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Soft Cultural Elements

Methodology

Factual elements are context dependent, but their concrete values are well defined for a given setting. Soft cultural elements on the other hand are almost by definition difficult to describe with precision and will always abstract from potentially diverging personal views. Furthermore, their description must be formalized to the extend that information about them becomes machine-readable and interchangeable.

Following the theory of structural anthropology [1] the approach chosen is following structuralist lines, though not dogmatically. The positive (+) or negative (-) judgement on certain key properties in selected elements are identified in the scope of a given cultural setting and optionally a certain context. This procedure is exemplarily demonstrated for colour conventions and then applied to other categories of soft cultural elements.

This CWA does not make any claims as to the epistemological nature of these binary opposition. In the scope of this CWA they serve exclusively as tools for a formal description of those soft cultural elements.

[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss: Anthropologie structurale(1958)

Description of Soft Cultural Elements

A soft cultural element codifies a value judgement that a certain culture or subculture predominantly shares in a given context. These can be preferences for certain ways of interaction — e.g. formal vs. informal or personal vs. institutional —, for certain moral values, colours, gestures etc.. Virtually always, such judgements will be context dependent, as a certain behaviour can be considered to be perfectly admissible, say, in a private context and be deeply offensive if performed in public in the very same cultural setting.

“Predominantly” implies that such a value judgement may not be shared by all members of that culture to an equal degree. For example, even in cultural settings that generally prefer formal modes of interaction some individuals and even whole organizations will instead favour informal interactions.

Value judgements of the predominant culture in a given administrative unit may differ significantly from that of subcultures — e.g., of immigrant communities — that live in the same geographic area. These communities can constitute cultural settings of their own, possibly (but not necessarily) using a different language. A cultural setting can thus be related to an administrative unit, but be more specific (e.g. describing the culture of the Muslim community in the UK or that of the Christian community in Turkey). When the following sample tables lists countries as representing cultural settings, this is thus an oversimplification that helps to stress the fact that the sample data in this CWA is for illustrative purposes only.

Collecting data

The most significant issues in bringing together this information are the scope of the content of the resource and the way in which it is structured. At a simplistic level, the scope of the resource is to include “significant” positive and negative associations of meaning for any cultural setting. The two major issues to be decided in delivering this scope are how an association could be judged to be “significant” and also the ways in which cultural setting could be defined. The significance issue can be resolved by use of the existing Unicode voting methods for agreeing that items should be included in the CLDR and / or by classifying existing such information in the context of a larger network of eGovernment resources. The choice of how to define cultural settings is more complex and will require individual judgement. In some regions, quite a number of the value judgements are primarily related to a specific religion. Another set of associations may be specific to a ethnicity. It is possible and in some eGovernment scenarios certainly advisable to add religions and ethnicities to the linguistic, national and regional settings that are already identified in the CLDR. In particular, a government body may want to address specific religious or ethnic communities in its area with specifically targeted publications or services.

Adding this information to the CLDR itself might be inadvisable, however, for the following reasons:

• issues of ethnicity and religion are often associated with strong opinions that might make agreement on data related to these factors extremely difficult;
• when the ways that this new CLDR resource is likely to be used are considered, it is difficult to imagine that many services will be localized to meet the needs of a specific religious or ethnicities.

It is probable that services will primarily be localized for the same language, national and regional groupings that are already identified in the CLDR. The only practical way in which the issues of racial and religious derived colour associations can be addressed in system design is to take account of the predominant religions and ethnicities that are prevalent in a particular country or region. Fortunately, the existing sources of information related to value judgements in regions and countries already reflect these cultural and religious influences.

The data that the sample tables contain is for illustrative purposes only and is neither complete nor necessarily correct.

Colour Conventions

In each culture, there are specific meanings associated with colours and these meanings frequently vary between different cultures. There are a number of colours that have common meanings across a wide range of cultures. For example, bright red has a worldwide association with danger by 96% of a diverse worldwide sample and with war by 88% [1]. However, the prospect of recording every possible association as part of the soft cultural registry is an enormous task and one that may be subject to a lot of dispute as many of the possible meanings associated with colours may not be universally accepted. What would be useful would be to record those colour associations that have quite strong negative, and to a lesser extent, positive associations. It would also be highly valuable to indicate the sometimes large cross-cultural differences in associated meaning.

