cultural context power essay

The Importance of Cultural Context: Expanding Interpretive Power in Psychological Science

In 1995, psychological scientists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley made a splash with their influential book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children , in which they estimated that by age 4, poor children heard 32 million fewer words than wealthy children did. Furthermore, they argued that the number of words children hear early in life predicts later academic outcomes, potentially contributing to socioeconomic educational disparities. Interventions encouraging low-income parents to talk to their children gained traction even at the highest levels of US government. The Obama administration, for example, launched a campaign to raise awareness about the “30-million word gap.”

Twenty-three years after Hart and Risley’s book appeared, however, Douglas E. Sperry (Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College), Linda L. Sperry (Indiana State University), and Peggy J Miller (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) published analyses of five studies that called in question the existence and magnitude of a “word gap”. Using Hart and Risley’s measurement of words spoken to a child by a primary caregiver, Sperry and colleagues found inconsistent support for a word gap among a more diverse sample of wealthy and poor families.

This publication incited widespread debate. Some critiqued Sperry and colleagues’ measurement and conclusions, while others focused on the initial study’s limitations. Many suggested Hart and Risley conflated race and social class, as a majority of the poor families were Black while a majority of the wealthy families were White. Others questioned their methodology, speculating that the anxiety of being observed by educated White researchers could cause poor Black parents to speak less to their children than they normally would. Others argued Hart and Risley’s narrow focus on words spoken by a primary caregiver to a child reflected White, middle-class cultural norms. Children in other cultural contexts hear a great deal of language from other caregivers (e.g., siblings, extended family) and their ambient environments, but Hart and Risley excluded this language. Thus, in cultural contexts in which extended family plays a large role in child rearing, focusing on the primary caregiver’s language may result in an incomplete representation of the richness of a child’s linguistic environment. In fact, using more expansive measurements of words children heard at home, Sperry and colleagues found that children in some lower-income communities heard more words than wealthy children did.

While psychological scientists surely have something to learn from both iterations of the “word gap” study, we have equally as much to learn from the debate itself. The criticisms raised illustrate a problem that we suggest results from a lack of interpretive power in psychological science. Interpretive power refers to the ability to understand individuals’ experiences and behaviors in relation to their cultural contexts. It requires understanding that cognition, motivation, emotion, and behavior are shaped by individuals’ cultural values and norms. The same behavior takes on different meanings in diverse cultural contexts, and different cultural contexts promote divergent normative responses to the same event.

To accurately understand human behavior, psychological scientists must understand the cultural context in which the behavior occurs and measure the behavior in culturally relevant ways. When they lack this interpretive power, they risk drawing inaccurate conclusions about psychological processes and thus building incomplete or misguided theories.

Failures of interpretive power take many forms, including:

• failing to acknowledge that culture shapes psychological processes, even if scientists do not fully understand how;
• failing to consider whether a measure or methodology captures a psychological process as it unfolds for the population studied;
• assuming findings generalize to other cultural contexts unless otherwise demonstrated; and
• not understanding how researchers’ own cultural experiences shape their assumptions, decisions, and conclusions.

To build stronger theories, psychological scientists can leverage interpretive power. The burden rests not just on individual researchers, but on the field as a whole to implement practices that attend to cultural influences. Using the culture cycle framework, we describe changes at four key levels of psychological science — ideas, institutions, interactions, and individuals — that can help the field build interpretive power

Figure: The Culture Cycle Framework (adapted from Markus & Conner, 2013)

Developing Culture-Conscious Research Questions

One of the key problems underlying psychology’s lack of interpretive power is the fact that a majority of research is conducted by people from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) contexts and relies on WEIRD samples. Developing interpretive power involves recognizing that many psychological theories describe human behavior in these particular cultural contexts, and that we know less about processes in non-WEIRD contexts. We must embrace the idea that culture shapes human experiences and reject the notion that any one group or context represents “normative” human functioning.

Scientific institutions (e.g., journals, universities, professional organizations) can play a powerful role in promoting attention to culture. For example, journals can showcase research with non-WEIRD samples to communicate the possibilities and importance of conducting research with diverse populations. Journals can also encourage greater transparency regarding studies’ cultural limitations by requiring researchers to specify the cultural contexts from which they recruited subjects and to which they expect findings to generalize. Critically, generalizability should not determine whether research is published. Studies that include small, difficult to recruit, or culturally specific samples should be considered potentially informative so long as they use sound methodologies.

Given that research with non-WEIRD populations is often more expensive and time consuming than research with WEIRD samples, institutions also have a responsibility to support and incentivize non-WEIRD research. Universities can account for the time, expense, and potential impact of non-WEIRD research when making tenure decisions, and professional organizations can create competitive awards to support this work. Perhaps most critically, universities can recruit psychological scientists from diverse backgrounds to join and lead departments.

Cross-cultural interactions also provide an avenue for increasing interpretive power. Both psychological institutions and individual scientists can build trusting, mutually beneficial relationships with diverse communities, many of which the field has historically mistreated, misunderstood, or ignored. In building these relationships, psychological scientists can work to reserve judgment and design research to address the communities’ concerns and needs.

On an individual level, building interpretive power requires exposure to different cultures and perspectives. Seeking diverse collaborators can render more nuanced and informed research questions. APS William James Fellow Hazel Markus and APS Fellow Shinobu Kitayama, for example, generated their influential theory of cultural models of self by comparing their own cultural experiences. Psychological scientists can also engage with the theoretical frameworks and knowledge about non-WEIRD cultures that are abundant in other academic disciplines (e.g., sociology, history, anthropology) to generate more culturally-informed research questions.

Using Culture-Conscious Research Design

In psychological science, hypothesis testing is the gold standard, yet many of our research designs are developed by and tested among people from WEIRD cultural contexts. Furthermore, a priori hypotheses often stem from researchers’ own experiences and thus often regard WEIRD processes. Embracing hypothesis generating methodologies can reduce WEIRD bias in research design. Ethnographic observations, focus groups, case studies, content analyses, and archival analyses all provide means of gaining insight about non-WEIRD cultural contexts that can inspire further experimental work. Leveraging interpretive power in research design means placing greater value on such methodologies.

To a great extent, scientific institutions serve as gatekeepers of “high-quality” research design. Journals, for instance, dictate which methodologies are acceptable for publication, with the most prestigious journals valuing — or even requiring —hypothesis testing. Because WEIRD samples are often most feasible for these designs, non-WEIRD populations and processes remain underrepresented in high-impact journals. To build interpretive power, journals can make space for a wider range of methodologies. They can recognize that, given the dearth of non-WEIRD research, exploratory work is often most helpful in advancing understanding of these cultural contexts. Journals can also make space for non-WEIRD findings that diverge from previous research with WEIRD populations. These findings can be considered not as “failures to replicate”, but as information about how psychological processes might differ cross-culturally.

Interactions with experts inside and outside of the field can also expand psychological scientists’ methodological repertoires and lead to more culture-conscious research design. Disciplines that use information-rich methodologies provide examples of how to thoroughly document qualitative and quantitative non-experimental findings. By drawing inspiration from research that probes different levels of society and uses diverse means of gathering and integrating data, we will find more generative methodologies to build interpretive power in our own field.

Finally, just as psychological scientists conduct a priori statistical power analyses, they can also conduct a priori interpretive power analyses. They can examine whether their methodology has been tested with non-WEIRD populations and learn about the cultural influences likely to shape the processes they study. Simultaneously, researchers can reflect on how their own cultural values and assumptions shape their empirical approach. Many fields encourage positionality statements, wherein researchers describe their own experiences in relation to their subject. This practice can help psychological scientists identify how cultural biases or misunderstandings might enter their research.

Implementing Culture-Conscious Analysis and Interpretation

Many of the statistical analyses psychological scientists use to test hypotheses treat unexplained variance as noise. Some of these variations reflect divergent cultural processes, but they are often averaged out by the majority or dismissed as outliers. Psychological researchers can commit to supplementing these analyses with practices that better illustrate variations and provide opportunities to explore potential cultural influences.

Journals can encourage psychological scientists to explore and report cultural variations. Journals can also encourage researchers to use online supplements to identify outliers and report information that may explain their variation.

Increased cross-lab communication also provides opportunities for better understanding cultural variation. Although any given dataset may include only a handful of participants from a particular culture, researchers exploring similar phenomena can pool data to create larger, more diverse samples for testing hypotheses about how and why psychological phenomena manifest differently across cultures.

Finally, psychological scientists can make a concerted effort to explore variation in their own data. Scatterplots, histograms, and spaghetti plots, for example, illustrate the diversity of effects across subjects. Rather than focusing on average effects, researchers can examine the percentage of participants for whom the hypothesized effect occurred and the percentage for which no effect or an opposite effect occurred. These small changes can elucidate cultural variation.

