239. Ideas, action, and integration

Let me now get more practical. In preceding items in this blog I discussed culture mostly in terms of ideas, perspectives, and ideologies. How about action? Isn’t that more basic and important for multiculturalism?

In view of having adopted a pragmatic perspective, in this blog, perhaps I am a little late with this, in my analysis. If ideas not only shape action but are also formed by it, then shared activity, in common practice, is perhaps the best basis for multiculturalism.

These days, a study appeared in the Netherlands showing that immigrants who entered for work integrate much faster and better than refugees seeking asylum, who are isolated for a long time, in detention centres, waiting for residence permits, without work or training. That blocks integration.  

What is to be shared, then, between people from different cultures, in a given society, is interaction, work, in some organizational structure and process.

Then one may think or say whatever one likes, according to one’s own culture, as long as it does not preclude working together.

Then a problem arises when one’s culture forbids participation, or there is lack of shared language, or there are other cultural blockages.

An Islamic patient may refuse to be treated by people from an opposite sex, or to bedded in a ward with people of mixed sex or religion. Or a personnel manager may discriminate applicants according to sex, religion or appearance.

Of course, the idea of action as a basis for integration is not as simple as it may seem. Organizations are shot through with culture. The degree and form of authority, deliberation, style of communication, degree of prejudice, style of socialization, rituals, etc.

Lack of understanding often relates not to deep or fundamental issues but to trivial things in daily practice that are taken for granted in the country hosting refugees but are not familiar to the refugee.

To understand this, I pick up, as a link between action and thought, the notion of scripts that I used before (in item 34) as a model of mental ‘framing’. To recall: A script is a network of connected nodes that represent component activities (in case of a practice) or notions (in case of a concept). In an activity a connection between components may indicate a sequence in time, one-sided or mutual dependence, the use of pooled resources, a relation of authority (supervision, control), etc. In a concept or theory it may indicate logical implication, conditionals, etc. 

The classic example is that of a restaurant, seen as a sequence of nodes of entry, seating, selecting, ordering, eating, paying and leaving.

If something happens but one does not have the appropriate script to absorb it, as part of a culture, one is at a loss about what to do. If one is not used to self-service restaurants, then just taking a seat will not get you served. This is part of the problem of integration of foreigners: they cannot properly ‘read’ events.

In earlier items (219, 231, 232) I discussed the notion of ‘voice’, the deliberation between conflicting views or interests. Voice needs a script. Outside the script voice is just noise.

Scripts entails prejudice, invalid attribution. A gesture towards a pocket is falsely interpreted as the reach for a gun. Scripts serve to identify an individual as having a place in one or more scripts.

Exhibiting, in ones actions, the absence of the ‘proper’ scripts, one is branded, largely subconsciously, as not belonging. And that may trigger the instinct for ‘parochial altruism’, with suspicion and ostracism of outsiders, which I discussed in item 205. That applies not only to foreigners, but, to a lesser degree, also within a culture, to class differences. Down to the way you hold your knife at a dinner. Some rituals or practices arise for the very purpose of ostracism or discrimination.

In sum, the scripted nature of ideas and practices yields problems, especially between people from different countries or cultures, carrying different mental scripts. 

But it also shows all the more clearly how important shared action is, to develop scripts that allow for collaboration and mutual understanding.

Of course, organizations are free to craft their scripts, within the law, and newcomers will have to adapt to them in order to integrate. Newcomers may need to adapt their goals and values, and learn requisite knowledge and skills, and they must be given the means to participate, and not to be excluded by discrimination. It can help to have role models of people that had success in this.[i]

However, innovation entails changes of script, and organizations do well to welcome misfits in the script, which may trigger novelty. Here again we have the potentially beneficial effect of cognitive and cultural distance, discussed before, in his blog. In the long run those organizations will be most successful wo have learned to collaborate with people who think differently.    owwve

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[i] See item 220, on a logic for hosting refugees.