8.3 Culture and interculturality, a quick review

If we wish to establish a common basis for understanding, then we need to be interested in the perspectives that various actors assume from their fields of experience. This involves being concerned with people and their cultural orientation. By considering an open perspective of culture, we acknowledge that culture exists within human collectives and is constituted through the interactive (re)production of patterns of shared meaning. With this understanding, culture can be created and changed by a group of people. The term culture as such refers to people’s membership of different kinds of groups that share commonalities. These could be, for example, a profession, a role, a department, a sport, a corporate organisation or a nation. Some of the collectives that actors feel affiliated with will become more relevant in particular contexts and at specific moments than others.

In a work environment, for example, diverse people meet for a specific purpose and may initially have different understandings of work processes due to their professional socialisation and membership of particular collectives. When they meet new colleagues they are likely to experience a feeling of unfamiliarity or even strangeness due to a different understanding of work and working together. Thus they find themselves in a situation in which ‘normality’ is missing. When we encounter such an absence of normality, i.e. a lack of shared understanding regarding established approaches and patterns of behaviour as well as a lack of plausibility and routinised action, this is what we call ‘interculturality’.

Interculturality can therefore be understood as a process of social interaction and communication during which people develop a common basis for understanding and modify and align cultural practices. This should be done in such a way that the people involved feel comfortable. In this case behavioural patterns are perceived as appropriate, with everybody behaving in a way that makes sense to others and in which routine actions are established which are understood and acceptable for all and therefore shared.