Stronger Theories, Better Understanding

Debates over “failed replications” such as the “30-million word gap” research can leave psychological scientists feeling anxious and unmotivated. However, they also point to the truth that our science has room for improvement, and they offer important critiques that can help our field grow. By leveraging interpretive power to understand a diversity of human experiences, psychology can build stronger theories and a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior. Perhaps more importantly, we will be better positioned to contribute our expertise to alleviate problems facing communities across the globe.

Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children . Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

Shankar, M. (2014, June 25). Empowering our children by bridging the word gap . Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/06/25/empowering-our-children-bridging-word-gap .

Sperry, D. E., Sperry, L. L., & Miller, P. J. (2018). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development . doi:10.1111/cdev.13072 [Epub ahead of print]

Brady, L. M., Fryberg, S. A., & Shoda, Y. (2018). Expanding the interpretive power of psychological science by attending to culture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (45), 11406-11413. doi:10.1073/pnas.1803526115

Rosebery A. S., Warren B., Tucker-Raymond E. (2016). Developing interpretive power in science teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 53 (10), 1571–1600. doi:10.1002/tea.21267

Markus, H. R., & Conner, A. (2013). Clash! 8 cultural conflicts that make us who we are . New York: Hudson Street Press.

Henrich, J., Heine, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2-3), 61-83. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98 (2), 224-253. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224

Whitsett, D. D., & Shoda, Y. (2014). An approach to test for individual differences in the effects of situations without using moderator variables. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 50 , 94-104. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2013.08.008

I applaud the authors efforts but they missed step 1: make an anthropologist a part of your research team. We’ve been studying these things and theorizing them for over 100 years. There’s even a subfield of psychological anthropology!

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About the Authors

Laura Brady, Stephanie Fryberg, and APS Fellow Yuichi Shioda are all research scientists at the University of Washington. They can be reached by contacting [email protected] .

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“When families are informed about the importance of conversational interaction and are provided training, they become active communicators and directly contribute to reducing the word gap (Leung et al., 2020).”

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language​

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

Planning Effective Communications

Cultural context, culture and communication.

Culture refers to the values, beliefs, attitudes, accepted actions, and general characteristics of a group of people.  We often think of culture in terms of nationality or geography, but there are cultures based on age, religion, education, ability, gender, ethnicity, income, and more.  Consider cultural contexts as you plan and draft your communications.  And realize that your consideration occurs through your own cultural lens.

According to Bovee and Thill:

The interaction of culture and communication is so pervasive that separating the two is virtually impossible. The way you communicate is deeply influenced by the culture in which you were raised. The meaning of words, the significance of gestures, the importance of time and place, the rules of human relationships—these and many other aspects of communication are defined by culture. To a large degree, your culture influences the way you think, which naturally affects the way you communicate both as a sender and receiver….In particular, your instinct is to encode your message using the assumptions of your culture. However, members of your audience decode your message according to the assumptions of their culture. The greater the difference between cultures, the greater the chance for misunderstanding. [1]

Although it may seem that cultural variables are too plentiful to ever master, simply being aware of cultural contexts and trying to develop fuller cultural awareness, as well as fuller self-awareness of your own assumptions and cultural lens, can help you as you analyze communication situations. The video below offers tips intended to help you communicate with more cultural awareness.

One major aspect to consider in your analysis of various national and social cultures is the concept of high-context vs. low-context cultures.  High-context cultures, such as those in Asia, Greece, France, Africa, South America, or Southern India (which the narrator describes in the video above), value personal, trusting relationships.  In high-context cultures, you might expect discussion of family, health, and other common topics before entering into the topic of a professional discussion.  High-context cultures rely on non-verbal communications as well as verbal (e.g., there is a specific physical protocol for presenting business cards in Japan).  High-context cultures also emphasize group as opposed to individual work, and members of high-context cultures are often comfortable with physical closeness in face-to-face business situations.

In contrast, low-context cultures, such as those in Northern Europe, Scandinavia, and North America, value directness and task-oriented business relationships.  In low-context cultures, you might expect quick focus on the task with relatively little context-setting; the task itself provides the context. Low-context cultures rely on more on verbal communications as well as task-oriented protocol, as opposed to non-verbal communications, in order to move toward goals (e.g., minutes of last meeting, overview of agenda, discussion of agenda items in order, maintaining the time allotted to each item). Low-context cultures also emphasize individual as opposed to group work, and members of low-context cultures usually maintain their physical space in face-to-face business situations.

For an interesting discussion of becoming aware of diverse cultures, which includes examples of high- and low-context cultures, view the following video.

The next video offers additional ways of considering cultural context, in terms of power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, “masculine” and “feminine” traits, and long-term orientation.

This short video offers a few simple scenarios that deal with cultural context.  Pause the video at each multiple-choice question and choose your answer before viewing the explanation.

As you can see, there are many aspects to cultural context to consider when planning professional communications.  The main idea in analyzing cultural context is to try to understand the lens through which your audience experiences the communication, to strengthen the focus on creating and receiving a message respectful to the audience.

Applying an Understanding of Culture to Communications

In general, when considering cultural context, consider the following factors as you create communications:

• Amount of Detail Expected  – High-context cultures such as Japan, China, and France provide little details in their writing. Since a high-context culture is based on fewer, deeper relations with people, there are many unspoken social rules and understandings within the culture. People in these cultures expect readers to have enough knowledge about the communication before they begin reading. In areas such as instructions, for example, it is assumed that readers have enough background knowledge or experience to avoid detailed explanation of every step or tool used. People in low-context cultures such as the United States, Great Britain, and Germany assume readers know very little before they begin reading. Low-context cultures have a greater number of surface-level relations; rules are more explicitly defined so others know how to behave. People in low-context cultures expect detailed writing that explains the entire process. You should consider the cultural audience for your communication so that they are not insulted by an excess or lack of information.
• Distance Between the Top and Bottom of Organizational Hierarchies  – Many organizations in the United States and Western Europe have great distances with many layers between top-level management and low-level workers. When the distance is large, writing to employees above and below tends to be more formal. In cultures where companies are more flatly organized, communication between layers tends to be less formal.
• Individual versus Group Orientation  – Many Asian and South American cultures are collectivist, meaning people pursue group goals and pay attention to the needs of the group. In individualistic cultures such as the United States and Northern Europe, people are more interested in personal achievement. Understanding individual vs. group orientation will help you know whether to emphasize “we” or “you/I” in your communications.
• In-person Business Communications  – There are several differences that one should be aware of when meeting a colleague with a different cultural background. For instance, some cultures stand very close to each other when talking and some prefer to have distance. Some cultures make eye contact with each other and some find it disrespectful. There are also certain cultures where an employee will not disagree or give feedback to their superior. It is seen as disrespectful. In these cultures, it is usually unacceptable to ask questions.
• Preference for Direct or Indirect Statements  – People in the United States and Northern Europe prefer direct communications, while people in Japan and Korea typically prefer indirect communications. When denying a request in the U.S., a writer will typically apologize, but firmly state that request was denied. In Japan, that directness may seem rude. A Japanese writer may instead write that the decision has not yet been made, delaying the answer with the expectation that the requester will not ask again. In Japan, this is viewed as more polite than flatly denying someone; however, in the United States this may give false hope to the requester, and the requester may ask again.
• Basis of Business Decisions  – In the United States and Europe, business decisions are typically made with reference to objective points such as cost, feasibility, timeliness, etc. In Arab cultures, business decisions are often made on the basis of personal relationships. As a communicator, you should know if a goal-oriented approach is best, or if a more personable communication would be preferred.

• Interpretation of Images, Gestures, and Words  – Words, images, and gestures can mean different things in different cultures. Knowing how images will be interpreted in another culture is crucial before sending documents to unfamiliar audiences. For example, hand gestures are interpreted differently around the world, and graphics showing hands should generally be avoided. Also, religiously affiliated wording can cause offense by readers. “I’ve been blessed to work with you” and comments that lend themselves to religious references should be avoided in the business setting.

Learning About Cultures

Even though it’s important to know as much about your audience as possible before starting a communication, it’s often difficult to determine cultural context: cultural biases, assumptions, and customs. To use a really simple exmaple, professionals in the U.S. write the date with the month, day, and year, but professionals in other countries write a date with the day, month, and year. Not knowing this can cause confusion. Research as many resources as feasible if you know you’ll be communicating with people from specific cultures, since understanding expectations and differences reduces the amount of miscommunication.  Your audience will appreciate your knowledge of their customs.

