertainty avoidance was found to have derived from “American organization sociology, in particular from the work of James G. March…All human beings have to face the fact that we do not know what will happen tomorrow: the future is uncertain, but we have to live with it anyway” (Hofstede et al. 91). This idea is something that all humans face in their lives, across all cultures and time. The process of acknowledging and accepting this may come easier to people in some countries than it does in others. Hofstede et al. explain why on page 91 of their book, stating,
Feelings of uncertainty may also be partly shared with other members of one’s society…feelings of uncertainty are acquired and learned. Those feelings and the ways of coping with them belong to the cultural heritage of societies. They are transferred and reinforced through basic institutions such as the family, the school, and the state…They lead to collective patterns of behavior in one society that may seem aberrant and incomprehensible to members of other societies.
The measurement of this dimension can be understood as “the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations” (Hofstede et al. 92). On the index scale for this category, China is at the bottom, low-end. This means that the culture generally does not feel threatened by experiences in which the outcome is unknown. Ironically Japan was at the very top, which one would assume that the cultures would score similarly on all dimensions because of their geographic proximity, but it just proves that there are many more unobservable factors that should be assessed.
Understanding the term “imagined worlds” could also influence how a document is perceived. Hunsinger cites the term in his article, “Culture and Identity in Intercultural Technical Communication”, where he describes it as the construction of a cultural identity based off of global flaws, making it “irreducibly intertextual and unstable” (40). Cultural identity differs from culture in that it is viewed separately from economic, political, and historical contexts, and notably “characterized not by the interaction of relatively stable entities, such as effectively autonomous cultures, but rather by mobile worldwide currents that move independently of one another to converge and interact in a complex global system” (40). For example, the author of the healthcare document may change certain elements if they were writing for a Chinese audience within the Chinese culture, than say if they were writing for a Chinese audience who has assimilated into American culture. Although the readers are from the same heritage, their cultural identities will differ, hence the document would not be perceived the same by each audience.
In conclusion, writers are shown to have a more effective message when they adapt to the variance of cultures, and are aware and proficient in their approach to the culture when generating technical documentation. Using references such as Hoft, Cardon, Hofstede et al., and Hunsinger, I was able to explore the seven cultural variables, Hall’s Theory of Contexting, and Hofstede’s cultural value dimensions to validate the obligation of understanding the depth of the culture during the initial writing process. For this international audience analysis, I chose to focus on the steps necessary to effectively write a technical healthcare document for people belonging to the Chinese culture. Due to observable differences in this culture, the author must be particularly conscientious if they intend to satisfy and enthuse their international audience.
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Works Cited
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Boslaugh, Sarah, Health Care Systems around the World: A Comparative Guide. SAGE Publications, Inc., 2013.
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Cardon, Peter “A Critique of Hall’s Contexting Model: A Meta-Analysis of Literature on Intercultural Business and Technical Communication.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 2006, pp. 31-48. Accessed 24 January 2020.
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“China CFDA (now NMPA) Medical Device and Pharmaceutical Regulations.” Pacific Bridge Medical, https://www.pacificbridgemedical.com/regulation/china-medical-device-pharmaceutical-regulations/. Accessed 24 January 2020.
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“China.” CIA World Fact Book, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/one_page_summaries.html. Accessed 24 January 2020.
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Hofstede, Geert H., et al. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. McGraw-Hill, 2010.
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Hoft, Nancy L. International Technical Communication: How to Export Information about High Technology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995, pp. 62-63. Accessed 24 January 2020.
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Hunsinger, Peter “Culture and Identity in Intercultural Technical Communication.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 2008, pp. 399-428. Accessed 24 January 2020.