Is Culture a Dependent Variable?

I can appreciate the fact that Kelton Rhoads has reservations towards considering culture as the primary factor of consideration in strategic communication and influence efforts. In The Culture Variable in the Influence Equation, he plays devil's advocate to the primacy-of-culture "bandwagon." While recognizing that culture is important, he does not think it is the only and most important factor. On this point, I agree. However, in some of his examples on viewing universals as cultural specifics, I think he discounts culture too much, failing to recognize that degrees of difference matter, essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Of one analyst's findings on key problems with US public diplomacy and the US military Rhoads argues that it is equally true in the US as in the Arab world that: face-to-face messages trump mass-media appeals; dialog-style influence is superior to monologue for persuasion; metaphors and analogies are preferred over facts and statistics; direct, confrontational speech in public settings is considered face-threatening. I would agree these are all true, BUT the analyst's point was not to determine what works better everywhere. The point was to show that certain methods of communication work particularly poorly in Arab culture, and thus would be a waste of resources, might make situations worse, and should be avoided altogether. In the example of two Taliban who were killed in Afghanistan and cremated by US forces, Rhoads does not understand how this constitutes a cultural blunder. I think it is quite clear that for Muslims the burning of bodies is taboo in a way that is different from America, where cremation is accepted, practiced, and has its own industry.

Recently in my Cross Cultural Communication class (incidentally), our professor asked if any of the Middle Eastern students in our class could offer a possibly unique perspective on the uprisings sweeping the Arab world. One of our classmates shared an enlightening insight on culture which helped me relativize the situation. She stressed that in her culture, people are not accustomed to challenging their leadership and openly questioning authority, so the fact that people were demonstrating out in the streets was a sign that they were truly fed up. She said we should understand this to mean that the situation had reached a point of no return, and the protesters would not back down until Mubarak resigned. If I was considering the protests from my American or French perspective (and the French do love to take to the streets for just about any reason), then I might not understand the gravity of the situation, or even think that the whole thing might just blow over.

For Policymakers it is important to understand this type of cultural context in terms of public diplomacy. For the US government it would make a difference in how they might communicate about the protesters' cause, knowing that anything short of regime change was unacceptable. This is why early statements from the US government saying that we did not support any particular outcome, or that the Egyptian government should make reforms, were deemed insufficient. Rhoads concludes that cultural tuning becomes more important when it comes to message delivery, but I think it is equally important in the earlier stages of determining when and how to craft strategic messages.