Coworkers are also a great source of intercultural information. People familiar with you and the company provide the best information about your audience’s expectations. If coworkers have previously written to your audience, they may be able to offer insight as to how your writing will be interpreted. Previous communications kept by your company can also be a useful tool for determining how to write to another culture.

Note that there are countless resources dealing with cultural context and communication, from the Peace Corp’s Culture Matters Workbook , to websites such as Syracuse University’s Disability Cultural Center’s Language Guide , to various websites on specific cultures.  Research your audience as much as time allows to learn more about their cultural contexts.

• Read a sample letter  based on an actual letter sent to a director of an online college program from an organization in Indonesia. What can you determine about the author of the letter? What is the author’s purpose? What parts of the letter help you understand the author’s purpose? Consider how the author’s style of communication is like or unlike business letters that you are familiar with. What specific similarities and/or differences do you observe?
• Then do some brief research on Indonesian culture. If you search the Internet for “doing business in Indonesian culture,” you’ll find multiple short articles. Read one. What are some main characteristics of doing business in this culture that you see exemplified in this letter?
• What specific characteristics of Indonesian culture do you need to know in order to respond appropriately, with this particular cultural context in mind?
• If you were to respond, compose one specific sentence or strategy that you might take, given what you learned from the sample letter and your brief research.

Analyzing Your Own Cultural Lens

In addition to considering characteristics of cultures other than your own, realize that people receive information and make meaning through their own cultural lenses.  Your cultural lens is the set of values, expectations, beliefs, actions, etc. with which you are familiar.  In fact, you may be so familiar with understanding things through this lens that it’s hard to realize your own assumptions and attitudes.  Think of a situation in which you were out of your usual context, e.g., celebrating a holiday with your new partner’s family for the first time, moving to a different city, or even moving from one department to another at your workplace.  Experiencing a new situation may have made you more aware of some of your own values, attitudes, and beliefs.  When analyzing cultural context, try to develop awareness of your own cultural lens as well as characteristic values, attitudes, and beliefs of other cultures.

For example, look at the images of Indonesia included at the end of the last Try It exercise on this page. Because this text is written from the lens of western, and particularly U.S. culture, and because the purpose of the exercise was to highlight differences in culture, images were chosen that highlighted place differences between Indonesia and the U.S., playing to the cultural lens through which U.S. residents might view Indonesia (e.g., exotic pagoda architecture, hot climate and rice production).  Consider how you might have reacted had you viewed these images of contemporary Indonesia at the end of the exercise.

If you’re intrigued by the concept of cultural lens, the following video offers fuller explanation of the concepts of culture, cultural lens, and organizational culture.  Note that you do not need to delve this deeply into cultures when you’re doing a situational analysis as a prelude to creating a professional communication; however, the information may interest you.

[1] Bovee, Courtland and John Thill. Business Communication Today. 13th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2016, pgs. 65-66.

• Cultural Context, original material and material adapted from Technical Writing, see attribution below. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Project : Communications for Professionals. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• image of photo montage of diverse faces. Authored by : geralt. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/illustrations/photomontage-faces-photo-album-1514218/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• video Cultural Diversity - Tips for Communicating with Cultural Awareness. Provided by : Speakfirst. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDvLk7e2Irc . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• video How Culture Drives Behaviours. Authored by : Julian S. Bourrelle. Provided by : TedTalks. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-Yy6poJ2zs . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• video International Business - Cross-Cultural Communication. Authored by : Mark Walsh. Provided by : The embodiment channel. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7srdUiRfM&t=132s . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright . License Terms : YouTube video
• video Cultural Lens Overview - part I. Authored by : Laura Holyoke. Provided by : Holyoke - AOLL. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJSIesdTcAk . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• Appreciating Different Cultures, based on WikiBooks Professional and Technical Writing at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professional_and_Technical_Writing/Ethics/Cultures. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/technicalwriting/chapter/appreciating-different-cultures/ . Project : Technical Writing. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• image of arm and the word Gestures. Authored by : Val Kerry. Provided by : flickr. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/fXaoJ . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• image of two men from different cultures shaking hands. Authored by : Bahrain International Airport. Provided by : flickr. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/guoPub . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• image of pagoda in Indonesia. Authored by : MadebyNastia. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/pagoda-temple-lake-travel-3240169/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• image of rice farmer in Indonesia. Authored by : 3422763. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/farmer-rice-field-countryside-3900957/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• image of family on motorbike in Bali, Indonesia. Authored by : keulefm. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/bali-traffic-family-bike-transport-237205/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• image of beach holiday in Indonesia. Authored by : mrsvickyaltaie . Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/seminyak-bali-indonesia-holiday-2407835/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved

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Social Power and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Context Essay

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Introduction

Using social media to promote social justice.

Leadership approaches imply different theoretical rationales and components that form the overall management concept. As components that need to be taken into account, Mittal and Elias (2016) consider the variables of content and context. In the first case, situations are identified in which the characteristic signs of leadership appear. The variables of context manifest when a new form of relationship among managers and subordinates arises.

As Bachrach and Mullins (2019) note, the main elements of the global mindset are the three forms of capital – intellectual, psychological, and social. The role of culture is also significant, and Mittal and Elias (2016) mention contingency variables that are included in the theory of contingency leadership. This concept includes those mechanisms that influence such indicators as diligence, productivity, and other aspects of work activity (Bachrach & Mullins, 2019). The role of culture in this theory is high since communication within a contingency approach is an essential attribute of interaction.

In order to evaluate the features of leader-subordinate relationships, it is possible to apply a special model of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. According to Thanetsunthorn and Wuthisatian (2018), these dimensions are power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity. Based on their study, only two components of the model can have the greatest negative effect – power distance and masculinity, “whereas individualism and uncertainty avoidance have no significant impact” (Thanetsunthorn & Wuthisatian, 2018, p. 1139).

For instance, in companies with a vertical management system, the interaction of leaders with subordinates will be less productive if masculine culture is maintained. As Thanetsunthorn and Wuthisatian (2018) remark, uncertainty avoidance is a more useful strategy to communicate effectively. Therefore, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are to be taken into account when discussing the features of leader-subordinate relationships.

The role of social media is significant in addressing the issues of inequality and promoting justice. One of the examples of activities aimed at drawing attention to such problems is the annual organization of a special event dedicated to the struggle for social justice in Canada – Media Democracy Day (MDD). According to Skinner, Hackett, and Poyntz (2015), students from local universities are the most active participants in this event. In the focus of the members of volunteer groups, media-related problems are raised, in particular, racial prejudices and the lack of appropriate support for minorities that are under pressure in social networks.

Another example of such targeted work is the activity conducted by students and having specific ideological overtones. Baker-Bell, Stanbrough, and Everett (2017) note that the involvement of a large number of stakeholders in the dissemination of important information on the need for equality is one of such initiatives. This approach is implemented through social networks successfully enough, and the members of a large community “produce counternarratives, express their opinions, voice their concerns, and locate more reliable news and information about the Black community” (Baker-Bell et al., 2017, p. 137).

This principle of interaction allows students to draw as much attention as possible to the issue under consideration and find ways of conveying their position to the public. In general, social media promotes student activism because this group of the population forms the prevailing number of Internet users, and it is easier for them to discuss particular problems in this environment.

With regard to the areas of management and business, this position may be used as one of the samples of career guidance. The leaders of individual organizations can use the principle of disseminating information to the target audience, in particular, subordinates through the modern forms of communication. Business approaches may also imply using online platforms actively for advertising and selling products, which makes the field of social media relevant and meaningful.

Bachrach, D. G., & Mullins, R. (2019). A dual-process contingency model of leadership, transactive memory systems and team performance. Journal of Business Research , 96 , 297-308. Web.

Baker-Bell, A., Stanbrough, R. J., & Everett, S. (2017). The stories they tell: Mainstream media, pedagogies of healing, and critical media literacy. English Education , 49 (2), 130-152.

Mittal, R., & Elias, S. M. (2016). Social power and leadership in cross-cultural context. Journal of Management Development , 35 (1), 58-74. Web.

Skinner, D., Hackett, R., & Poyntz, S. R. (2015). Media activism and the academy, three cases: Media Democracy Day, open media, and NewsWatch Canada. Studies in Social Justice , 9 (1), 86-101. Web.

Thanetsunthorn, N., & Wuthisatian, R. (2018). Cultural configuration models: Corporate social responsibility and national culture. Management Research Review , 41 (10), 1137-1175. Web.