A resource that captures significant associations of negative and positive meanings with colours and indicates how these associations differed across cultures provides valuable support to the design of visually presented services. This can be used to avoid using colours in ways that accidentally give offence and, to a lesser extent would assist in creating positive emotions for the service users. This resource could, at one level, be used to automatically identify potential cultural mismatches between the design of a localized version of a service and the cultural expectations of the planned audience for that service. It can also be used in design support tools to provide real-time guidance to creators of eGovernment publications.

Having decided on the scope of this new colour related resource, the final issue is to decide on a way of representing this information in the CLDR and the context of the eGovernment ontology. The table below uses colour as the primary organising dimension. Such a structure would allow a designer or a software application to use the table to generate two lists of countries, one with negative associations and one with positive ones, for each colour that is used in the service. This list of countries could then be compared with those for which the service has been localized and any warnings of negative associations (or highlighting of positive associations) could be generated. This approach is paradigmatic for the general structuralist analysis and description of soft cultural elements:

The above is only a small subset of the possible set of colour associations. However, some examples have been included to illustrate that it is possible that the same colour can have both strong negative and strong positive associations for the same culture (e.g. see the colour red for China). It may also be the case that a colour may only have strong positive associations and no negative associations, which appears to be the case for the colour pink.

An alternative way of using this new resource would be for the service designer, or software tool, to specify the regions or countries for which the service has been localized and receive a list of colours to avoid (those with negative associations) and those with very positive associations. A table with the colour and culture columns reversed would meet this need. In the CLDR there is a precedent for representing the same resource in two alternate presentations - "Territory-Language Information" and "Language-Territory Information" and this application seems to be another good situation where this approach is justified.

An issue that deserves a significant debate is the degree to which it is important to reflect a few strong religious colour associations that may pose a significant risk that failing to consider them might offend potential users of a service that is targeting users in any geographic region. The introduction of religious groupings would be a new departure for the CLDR and might, as suggested above, be an issue that would raise concern and controversy.

Another important factor that needs to be taken into account in populating a table of colour associations such as the one above is whether it is anticipated that the colour association data will mainly be used in the context of leisure related services or business related services. The reason for considering this factor relates to a study of the use of factory machines in mainland China [2] which indicated that in the working context of a factory environment the workers were perfectly familiar with the international standard (IEC73) meaning of "danger" for the colour red but, outside that context, they associated it with the traditional Chinese meaning of "Luck".

• [1] Chiijiiwa, Professor Hideaki, Encyclopedia on Color Cognition of the World's Youth. Japan: Kawade Shoboh Shinsha. 1999.
• [2] Röse, K. (2005): Intercultural Human-Machine Systems: Empirical Study of User Requirements in Mainland China. In: Usability and Internationalization of Information Technology, Ed. Aykin, N: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London, 2005,

Propriety

Cultures differ widely in their concepts of propriety, especially with regards to decency and permissible behaviour. Differences can be very pronounced: in a culture such as the Tuareg it is unusual for a man to show his face to outsiders and deviating behaviour is considered offensive. Partial or even full nudity and / or display of skin can be acceptable in some cultural settings, but heavily ostracized in others.

Nudity / Dressing of persons in images

In the eGovernment setting, a particularly sensitive subset of propriety is the reaction to images of persons on web pages, in documents or in relation to software. An image that may be entirely innocuous in the scope of one cultural setting — e.g., men and women displaying their torsos on the web page of a German local authority alongside the swimming pool's opening hours — may be deeply offensive in other cultural settings, possibly even within the same country. On the other hand, using certain types of dress such as a head scarf may convey political and / or religious messages that are positively connotated in some cultures and negatively in others (potentially again within the boundaries of the same country).

Propriety in texts

Much of what has been said relating to propriety in images in eGovernment publications also is relevant to their textual contents. The textual motives are more varied, though, and do not at present lend themselves to the same level of formalization.

