Summer Reading: Beyond Culture

Edward T. Hall's classic book, Beyond Culture (Anchor Books, 1976), is not a government ethics book. But a lot of the wisdom in this brilliant book can be applied to our field.

It's hard to describe this book. It is an examination of certain aspects of culture and of how difficult it is to go from one to another. Americans are lost in Japanese culture, for example. Most people are also lost in the culture of a local government organization.

Hall notes that  "we live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively." This makes it harder for government officials to deal with the conflicts that occur among the various roles they play. It is also difficult for them to see their organization's ethics environment as a whole. Instead, they tend to deal with each event separately, as they come along. Similarly, ethics reform tends to occur piecemeal rather than comprehensively.

A -Chronic Problem
Hall divides cultures into two basic kinds: polychronic and monochronic. The U.S. is a monochronic culture. This means that it emphasizes schedules, segmentation, and promptness. In a polychronic culture everything happens at once, and there is a stress on the involvement of people and the completion of transactions, rather than following preset schedules. In a polychronic culture, such as Japan, one has to be an insider or else have a "friend" who can make things happen.

Hall doesn't apply this distinction to governments, but I think that local governments, especially those with an unhealthy ethics environment, tend to be more polychronic than the rest of the culture.

Difficulty Externalizing
Hall speaks of our using the environment as a tool, altering it by externalizing and internalizing. Thus, "actions that are under the control of what we call the conscience in one part of the world may be handled by externalized controls elsewhere." Example: the British internalize status, while Americans tend to externalize it.

"Once something is externalized," Hall wrote, "it is possible to look at it, study it, change it, perfect it, and at the same time learn important things about oneself." So much discussion of government ethics, within governments, involves internal things, such as integrity. Nothing can be done about government ethics as long as officials speak in terms of integrity. And nothing can be done about unwritten rules unless they are brought out into the open.

Hall wrote, "One cannot normally transcend one's culture without first exposing its major hidden axioms and unstated assumptions … Because cultures are wholes, are systematic … and are highly contextual as well, it is hard to describe them from the outside."

It is important that government ethics never be separated from the democratic values that underlie it. But it is equally important to separate a government ethics program from the officials it oversees, who are focused on control and internalizing. Since it is high-level officials who usually make decisions regarding ethics programs (usually not to have one or to have it under their control), this is very difficult.

Context
Hall wrote a lot about the context or environment in which we live and think. He said that it is "impossible to separate the individual from the environment in which he functions. ... There is no such thing as a patient independent and separate from his hospital situation." And there is no such thing as a government official or employee who is independent and separate from her ethics environment.

Hall distinguishes between high-context and low-context systems. A typical low-context system is the American court system, where the focus is on rules and limitations. Low-context systems tend to be impersonal and open to manipulation by those with the greatest skills.

There are high-context legal systems in other societies, where "the accused, the court, the public, and those who are the injured parties are on the same side, where, ideally, they can work together to settle things. The purpose of the trial is to provide a setting where the powers of government can act as a backdrop for a performance, where the consequences and the impact of the crime are played out before the accused. It also provides an opportunity for the accused to be properly and publicly repentant for disrupting the orderly processes of life, for releasing the evil of disorder by failing to observe the regulative norms expected of decent human beings. In a word, the function of the trial is to place the crime in context and present it in such a way that the criminal must see and understand the consequences of his act."

A high-context hearing would seem to be perfect for an ethics proceeding. Where an ethics program is not criminalized, ethics proceedings are more high-context, because they are administrative in nature. But still, the high-context process usually occurs less in the hearing room than in the news media and on blogs.

High-context cultures, such as Japan, although full of a sort of corruption that is unacceptable in the U.S., deal with responsibility in a different manner. People in places of authority are truly responsible for the actions of subordinates. In low-context cultures such as ours, responsibility is more difficult to pin down: "when something happens to a low-context system, everyone runs for cover and 'the system' is supposed to protect its members. If a scapegoat is needed, the most plausible low-ranking scapegoat is chosen."

Hall also asserts that low-context cultures tend to resist self-examination. This failure to practice self-examination is responsible not only for much ethical misconduct, but also for the handling of instances of misconduct that are brought to light.

Dissociation
Hall identifies another process that might be responsible for ethical misconduct. He calls it "dissociation." It consists of behavior patterns that people significant to us disapproved of in our childhood. The underlying need or desire remains intact and is, therefore, "dissociated from the self, so that self respect can also be maintained. ... dissociated acts have a 'not me' quality to them. … When one is acting under the rule of dissociated impulses, everybody except the individual himself knows and perceives what is happening." The results of dissociation are very familiar to those involved in government ethics.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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