• In Praise of the Incomplete Leader and Ways Women Lead
• Transactional Leadership Style at a Hospital
• Laban Erapu's Views on Naipaul's "Miguel Street"
• Vietnam War in the "Platoon" Movie by Oliver Stone
• Quote from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Campbell
• Service Leadership Style in Chinese Hotel Business
• Consolidated Products Managers' Leadership Styles
• Leadership Style and Employee Motivation: Burj Al Arab Hotel
• Self-Awareness Importance in Effective Leadership
• Establishing Authority in a Managerial Position
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, June 3). Social Power and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Context. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-power-and-leadership-in-cross-cultural-context/

"Social Power and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Context." IvyPanda , 3 June 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/social-power-and-leadership-in-cross-cultural-context/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Social Power and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Context'. 3 June.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Social Power and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Context." June 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-power-and-leadership-in-cross-cultural-context/.

1. IvyPanda . "Social Power and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Context." June 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-power-and-leadership-in-cross-cultural-context/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Social Power and Leadership in Cross-Cultural Context." June 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-power-and-leadership-in-cross-cultural-context/.

Enda's English Notes

Junior and Leaving Cert English Notes

Introduction to the Comparative Course-The Cultural Context

For Leaving Cert English, you will be asked to study three texts as part of your comparative course, under different modes of comparison. Generally, you will study a novel, a play and a film. Your job is to compare the differences and similarities in all three texts under a certain mode, for example, Cultural Context, Literary Genre, Theme or General Vision and Viewpoint.

Cultural Context:

This generally means the ‘world of the text’ in which the characters live. You will be asked to analyse how the characters are affected by the cultural context in each of the texts. A good way to think about the influence of the cultural context of a text is to imagine you can remove the main characters and place them in today’s world and if their lives would be any different. So for example, if a young girl is living in 1960’s Ireland and finds herself pregnant out of wedlock, is she influenced negatively by the cultural context? The answer would undoubtedly be yes and if you took that girl and placed her in Ireland 2020, would she face the same problems? The answer would be no, so we can clearly state that the cultural context affects this young girl negatively.

Generally, we look at cultural context under a number of headings:

• Social Class / Class structure
• The role of men and women
• Attitudes towards family
• The role of religion
• Attitudes towards love and marriage
• Customs and Rituals
• General Values

When you look at a text, you should try to identify the characters attitudes towards these headings. For example, in social class, are people treated better because they have have money and status? Do people with money look down on those who are poor? Is social status more important than happiness to the characters?

When look at the role of men and women, analyse how men and women can be treated differently based on their gender. Is the text set in a patriarchal society? Do the men have chauvinistic beliefs and are women belittled because of their gender? How easy is it for women to get what they want or is their success predicated on decisions made by men?

You should think about the attitudes towards family in the texts by asking how important Family is to the main characters? Is the happiness of their families more important than money or social status or is their family used as a means to further their social standing in the text? Some characters truly value family but in some texts you will see how little family means to the main characters.

Do the characters in your text marry for love or money and security? This is a crucial question when commenting on attitudes towards love and marriage. The cultural context in some texts will dictate that people should marry for security and a chance to enhance your social standing, rather than simply for love. When you are analysing your text, it is always a good idea to think about how different today’s world is or in some cases, how things haven’t changed.

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Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory & Examples

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

• Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory, developed by Geert Hofstede, is a framework used to understand the differences in culture across countries.
• Hofstede’s initial six key dimensions include power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity, and short vs. long-term orientation. Later, researchers added restraint vs. indulgence to this list.
• The extent to which individual countries share key dimensions depends on a number of factors, such as shared language and geographical location.
• Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are widely used to understand etiquette and facilitate communication across cultures in areas ranging from business to diplomacy.

History and Overview

Hofstede’s cultural values or dimensions provide a framework through which sociologists can describe the effects of culture on the values of its members and how these values relate to the behavior of people who live within a culture.

Outside of sociology, Hofstede’s work is also applicable to fields such as cross-cultural psychology, international management, and cross-cultural communication.

The Dutch management researcher Geert Hofstede created the cultural dimensions theory in 1980 (Hofstede, 1980).

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions originate from a large survey that he conducted from the 1960s to 1970s that examined value differences among different divisions of IBM, a multinational computer manufacturing company.

This study encompassed over 100,000 employees from 50 countries across three regions. Hoftstede, using a specific statistical method called factor analysis, initially identified four value dimensions: individualism and collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity and femininity.

Later research from Chinese sociologists identified a fifty-dimension, long-term, or short-term orientation (Bond, 1991).

Finally, a replication of Hofstede’s study, conducted across 93 separate countries, confirmed the existence of the five dimensions and identified a sixth known as indulgence and restraint (Hofstede & Minkov, 2010).

Cultural Dimensions

Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory (1980) examined people’s values in the workplace and created differentiation along three dimensions: small/large power distance, strong/weak uncertainty avoidance, masculinity/femininity, and individualism/collectivism.

Power-Distance Index

The power distance index describes the extent to which the less powerful members of an organization or institution — such as a family — accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.

Although there is a certain degree of inequality in all societies, Hofstede notes that there is relatively more equality in some societies than in others.

Individuals in societies that have a high degree of power distance accept hierarchies where everyone has a place in a ranking without the need for justification.

Meanwhile, societies with low power distance seek to have an equal distribution of power. The implication of this is that cultures endorse and expect relations that are more consultative, democratic, or egalitarian.

In countries with low power distance index values, there tends to be more equality between parents and children, with parents more likely to accept it if children argue or “talk back” to authority.

In low power distance index workplaces, employers and managers are more likely to ask employees for input; in fact, those at the lower ends of the hierarchy expect to be asked for their input (Hofstede, 1980).

Meanwhile, in countries with high power distance, parents may expect children to obey without questioning their authority. Those of higher status may also regularly experience obvious displays of subordination and respect from subordinates.

Superiors and subordinates are unlikely to see each other as equals in the workplace, and employees assume that higher-ups will make decisions without asking them for input.

These major differences in how institutions operate make status more important in high power distance countries than low power distance ones (Hofstede, 1980).

Collectivism vs. Individualism

Individualism and collectivism, respectively, refer to the integration of individuals into groups.

Individualistic societies stress achievement and individual rights, focusing on the needs of oneself and one’s immediate family.

A person’s self-image in this category is defined as “I.”

In contrast, collectivist societies place greater importance on the goals and well-being of the group, with a person’s self-image in this category being more similar to a “We.”

Those from collectivist cultures tend to emphasize relationships and loyalty more than those from individualistic cultures.

They tend to belong to fewer groups but are defined more by their membership in them. Lastly, communication tends to be more direct in individualistic societies but more indirect in collectivistic ones (Hofstede, 1980).

Uncertainty Avoidance Index

The uncertainty avoidance dimension of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions addresses a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.

This dimension reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with their anxiety by minimizing uncertainty. In its most simplified form, uncertainty avoidance refers to how threatening change is to a culture (Hofstede, 1980).

A high uncertainty avoidance index indicates a low tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk-taking. Both the institutions and individuals within these societies seek to minimize the unknown through strict rules, regulations, and so forth.

People within these cultures also tend to be more emotional.

In contrast, those in low uncertainty avoidance cultures accept and feel comfortable in unstructured situations or changeable environments and try to have as few rules as possible. This means that people within these cultures tend to be more tolerant of change.

The unknown is more openly accepted, and less strict rules and regulations may ensue.

For example, a student may be more accepting of a teacher saying they do not know the answer to a question in a low uncertainty avoidance culture than in a high uncertainty avoidance one (Hofstede, 1980).

Femininity vs. Masculinity

Femininity vs. masculinity, also known as gender role differentiation, is yet another one of Hofstede’s six dimensions of national culture. This dimension looks at how much a society values traditional masculine and feminine roles.

A masculine society values assertiveness, courage, strength, and competition; a feminine society values cooperation, nurturing, and quality of life (Hofstede, 1980).

A high femininity score indicates that traditionally feminine gender roles are more important in that society; a low femininity score indicates that those roles are less important.

For example, a country with a high femininity score is likely to have better maternity leave policies and more affordable child care.

Meanwhile, a country with a low femininity score is likely to have more women in leadership positions and higher rates of female entrepreneurship (Hofstede, 1980).

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Orientation

The long-term and short-term orientation dimension refers to the degree to which cultures encourage delaying gratification or the material, social, and emotional needs of their members (Hofstede, 1980).

Societies with long-term orientations tend to focus on the future in a way that delays short-term success in favor of success in the long term.

These societies emphasize traits such as persistence, perseverance, thrift, saving, long-term growth, and the capacity for adaptation.

Short-term orientation in a society, in contrast, indicates a focus on the near future, involves delivering short-term success or gratification, and places a stronger emphasis on the present than the future.

