Sociocultural Data to Accomplish Department of Defense Missions Toward a Unified Social Framework: Workshop Summary (2011) / Chapter Skim
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4 Cooperative Relationships
4 Cooperative Relationships
Pages 35-48
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From page 35... ...
As Andrew Imada, the panel's moderator, noted in his opening comments, "The guiding question for this session was, What sociocultural knowledge will enable Department of Defense personnel to work with cooperative partners to make local populations feel safe? " Three presenters addressed that question: (1)
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From page 36... ...
Donal Carbaugh, an expert on international and intercultural communication. MODELS OF COOPERATIvE BEHAvIOR In the first presentation, Robert Rubinstein of The Maxwell School of Syracuse University came to grips directly with one of the key themes of the workshop: How much can sociocultural models do, and what are their limitations?
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From page 37... ...
In these kinds of models, some groups are characterized as relying more on linear thinking, putting their faith in logic and rationality and regularly seeking objective truths, and others are nonlinear, with indirect reasoning processes and no attempt to find external truths. "These models are very useful for some purposes," Rubinstein said.
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From page 38... ...
As the two examples illustrate, a culture can have contrasting models. Still, Rubinstein said, "they are what legitimates or gives moral force to actions.
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In particular, attempting to move from a model that captures group elements of culture to one that attempts to predict individual responses requires data that are simply not accessible, because individual behavior is an emergent phenomenon, one that depends closely on the interaction among individuals, and that will vary according to each individual's motivation and emotional state. "What I think," Rubinstein ended by saying, "is that trying to find a general predictive model of the social and cultural elements of cooperative behavior is really -- let's just be provocative -- a fool's errand, and not something that is very helpful to try, because it generates technique without validation against the real world.
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From page 40... ...
At last count, he said, more than 200 articles, chapters, and books have been published by more than 100 scholars to test, apply, or extend relational models theory. It is, in short, a well-established area of anthropology.1 The four models that relational models theory uses to understand cooperative behavior are (1)
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From page 41... ...
We know what would balance the relationship." The democratic idea of one person, one vote, is an example of an equality matching relationship, as are most games and sports, in which the rules specify equal numbers of players, equal numbers of pieces, taking turns, each side defending one half of the field, and so on. "An equality matching relationship is one in which people attend to the additive differences with reference to even balance." Like every relational model, equality matching can take on both positive and negative forms, Fiske said.
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The most familiar types of market pricing relationships involve money, but money does not have to be involved per se. "The money can be absolutely anything," Fiske said.
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The bottom line, Fiske said, is that "if you know which relational model people use and how they implement it, you will have a very, very good chance to being able to coordinate effectively with them, and to understand their judgments and emotions, the motivations behind their actions, what actions constitute transgressions of their models, and how they sanction transgressions. So to coordinate, cooperate, and engage with people in any culture, you need to discover what relational model they are using, how they implement the model, and then you have to invoke that model, make people feel committed to it, and you have to commit yourself to it." CULTURAL DISCOURSES People everywhere give shape and meaning to their life as they speak about it.
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From page 44... ...
. After some initial pleasantries, the NGO worker suggests to the farmer that he try organic fertilizer on his fields.
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"What the NGO worker may not know is that the Nepali farmer has farmed these fields for decades, knows what works, has used organic fertilizers in the past, knows that they are expensive and he can't afford them, even with the help of this agency, and so on." There is a whole system of subtexts underlying this conversation that "needs to be understood as a communicative dynamic that is active in that exchange between that farmer and that NGO worker," Carbaugh said. "If we don't understand that kind of dynamic, we are missing a lot of what is going on in these kinds of situations when we are trying to help and work with others." The key is to understand the ways people declare form and meanings in their lives through communication practices; people do this differently.
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From page 46... ...
"Scientific and agency discourse is one member of this class," he said. "It doesn't stand outside or above the others." The first project Carbaugh described involved a research team from the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDR)
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Nuciforo set out to determine how a health program designed specifically for Russians might differ from ones designed for Americans. "She observed," Carbaugh said, "that many of the questions and the campaigns were designed -- through a popular American discourse -- according to the idea that health is a matter of personal choice and personal behavior, that ultimately it is up to you what you do with your body, what you put in it.
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From page 48... ...
48 SOCIOCULTURAL DATA TO ACCOMPLISH DOD MISSIONS gaps" between the discourses of the agency and the local people and designs practices for the agency workers based on that analysis. "This is a different way of working," he said, "because it is focused on discourse and on intensive qualitative and interpretive analyses about practices and contexts and the meaningfulness of those to people." "The outcomes that we target are enhanced effectiveness, better relations with people, local ownership of projects and programs that they help to create, that are their own and are therefore more sustainable.
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