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Culture

This document discusses the concept of culture and its influence through communication. It defines culture as being socially constructed and maintained through communication, giving both liberties and constraints that shape how people act, think and feel. Communication allows for the exchange of experiences that creates new meanings and further develops culture in a cyclical process. While culture can both limit and liberate, it also differentiates and unites people. Through communication, people are able to connect with those outside their bounded cultures and find commonality in dominant cultures.

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Marissa Mealey
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226 views

Culture

This document discusses the concept of culture and its influence through communication. It defines culture as being socially constructed and maintained through communication, giving both liberties and constraints that shape how people act, think and feel. Communication allows for the exchange of experiences that creates new meanings and further develops culture in a cyclical process. While culture can both limit and liberate, it also differentiates and unites people. Through communication, people are able to connect with those outside their bounded cultures and find commonality in dominant cultures.

Uploaded by

Marissa Mealey
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Bryant University

Culture

Marissa Mealey

COM 203-JE: Introduction to Communication

Professor Mutua

November 10, 2016


As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “a nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of

its people”. Culture is a very powerful and widely evident in our everyday lives, even if we don’t

always realize it. There are many factors that define a culture, such as location, gender,

experiences, dialect, and many more. Referring back to Gandhi’s quote about culture, the most

important aspect of culture are the people that make it what it is and what it stands for. By Susan

R. Beauchamp and Stanley J. Baran’s definition, culture is the world made meaningful, socially

constructed and maintained through communication. All culture, no matter what type, brings

meaning to the world by being maintained through communication, giving us liberties and

constraints thus shaping the way humans act, think, and feel.

Through communicating experiences, we are creating new meanings which allows

culture to bloom and create even more experiences, thus portraying a cyclical nature of culture.

If you think broadly, there can be many definitions of what exactly culture is; however, when it

comes to the process of communication, there is a heavy influence on meaning making in

culture. Susan R. Beauchamp and Stanley J. Baran, authors of Introduction to Human

Communication: Perception, Meaning, and Identity, explain “when we communicate with others,

we find what is common to our experiences – language is an obvious example – and then we

mutually negotiate new meanings, creating even more experiences. This is the true power of

culture. Culture is the background, the set of experiences and expectations that we each carry

around with us wherever we go. Culture allows us to interact with people who are different from

us, while in the process we become more alike” (Beauchamp & Baran 9). The transaction of

culture taking place through exchanging experiences and meanings gives more purpose to
culture’s surrounding world. Culture is prominent on a regular day; however, when you pair it

with communication it becomes all the more powerful.

With great power comes great responsibility and one of the reasons why culture is so

powerful is because it has the ability to “limit as well as liberate us” and “it differentiates as well

as unites us” (Beauchamp & Baran 10). Sometimes people have preconceptions on specific

cultures; therefore, it can limit people within a specific culture, to express themselves freely. For

example, Susan R. Beauchamp and Stanley J. Baran cite the preconceptions of male bosses

versus female bosses stating, “a male boss who speaks forcefully and dominates his workplace is

perceived as a natural leader… a female boss is less likely to employ force and dominance in her

management style because doing so may subject her to a much different evaluation by her

colleagues (Sandberg and Grant, 2015)” (Beauchamp & Baran 11). This is identifying limits and

liberties in three types of culture: men, women, and professional culture. Like culture, language

has the power to divide as well as unite: in an interesting article featured in the Chicago Tribune,

Jon Margolis explains how a lot of the time people are not aware that all languages and all

cultures are different and there is no specific one that is better than the others. Margolis states,

“Hungarians must know that theirs is a strange language. Well, aren’t they all to everyone who

does not understand them? And isn’t calling a language ‘strange’ a sign of cultural imperialism?”

(Margolis). Margolis reiterates a classic response to what many people have when another

culture is displaying differences to their own culture. It’s important to let culture unite us through

our differences: “culture differentiates because it defines. You communicate within your

country’s dominant culture… but you simultaneously belong to a several bounded cultures”

(Beauchamp & Baran 11). A dominant culture is also known as the mainstream culture which is

the collective cultural experience held and shared by the large majority of people. Bounded
cultures are cultural identities existing within the larger culture. All individuals are different

within a plethora of cultures; however, all individuals are able to unite under broader, more

mainstream cultures due to this one important tool that is all around: communication.

Most people go every day without realizing the impact culture has on our daily lives;

however, this impact is very profound and plays a key role in shaping how humans act, think,

and feel. Specific cultures all have certain ways of acting. For example, sport fans, let’s say of

the Boston Red Sox, can act very loud and rowdy at Fenway Park because they are overcome by

the grand spirit of rooting for their beloved team. Not only are people’s actions influenced by

their culture but how they think and feel are too. If you are from the United States of America,

typically, you feel pride and joy being a part of a free country, the land of opportunity. You tend

to think how grateful you may be to be able to live freely and have many resources that not all

nations have. Another aspect that even further pushes culture’s influence on acting, thinking, and

feeling, is communication. With the ability to communicate, culture is only being enhanced;

therefore, cyclically shaping how people act, think, and feel within their dominant and bounded

cultures.

Culture has four individual parts that all simultaneously work together to keep it moving.

These four parts being: meaning, communication, liberties as well as constraints, and the process

of shaping how humans act, think, and feel. All individual parts work as a cycle within each

other which in the end, empowers all cultures everywhere.


Work Cited

Beauchamp, S.R., & Baran, S. J. (n.d). Introduction to human communication:

Perception, meaning, and identity. NY: Oxford University Press.

Margolis, J. (1992). Language Has the Power to Divide as Well as Unite. Retrieved

November 10, 2016, from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-06-

09/news/9202210199_1_foreign-language-hungarians-speak

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