The end result of this is an emphasis on quick results and respect for tradition. The values of a short-term society are related to the past and the present and can result in unrestrained spending, often in response to social or ecological pressure (Hofstede, 1980).

Restraint vs. Indulgence

Finally, the restraint and indulgence dimension considers the extent and tendency of a society to fulfill its desires.

That is to say, this dimension is a measure of societal impulse and desire control. High levels of indulgence indicate that society allows relatively free gratification and high levels of bon de vivre.

Meanwhile, restraint indicates that society tends to suppress the gratification of needs and regulate them through social norms.

For example, in a highly indulgent society, people may tend to spend more money on luxuries and enjoy more freedom when it comes to leisure time activities. In a restrained society, people are more likely to save money and focus on practical needs (Hofstede, 2011).

Correlations With Other Country’s Differences

Hofstede’s dimensions have been found to correlate with a variety of other country difference variables, including:

• geographical proximity,
• shared language,
• related historical background,
• similar religious beliefs and practices,
• common philosophical influences,
• and identical political systems (Hofstede, 2011).

For example, countries that share a border tend to have more similarities in culture than those that are further apart.

This is because people who live close to each other are more likely to interact with each other on a regular basis, which leads to a greater understanding and appreciation of each other’s cultures.

Similarly, countries that share a common language tend to have more similarities in culture than those that do not.

Those who speak the same language can communicate more easily with each other, which leads to a greater understanding and appreciation of each other’s cultures (Hofstede, 2011).

Finally, countries that have similar historical backgrounds tend to have more similarities in culture than those that do not.

People who share a common history are more likely to have similar values and beliefs, which leads, it has generally been theorized, to a greater understanding and appreciation of each other’s cultures.

Applications

Cultural difference awareness.

Geert Hofstede shed light on how cultural differences are still significant today in a world that is becoming more and more diverse.

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions can be used to help explain why certain behaviors are more or less common in different cultures.

For example, individualism vs. collectivism can help explain why some cultures place more emphasis on personal achievement than others. Masculinity vs. feminism could help explain why some cultures are more competitive than others.

And long-term vs. short-term orientation can help explain why some cultures focus more on the future than the present (Hofstede, 2011).

International communication and negotiation

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions can also be used to predict how people from different cultures will interact with each other.

For example, if two people from cultures with high levels of power distance meet, they may have difficulty communicating because they have different expectations about who should be in charge (Hofstede, 2011).

In Business

Finally, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions can be used to help businesses adapt their products and marketing to different cultures.

For example, if a company wants to sell its products in a country with a high collectivism score, it may need to design its packaging and advertising to appeal to groups rather than individuals.

Within a business, Hofstede’s framework can also help managers to understand why their employees behave the way they do.

For example, if a manager is having difficulty getting her employees to work together as a team, she may need to take into account that her employees come from cultures with different levels of collectivism (Hofstede, 2011).

Although the cultural value dimensions identified by Hofstede and others are useful ways to think about culture and study cultural psychology, the theory has been chronically questioned and critiqued.

Most of this criticism has been directed at the methodology of Hofstede’s original study.

Orr and Hauser (2008) note Hofstede’s questionnaire was not originally designed to measure culture but workplace satisfaction. Indeed, many of the conclusions are based on a small number of responses.

Although Hofstede administered 117,000 questionnaires, he used the results from 40 countries, only six of which had more than 1000 respondents.

This has led critics to question the representativeness of the original sample.

Furthermore, Hofstede conducted this study using the employees of a multinational corporation, who — especially when the study was conducted in the 1960s and 1970s — were overwhelmingly highly educated, mostly male, and performed so-called “white collar” work (McSweeney, 2002).

Hofstede’s theory has also been criticized for promoting a static view of culture that does not respond to the influences or changes of other cultures.

For example, as Hamden-Turner and Trompenaars (1997) have envisioned, the cultural influence of Western powers such as the United States has likely influenced a tide of individualism in the notoriously collectivist Japanese culture.

Nonetheless, Hofstede’s theory still has a few enduring strengths. As McSweeney (2002) notes, Hofstede’s work has “stimulated a great deal of cross-cultural research and provided a useful framework for the comparative study of cultures” (p. 83).

Additionally, as Orr and Hauser (2008) point out, Hofstede’s dimensions have been found to be correlated with actual behavior in cross-cultural studies, suggesting that it does hold some validity.

All in all, as McSweeney (2002) points out, Hofstede’s theory is a useful starting point for cultural analysis, but there have been many additional and more methodologically rigorous advances made in the last several decades.

Bond, M. H. (1991). Beyond the Chinese face: Insights from psychology . Oxford University Press, USA.

Hampden-Turner, C., & Trompenaars, F. (1997). Response to geert hofstede. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 21 (1), 149.

 Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture and organizations. International studies of management & organization, 10 (4), 15-41.

Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context. Online readings in psychology and culture, 2 (1), 2307-0919.

Hofstede, G., & Minkov, M. (2010). Long-versus short-term orientation: new perspectives. Asia Pacific Business Review, 16(4), 493-504.

Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences (Vol. Sage): Beverly Hills, CA.

Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the mind . London, England: McGraw-Hill.

McSweeney, B. (2002). The essentials of scholarship: A reply to Geert Hofstede. Human Relations, 55( 11), 1363-1372.

Orr, L. M., & Hauser, W. J. (2008). A re-inquiry of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: A call for 21st century cross-cultural research. Marketing Management Journal, 18 (2), 1-19.

Further Information

• Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological review, 98(2), 224.
• Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing cultural contexts. Psychological review, 96(3), 506.
• Oyserman, D., Coon, H. M., & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking individualism and collectivism: evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological bulletin, 128(1), 3.
• Brewer, M. B., & Chen, Y. R. (2007). Where (who) are collectives in collectivism? Toward conceptual clarification of individualism and collectivism. Psychological review, 114(1), 133.
• Grossmann, I., & Santos, H. (2017). Individualistic culture.

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24 What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?

When we use New Historicism or cultural studies as our lens, we seek to understand literature and culture by examining the historical and cultural contexts in which literary works were produced and by exploring the ways in which literature and culture influence and are influenced by social and political power dynamics. For our exploration of these critical methods, we will consider the literary work’s context as the center of our target.

New Historicism is often associated with the work of Stephen Greenblatt , who argued that literature is not a timeless reflection of universal truths, but rather a product of the historical and cultural contexts in which it was produced. Greenblatt emphasized the importance of studying the social, political, and economic factors that shaped literary works, as well as the ways in which those works in turn influenced the culture and politics of their time.

New Historicism also seeks to break down the boundaries between high and low culture, and to explore the ways in which literature and culture interact with other forms of discourse and representation, such as science, philosophy, and popular culture.

One of the key principles of New Historicism is the idea that literature and culture are never neutral or objective, but are always implicated in power relations and struggles. It also emphasizes the importance of the reader or interpreter in shaping the meaning of a text, arguing that our own historical and cultural contexts influence the way we understand and interpret literary works. When using this method, we often talk about cultural artifacts as part of the discourse of their time period.

New Historicism has been influential in a variety of fields, including literary and cultural studies, history, and anthropology. It has been used to analyze a wide range of literary works, from Shakespeare to contemporary novels, as well as other cultural artifacts such as films and popular music.

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing literature that emerged in the late 20th century. Unlike traditional literary criticism that focuses solely on the text itself, cultural studies criticism explores the relationship between literature and culture. It considers how literature reflects, influences, and is influenced by the broader cultural, social, political, and historical contexts in which it is produced and consumed.

In cultural studies literary criticism, scholars may examine how literature intersects with issues such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and power dynamics. The goal is to understand how literature participates in and shapes cultural discourses. This approach emphasizes the importance of considering the cultural and social implications of literary texts, as well as the ways in which literature can be a site of contestation and negotiation.