Formality

Cultures differ markedly in the level of formality they use in various forms of communications in certain contexts. This is mirrored in many situations — the preferred choice of clothing in certain contexts, the way of saluting or taking leave of somebody, the preference for certain meals over others, etc.. In many of these cases these preferences persist independently of the concrete way of expressing them.

Formality in addressing people

In this CWA we concentrate on one special case, the preference for formality used in written communication, in particular in letters and emails, when addressing a person. For expediency we postulate the existence of three different name forms for addressing a person:

• formal form of address (e.g. “The Right Honorable XY” or “Herr Prof. Dr. Z”)

• neutral form of address (e.g. “Mr. XY” or “Herr Z”)

• informal form of address (e.g. “John” or “Hans”)

The concrete format of the name, possibly involving the person's honorifics and styles, as well as name ordering differs widely from culture to culture, as is discussed in more detail above.

We pitch these three forms of address against three contexts and list the preference for using one of them in that context:

• familiar: the addressee is related or close friends;

• normal: contact with the addressee is in a “normal” business scenario;

• formal: contact with the addressee is in formal setting and / or the addressee is much more senior in age or rank.

  NOTE: If the addressee is a child, the context is normally familiar by default.

The choice of name form in those contexts differs markedly across cultures. In the US, for example, it is quite common to send business letters to virtual strangers on a first name basis, i.e. using an informal version of their name. Doing the same in many other countries would be considered extremely offensive.

• NOTE: The three-partite taxonomy of names and contexts is based on European requirements. For other cultural environments it may be too coarse grained.

T-V distinction

Related, but not identical to the choice of the correct form of a name in a given context is the choice of second-person personal pronoun in interacting with somebody else. While some languages such as English have only one second-person personal pronoun (at least, in their present state), namely “you”, many other cultures / languages have two or, indeed, several pronouns that a speaker chooses depending on his relationship to the addressee. This situation is called the T-V distinction, after the Latin pronouns tu and vos. It is well known, e.g., in French (”tu” vs. “vous”), German (”du” vs. “Sie”) and Italian (”tu” vs. “lei”), but in fact, most European languages use a variation of the t-v distinction, though its use has eroded over the last decades in all but the most formal settings in some countries such as Norway and Sweden. Several non-European cultures such as Japan have a much more elaborate system of t-v distinction with many more gradations of formality.

In cultures that have the t-v distinction, the correct choice of pronoun is a matter of basic politeness in both oral and written communication. Not using the correct pronoun can be anything between inconsiderate and extremely rude. It is often, but by no means always coupled to the chosen version of a name.

We apply the same three-partite taxonomy of contexts, but link to a list of second-person personal pronouns, ordered by increasing formality. For our sample table, this CWA concentrates on systems with two second-person personal pronouns (the most frequent case in Europe), but the mechanism scales to more elaborate systems.

[1] Brown, R. and A. Gilman (1960) “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity” in American Anthropologist 4 (6): 24-39

Role of hierarchies

Along similar lines, the role of the individual in its institutional hierarchy differs markedly across cultures [1]. The focus can be on the role of the individual in the fabric of governmental organizations or on the organizations themselves. Again, such changes can reflect on the correct format of addressing somebody and permeate many aspects of the communication.

[1] Hall, E.T. (1989) Beyond Culture. Anchor Books, New York 1989

Role of Privacy vs Transparency

Privacy and transparency are both valued positively in most cultures in government contexts, while often being antithetical to one another. Transparency is considered essential, amongst others, to fight corruption and to ensure the fairness of governmental and political decision taking processes. Privacy, on the other hand, is valued to protect the individual sphere of citizens, politicians and government employees alike. The relative weighting of these values differs markedly between cultures.

In the context of this CWA we concentrate on the effect of the weighting on the access to government resources. In some countries, notably Sweden, the great majority of government documents including tax declarations and job applications to government posts are disclosed to the public. In others government documents are considered private by default, and the release of a citizen's tax declaration to the public would be a serious breach of relevant privacy laws.

Arbitrarily, the following table used “+” to mark a preference for privacy over transparency and “-” for the inverse situation.

[1] Posner, R. A. (1981). “The economics of privacy”. The American Economic Review, 71(2), 405-409