Intercultural Code Switching

If a person has ever lived, studied, or worked in a foreign culture, that individual has likely confronted situations in which the natural, comfortable, default behavior from the native culture turns out to be ineffective for a situation within the new cultural environment. This can occur on the job, during the job search process, in academic situations, and in social settings. Take, for example, the case of an Indian professional working in the United States and having to describe his accomplishments to his boss as part of a promotion process. In India, discussions with the boss would be quite formal and serious, and employees are expected to speak with discretion and composure and be quite modest about their accomplishments. In the United States, however, this employee would have to engage in a completely opposite set of behaviors to attract his boss’s attention. He would have to express a relatively high level of enthusiasm to show that he has pride and excitement for what he has accomplished. Furthermore, he would have to likely be relatively assertive and self-promotional during the conversation. After all, in the United States, an employee wants to give the boss the impression that the person is a “go-getter” and “leadership material,” and the way to do that is to show confidence about professional tasks.

The problem here is relatively easy to see: The way in which this professional needs to act conflicts at a relatively deep level with how the person is comfortable acting. But to achieve the goals and be effective at the job, the individual needs to learn to switch or adapt cultural behavior. This act of switching cultural behavior in specific situations of cultural differences is the essence of the idea of intercultural code switching.

In today’s ever-globalizing world, people are constantly faced with situations in which intercultural code switching is necessary—situations such as those profiled above, in which their natural, intuitive, culturally ingrained behavior is inappropriate for the situation they face. To complicate the issue even further, the rules for effective behavior in the new culture may even conflict with their own culturally ingrained values and beliefs. To act appropriately and effectively in these situations, people must somehow learn to switch their cultural behavior. This means being able to recognize their behavior as cultural, learn the new rules, suppress their natural response, and then somehow produce behavior that is appropriate to the new setting. And, of course, it is not just in professional situations where people need to interculturally code switch. It is so in academic and social settings as well.

The concept of intercultural code switching emerges out of two different streams of research [Page 448]literature. The first stream is research about cultural differences themselves, an expansive body of work in psychology, organizational behavior, and other related fields that has emphasized and documented all the different ways in which cultures are different. For example, from this body of work on cultural differences, we now know that cultures differ significantly in the ways people communicate with one another, both verbally and nonverbally; in how they express emotion; and in how they think and make sense of the world. (In fact, many of these differences are described and documented in this encyclopedia.) What a differences-oriented approach does not capture, however, are the personal and psychological challenges that people face when they have to adapt their behavior across cultures in light of these differences. Understanding cultural differences is clearly important. However, the reality is that when adapting across cultures in the examples described above, people do not just struggle with differences. Rather, they struggle at adapting behavior to overcome cultural differences. Intercultural code switching takes this critical next step and explores the challenges of actually switching one’s cultural behavior.

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