Key concepts in cultural studies literary criticism include hegemony, representation, identity, and the politics of culture. Scholars in this field often draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, to analyze and interpret literary works in their cultural context. We will explore these approaches to literature in more depth in future parts of the book.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse. (CLO 2.1
• Using a literary theory, choose appropriate elements of literature (formal, content, or context) to focus on in support of an interpretation (CLO 2.3)
• Emphasize what the work does and how it does it with respect to form, content, and context (CLO 2.4
• Understand how context impacts the reading of a text, and how different contexts can bring about different readings (CLO 4.1)
• Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing how textual interpretation can change given the context from which one reads (CLO 6.2)
• Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

Scholarship: An Excerpt from the Introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, is widely credited with the ideas about history that led to the development of New Historicism as an approach to literary texts. In this passage, Foucault explains his aims in proposing that history does not consist of stable facts. Understanding Foucault’s approach to history is necessary for understanding the New Historicism critical approach to literature.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations. My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this, transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used; my aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities (whether world-views, ideal types, the particular spirit of an age) in order to impose on history, despite itself, the forms of structural analysis. The series described, the limits fixed, the comparisons and correlations made are based not on the old philosophies of history, but are intended to question teleologies and totalisations; in so far as my aim is to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme, it is clear that the theory that I am about to outline has a dual relation with the previous studies. It is an attempt to formulate, in general terms (and not without a great deal of rectification and elaboration), the tools that these studies have used or forged for themselves in the course of their work. But, on the other hand, it uses the results already obtained to define a method of analysis purged of all anthropologism. The ground on which it rests is the one that it has itself discovered. The studies of madness and the beginnings of psychology, of illness and the beginnings of a clinical medicine, of the sciences of life, language, and economics were attempts that were carried out, to some extent, in the dark: but they gradually became clear, not only because little by little their method became more precise, but also because they discovered – in this debate on humanism and anthropology – the point of its historical possibility. In short, this book, like those that preceded it, does not belong – at least directly, or in the first instance – to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too. This work is not an exact description of what can be read in Madness and Civilisation, Naissance de la clinique, or The Order of Things. It is different on a great many points. It also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms. Generally speaking, Madness and Civilisation accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an ‘experiment’, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history; in Naissance de la clinique, the frequent recourse to structural analysis threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem presented, and the level proper to archaeology; lastly, in The Order of Things, the absence of methodological signposting may have given the impression that my analyses were being conducted in terms of cultural totality. It is mortifying that I was unable to avoid these dangers: I console myself with the thought that they were intrinsic to the enterprise itself, since, in order to carry out its task, it had first to free itself from these various methods and forms of history; moreover, without the questions that I was asked,’ without the difficulties that arose, without the objections that were made, I may never have gained so clear a view of the enterprise to which I am now inextricably linked. Hence the cautious, stumbling manner of this text: at every turn, it stands back, measures up what is before it, gropes towards its limits, stumbles against what it does not mean, and digs pits to mark out its own path. At every turn, it denounces any possible confusion. It rejects its identity, without previously stating: I am neither this nor that. It is not critical, most of the time; it is not a way of saying that everyone else ‘ is wrong. It is an attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity; rather than trying to reduce others to silence, by claiming that what they say is worthless, I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure. ‘Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you, are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?’ ‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’

After reading this brief excerpt from Foucault’s approach to history, how do you feel about his assertion that there are no stable facts, that history is essentially like any other text that we can deconstruct? Is there such a thing as “objective” or “true” history? Why or why not? How does this approach compare with what you learned about deconstruction in our previous section?

Scholar Jean Howard has said of the historical/biographical criticism (which we studied in part one) that it depends on three assumptions:

• “history is knowable”;
• “literature mirrors…or reflects historical reality”;
• “historians and critics can see the facts objectively” (Howard 18).

Foucault and the New Historicists reject these three assumptions.

Cultural Studies: From “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular'” by Stuart Hall

Now let’s look at an example of Cultural Studies criticism: Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.'” Hall, a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist, was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies. He explored the process of encoding and decoding that accompanies any interaction readers have with a text. When Hall talks about “periodisation” in the passage below, he is discussing historians’ and literary theorists’ attempts to classify works through “periods” (e.g., the English Romantic poets; the Bloomsbury Group , etc.). Hall extends this difficulty to the phrase “popular culture,” which is often used in cultural studies criticism.

First, I want to say something about periodisations in the study of popular culture. Difficult problems are posed here by periodization—I don’t offer it to you simply as a sort of gesture to the historians. Are the major breaks largely descriptive? Do they arise largely from within popular culture itself, or from factors which are outside of but impinge on it? With what other movements and periodisations is “popular culture” most revealingly linked? Then I want to tell you some of the difficulties I have with the term “popular.” I have almost as many problems with “popular” as I have with “culture.” When you put the two terms together the difficulties can be pretty horrendous. Throughout the long transition into agrarian capitalism and then in the formation and development of industrial capitalism, there is a more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor. This fact must be the starting point for any study, both of the basis for, and of the transformations of, popular culture. The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout that history revealed themselves, time and again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions and ways of life of the popular classes. Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense. And one of the principal sites of resistance to the forms through which this “reformation” of the people was pursued lay in popular tradition. That is why popular culture is linked, for so long, to questions of tradition, of traditional forms of life, and why its “traditionalism” has been so often misinterpreted as a product of a merely conservative impulse, backward-looking and anachronistic. Struggle and resistance—but also, of course, appropriation and ex -propriation. Time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. “Cultural change” is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the centre of popular life, actively marginalised. Rather than simply “falling into disuse” through the Long March to modernization, things are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place. The magistrate and the evangelical police have, or ought to have, a more “honoured” place in the history of popular culture than they have usually been accorded. Even more important than ban and proscription is that subtle and slippery customer—“reform” (with all the positive and unambiguous overtones it carries today). One way or another, “the people” are frequently the object of “reform”: often, for their own good, of course—in their “best interest.” We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”— yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the labouring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. Popular culture is neither, in a “pure” sense, the popular traditions of resistance to these processes; nor is it the forms which are superimposed on and over them. It is the ground on which the transformations are worked. In the study of popular culture, we should always start here: with the double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.

Now that you’ve read examples of scholarship from these two approaches, what similarities and differences do you see? Despite significant overlaps—both approaches consider power structures and view texts as artifacts, for example—Cultural Studies tends to have a broader scope, incorporating insights from various cultural disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. New Historicism focuses more specifically on the interplay between literature and history. Additionally, Cultural Studies may engage more directly with contemporary cultural and political issues, while New Historicism tends to focus on historical periods and their relevance to understanding literature.

How to Use New Historicism and Cultural Studies as  Critical Approaches

When using a New Historicism or cultural studies approach to analyze a literary text, you should consider the connections between the text and its historical context. With cultural studies, you will also consider how the text influenced and was influenced by popular culture, and how the text’s reception changed over time. You can do this in a variety of ways. Here are a few approaches you might consider. Some of them such as author background, reader response, and identifying power dynamics will feel familiar to you from previous chapters.

• Research the Historical Context: Investigate the time period in which the literary work was written. Explore political events, social structures, economic conditions, and cultural movements.
• Author’s Background: Examine the life and background of the author. Consider their personal experiences, beliefs, and the historical events that may have influenced them.
• Identify Power Dynamics: Analyze power relationships within the text and in the historical context. Consider issues of class, gender, race, and other forms of social hierarchy.
• Interdisciplinary Approach: Draw on insights from various disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, and political science to enrich your understanding of the historical and cultural context.
• Cultural Artifacts: Treat the literary work as a cultural artifact. Identify elements within the text that reflect or respond to the cultural values, norms, and anxieties of the time.
• Dialogues with Other Texts: Explore how the literary work engages with other texts, both literary and non-literary. Look for intertextual references and consider how the work contributes to broader cultural conversations (the discourse Foucault talks about).
• Language and Literary Techniques: Analyze the language, narrative structure, and formal elements of the text. Consider how these literary techniques contribute to the overall meaning and how they may be influenced by or respond to historical factors.
• Ideological Critique: Investigate the ideologies present in the text and how they align with or challenge the dominant ideologies of the historical period. Consider the ways in which literature participates in ideological struggles. We will explore more specific examples of how to do this when we focus on Marxism and Postcolonial Studies in our next section.
• Social and Cultural Constructs: Examine how social and cultural constructs are represented in the text. This includes exploring representations of identity, social norms, and cultural practices.
• Historical Events and Allusions: Identify direct or indirect references to historical events within the text. Consider how the events are portrayed and what commentary they offer on the historical moment.
• Historical Change and Continuity: Assess how the text reflects or responds to processes of historical change and continuity. Consider whether the text aligns with or challenges prevailing attitudes and structures.
• Reader Response: Reflect on how the historical context might shape the way readers interpret and respond to the text. Consider how the meaning of the text may evolve across different historical and cultural contexts.

You do not need to consider every aspect of the text mentioned above to write an effective New Historicism analysis. You can focus on one or a few of these elements in your approach to the text.

As noted above, a cultural studies critical approach is similar to New Historicism but focuses more on the text as it is received in a particular culture, with more emphasis on intersectionality. A cultural studies approach may consider a variety of artifacts in addition to literary texts (such as film and other media) for analysis. A cultural studies approach might also consider how cultural influences, receptions, and attitudes have changed over time.

Let’s look at how do do these types of criticism by applying New Historicism to a text.

Applying New Historicism Techniques to Literature

As with our other critical approaches, we will start with  a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). After you complete your close reading of the poem and find evidence from the text, you’ll need to look outside the text for additional information to place the poem in its context. I have provided some additional resources to demonstrate how you might do this. Looking at the text within its context will help you to formulate a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text, using New Historicism as your critical method.

“Lament for Dark Peoples”

I was a red man one time, But the white men came. I was a black man, too, But the white men came.

They drove me out of the forest. They took me away from the jungles. I lost my trees. I lost my silver moons.

Now they’ve caged me In the circus of civilization. Now I herd with the many— Caged in the circus of civilization.

The first thing we need to know is more about Langston Hughes as a poet. Who was he? When did he write? What was the cultural context for his writing? We can go to Wikipedia as a starting point for our research, but we should not cite Wikipedia. Instead, we will want to find higher-quality literary scholarship to use in our analysis.

The open source article “ Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language” by Christine Dualé informs us that “Hughes gained his reputation as a “jazz poet” during the jazz era or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s” ( Dualé 1). Dualé quotes a study of Black poets during the Harlem Renaissance that provides some context for this poem: “Many black intellects were disquieted by the white vogue for blackness. They recognized how frivolous and temporal it was, and the extent to which their culture was being admired for all the ‘primitive’ qualities from which they wished to be distanced” ( Dualé quoting Archer Straw). 

This quote helps us to understand lines 9-12 of the poem, where Hughes describes the “circus of civilization” that he felt under the gaze of this “white vogue for blackness.”

In considering the question of social constructs and power dynamics during this period, we need to know more about the Harlem Renaissance, preferably looking for contemporary sources that describe this period. JSTOR is a good database for this type of research. I limit my search by year to get five results, and I choose an article from Alain Locke (in part, because I already know enough about the Harlem Renaissance to know that Locke was an important part of it—it’s totally acceptable to use your own existing knowledge of the historical context, if you have it, to guide your research!).

When I read “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” written by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke in 1928,  I quickly find the prevailing social construct that the dominant intellectual culture at the time (white American men) had formed about African American writers during the period when this poem was written. I have quoted from the first page of the article below:

THERE are two distinctive elements in the cultural background of the American Negro: one, his primitive tropical heritage, however vague and clouded over that may be, and second, the specific character of the Negro group experience in America both with respect to group history and with regard to unique environing social conditions. As an easily discriminable minority, these conditions are almost inescapable for all sections of the Negro population, and function, therefore, to intensify emotionally and intellectually group feelings, group reactions, group traditions. Such an accumulating body of collective experience inevitably matures into a group culture which just as inevitably finds some channels of unique expression, and this has been and will be the basis of the Negro’s characteristic expression of himself in American life. In fact, as it matures to conscious control and intelligent use, what has been the Negro’s social handicap and class liability will very likely become his positive group capital and cultural asset. Certainly whatever the Negro has produced thus far of distinctive worth and originality has been derived in the main from this source, with the equipment from the general stock of American culture acting at times merely as the precipitating agent; at others, as the working tools of this creative expression (Locke 234).

In reading this article, it’s important to note that the author, Alain Locke, is  a noted African American scholar and writer and the first African American to win a prestigious Rhodes scholarship. He is widely considered to be one of the principal architects of the Harlem Renaissance. What does this passage tell us about the social constructs and contemporary views of African Americans in the late 1920s, when Langston Hughes wrote “Lament for Dark Peoples”? What important historical context seems to be “missing” or glossed over from this cultural description of African Americans in the 1920s? Hint: It’s only 60 years since President Lincolin signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet we see no explicit mention of slavery here.

Now to consider how history and context changes, I might also look for a contemporary appraisal of Langston Hughes’s work in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.

Again, I do a JSTOR search, limiting to articles from 2018 through 2023. I get 157 results using the same search terms. Clearly, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance are playing a prominent role in our contemporary scholarly discourse, especially in the fields of literature, history, and cultural studies. In fact, there’s even a journal called The Langston Hughes Review ! I choose an article from this journal entitled “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later” by Wallace Best, Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University.

In this article, I get some corroboration for what my search results have already told me: “Langston Hughes, one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, is having a renaissance all his own” (Best 1).

Best goes on to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s role in our culture has shifted since his death:

“There is good reason for all this attention. Arguably one of the most significant writers in United States history, Hughes has left an indelible mark, culturally and politically, on American society. Hailed in his lifetime mainly as the “Poet Laureate of the African American community,” he is now generally embraced as one of the most important poets speaking to, and on behalf of, all Americans. Since his death in May 1967, his writing, particularly his poetry, has been invoked to articulate both our loftiest hopes and our deepest fears as a nation. Seldom has there been a national crisis or an important political event in the United States over the last half-century in which his work has not been recounted. Speakers from across the social, ideological, and political spectrum, from Tim Kaine, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry to Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama have cited Hughes’s powerful compositions. His poetry has helped to shape our country’s thinking about itself, our often-troubled past, and our continuing hope for a brighter, more enlightened future.”

With these three external sources and the original poem, I can now begin to think about the kind of thesis statement I want to write.

Example of a New Historicism thesis statement: In one of his earlier poems, “Lament for Dark Peoples,” African American poet Langston Hughes makes a powerful argument against the “circus of [white] civilization (line 12), demonstrating how the cultural norms toward marginalized peoples in place during the early twentieth century damaged all Americans.

I would then use the evidence from the poem as one cultural artifact, including the additional sources I found to provide more context for when the poem was written, the social constructs and power dynamics in place at that time, and the shifts in culture that have now made Langston Hughes a poet for “all Americans” (Best 1).

With New Historicism, because we are considering the context, we must cite some outside sources in addition to the text itself. Here are the sources I cited in this section:

Works Cited

Best, Wallace. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later.” The Langston Hughes Review , vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–5. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.5325/langhughrevi.25.1.0001 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Dualé, Christine. “Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language.”  Angles. New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 7 (2018). https://journals.openedition.org/angles/920  . Accessed 3 Oct. 2023. Locke, Alain. “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , vol. 140, 1928, pp. 234–47. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1016852 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

One additional note: depending on your approach, it would also be appropriate to borrow research techniques from historians for a New Historicism analysis. This might involve working with archive primary source documents. One example of this type of document that I found in my research on the Harlem Renaissance is this one from the U.S. Library of Congress entitled “The Whites Invade Harlem.”

As noted above, a cultural studies approach would be similar to a New Historicism approach. However, if I were using cultural studies, I might want to focus on the difference between the text’s critical reception when it was published (how it affected and was affected by the discourse in the 1920s) and the text’s critical reception today, focusing on the explosion of academic interest on Langston Hughes’s work in since 2018. I would then look at the particular aspects of culture, such as the election of America’s first Black president and the backlash this created in popular culture, as well as the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia and how this was reflected in popular culture. For example, I could consider how twenty-first century scholarship focusing on Langston Hughes is one example of a larger desire for inclusion and representation of marginalized groups in literature, what we sometimes refer to as “exploding the canon” (Renza 257).

Limitations of New Historicism and Cultural Studies Criticism

While New Historicism offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness of literature and historical context, it also has its limitations. Here are some potential drawbacks:

• Relativism: New Historicism can sometimes be accused of cultural relativism, as it emphasizes understanding a text within its specific historical context. This might lead to a reluctance to make broader judgments about the quality or significance of a work across different times and cultures.
• Overemphasis on Power Relations: Critics argue that New Historicism can place an excessive focus on power dynamics and political aspects, potentially neglecting other important elements of literary analysis, such as aesthetics or individual authorial intentions.
• Determinism: There’s a risk of determinism in assuming that a text is entirely shaped by its historical context. This approach may downplay the agency of individual authors and the role of artistic creativity in shaping literature.
• Selective Use of History: Scholars employing New Historicism may selectively use historical evidence to support their interpretations, potentially overlooking contradictory historical data or alternative perspectives that challenge their readings (don’t do this!)
• Overlooking Textual Autonomy/Author Authority: Critics argue that New Historicism sometimes neglects the autonomy of literary texts, treating them primarily as reflections of historical conditions rather than as creative and independent entities with their own internal dynamics.
• Tendency for Presentism: There’s a risk of imposing contemporary values and perspectives onto historical texts, leading to anachronistic interpretations that may not accurately reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which the work was created (note how I initially looked for scholarship from the time period of the text I was analyzing above).

These limitations do not mean we shouldn’t use New Historicism; rather, they suggest areas where a more balanced and comprehensive approach to literary analysis may be necessary.

Similarly, cultural studies might place an overwhelming emphasis on cultural factors, sometimes neglecting economic or political considerations that could also shape social dynamics. The relativist stance of cultural studies may hinder critical evaluation and potentially overlook harmful practices or ideologies.

New Historicism and Cultural Criticism Scholars

New historicism.

• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who viewed history as a text that could be deconstructed. Foucault’s concept of “the discourse” is essential to both New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism.
• Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) is the American Shakespeare scholar who coined the term “New Historicism.”

Cultural Studies

• Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was a Jamaican-born British philosopher and cultural theorist whose ideas were influential to the development of cultural studies as a field.
• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher and thinker whose ideas about media were foundational to cultural studies.
• Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher and critic who focused on the importance of context over text in approaches to literary works.
• Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French philosopher whose 1967 essay “L’Morte de Auteur” critiqued traditional biographical approaches to literary criticism.

Further Reading

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Thinking Photography  (1982): 15-31.
• Brannigan, John.  New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
• Coates, Christopher. “What was the New Historicism?” The Centennial Review , vol. 37, no. 2, 1993, pp. 267–80. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/23739388. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Cotten, Angela L., and Christa Davis Acampora, eds.  Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings . State University of New York Press, 2012.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism.” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama . Routledge, 2016. 45-56.
• Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt.  Practicing New Historicism . University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “Racial Memory and Literary History.” PMLA , vol. 116, no. 1, 2001, pp. 48–63. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/463640. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry , vol. 23, no. 3, 1997, pp. 460–81. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344030. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hall, Stuart. “Encoding and decoding in the television discourse.” .https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/SOP07.pdf
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.”  Stuart Hall . Routledge, 2006. 272-285.
• Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Foucault and the New Historicism.” American Literary History , vol. 3, no. 2, 1991, pp. 360–75. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/490057. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hoover, Dwight W. “The New Historicism.” The History Teacher , vol. 25, no. 3, 1992, pp. 355–66. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/494247. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Howard, Jean E. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance  16.1 (1986): 13-43.
• Porter, Carolyn. “History and Literature: ‘After the New Historicism.’” New Literary History , vol. 21, no. 2, 1990, pp. 253–72. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/469250. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Renza, Louis A. “Exploding Canons.” Contemporary Literature , vol. 28, no. 2, 1987, pp. 257–70. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/1208391 . Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.
• Ryan, Kiernan. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Cultural Context – I’m Not Scared, The Great Gatsby, The Plough and the Stars for Leaving Cert English

Understanding who holds power and who is powerless helps to reveal the cultural context in texts..

#625Lab .  This essay is en route to a H1. Why? Clearly structured, genuinely engaged with the question, eloquently written. It errs on the side of being a little too long. It would be unusual for an overly long essay to be particularly good, so don’t feel under pressure to write and write and write.

Through my study of the distribution of power in the texts my comprehension of the cultural context was greatly enhanced. As a result of my extensive studies of social pressures, social classes, religion and the roles of both men and women I received a better insight into the world and society at the time.

• Post author: Martina
• Post published: April 19, 2018
• Post category: #625Lab / Comparative / Cultural Context / English / I'm not Scared / The Great Gatsby / The Plough and The Stars

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Leaving cert english personal essay: one or more moments of uncertainty you have experienced., short story: “the most dangerous stations are the emptiest” for leaving cert english, cultural context – wuthering heights, the great gatsby and the plough and the stars for leaving cert english.

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Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds: A Cultural-Psychological Perspective

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The American idea is the nation’s holiday garb, its festive dress, its Sunday best. It covers up an everyday practice of betraying the claims of equality, justice, and democracy. — John Hope Franklin (2007 , para. 5)

Racism in the structure of everyday worlds

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Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution

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Written by a distinguished scholar, this book explores themes of culture, identity, and power as they relate to conceptions of practice in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Among the topics covered are ethnic and identity conflicts; culture, relativism and human rights; post-conflict trauma and reconciliation; and modeling varieties of conflict resolution practice. Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution is the winner of the 2014 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part | 78  pages, culture and conflict resolution, chapter | 18  pages, introduction, chapter | 11  pages, culture, relativism, and human rights, chapter | 12  pages, constructing identity, chapter | 16  pages, type i and type ii errors in culturally sensitive conflict resolution practice, part | 105  pages, culture and identity, dilemmas of power, chapter | 15  pages, culture theory, culture clash, and the practice of conflict resolution, chapter | 27  pages, negotiating beyond interests, after violence, chapter | 35  pages, conflict resolution and the dilemma of power, chapter | 7  pages.

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Exploring purpose-driven leadership: theoretical foundations, mechanisms, and impacts in organizational context.

1. Introduction

2. theoretical perspectives on leadership: an evolutionary analysis, 3. purpose-driven leadership: a new perspective on leadership, 4. methodology.

• Conceptualization of Purpose-Driven Leadership.
• Importance of Purpose-Driven Leadership in contemporary research and practice.
• Theoretical foundations of Purpose-Driven Leadership.
• Mechanisms and impacts of Purpose-Driven Leadership.
• The role of purpose in navigating times of VUCA.
• Measurement approaches for purpose in leadership.

5. Findings

5.1. purpose-driven leadership research landscape, 5.2. purpose, organizational purpose, and purpose-driven leadership.

• Consistency: Purpose does not manifest as a fleeting intention but is grounded in its enduring nature ( Gavarkovs et al. 2023 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ; Knippenberg 2020 ). Demonstrating resilience against ephemeral shifts in external conditions or situational variances, purpose consistently maintains its vigor and steadfastness ( Rindova and Martins 2023 ; Trachik et al. 2020 ). It acts as a constant lodestar amid the dynamic terrains of both personal and professional spheres ( Bhattacharya et al. 2023 ; Qin et al. 2022 ; Rindova and Martins 2023 ).
• Generality: In contradistinction to a limited, task-centric objective, purpose is distinguished by its comprehensive scope ( By 2021 ; Gavarkovs et al. 2023 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ). Instead of being confined to proximate tasks or circumscribed aims, purpose spans a more expansive purview ( By 2021 ; Gavarkovs et al. 2023 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ). This ubiquity of purpose guarantees its applicability across multifarious contexts ( By 2021 ; Gavarkovs et al. 2023 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ).
• Two dimensions: - Internal Dimension: The internal dimension of purpose refers to the individuals’ intrinsic motivations and impulses, which are connected to their sense of purpose ( Crane 2022 ; Knippenberg 2020 ). It serves as a source of meaning, supporting the rationale of every decision, direction, or objective delineated ( Handa 2023 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ). This introspective aspect emphasizes the congruence and alignment between an individual and their purpose ( Gavarkovs et al. 2023 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ). - External Dimension: Beyond its internal impact, the influence of purpose extends to the external environment, through the efforts generated by the individual within their context ( By 2021 ; Gavarkovs et al. 2023 ; Handa 2023 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ). This is underpinned by the individual’s commitment to promoting positive change in a broader environment ( Ocasio et al. 2023 ; Qin et al. 2022 ).
• Daily embodiment and expression: Purpose manifests as a palpable instantiation in quotidian activities since it is part of every decision and action made ( By 2021 ; Jasinenko and Steuber 2023 ). Such perennial articulation provides consistency and influences daily activities ( Bronk et al. 2023 ; Hurth and Stewart 2022 ; Ocasio et al. 2023 ).

5.2.1. Attributes of Purpose-Driven Leadership

5.2.2. purpose-driven leadership construct conceptualization, 5.3. theoretical foundations of purpose-driven leadership, 5.4. mechanisms and impacts of purpose-driven leadership, 5.4.1. potential antecedents, 5.4.2. potential outcomes, 5.4.3. potential mediators, 5.4.4. potential moderatos, 5.5. purpose-driven leadership as a guiding light, 5.6. measurement approaches for purpose-driven leadership, 6. discussion, 7. conclusions, supplementary materials, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Ribeiro, M.F.; Costa, C.G.d.; Ramos, F.R. Exploring Purpose-Driven Leadership: Theoretical Foundations, Mechanisms, and Impacts in Organizational Context. Adm. Sci. 2024 , 14 , 148. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci14070148

Ribeiro MF, Costa CGd, Ramos FR. Exploring Purpose-Driven Leadership: Theoretical Foundations, Mechanisms, and Impacts in Organizational Context. Administrative Sciences . 2024; 14(7):148. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci14070148

Ribeiro, Marco Ferreira, Carla Gomes da Costa, and Filipe R. Ramos. 2024. "Exploring Purpose-Driven Leadership: Theoretical Foundations, Mechanisms, and Impacts in Organizational Context" Administrative Sciences 14, no. 7: 148. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci14070148

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