The Cross-Cultural Behavior in Tourism
Executive Summary
This essay explores the cross-cultural behavior in the context of tourism, including the issue of social contact and its measures, cultural shock, cultural values and the cultural model of the conceptual relationships. The subject of our research was the book Cross-Cultural Behavior in Tourism by Yvette Reisinger and Lindsay W. Turner. The essay seeks to identify how different factors influence social contact and actors in the tourism context. This information will be used to deepen the knowledge about the interrelations in tourism and to identify factors which can make enchase the process of intercultural communication.
Part one: the social contact in tourist encounters.
The intercultural communication issue became important in recent years due to the intensification of contacts at all levels and rightly attracted increasing interest of researchers. Tourism, for its part, acts as one of the important means of cross-cultural communication. It covers the particular culture of a people, its traditions, historical way of life, as well as those universal, globalist tendencies and cultural features that exist in today’s world. The combination of international and national principles, their interaction is one of the socio-cultural characteristics of tourism.
The dialogue of cultures can realize the need for mutual enrichment, interaction and understanding. Tourism is inherently communicative: a tourist acts as a communicant, tying together the space-time coordinates, and he acts as a kind of means of communication between different people and cultures. The cross-cultural communication in tourism, reflects not only the search for cultural unity, the ordering of life beginning, the introduction of a stranger in his own world, but also the tendency to preserve cultural identity, and the right to cultural self-determination, both personal and social. It is important to consider the particularities of different cultures. According to the Reisinger and Turner, the cultures should be differentiated on the basis of different communication style and orientation toward the world and people (Cross-Cultural Behavior in Tourism, 2003, p. 134).
Part two: the cultural shock and its influence on the behavior of the tourists and hosts.
According to Reisinger and Turner the foreign culture can be seen as the sum of the tourist symbols, norms, behaviors, stereotypes, which is incomprehensible to the extraneous observer. Thus, well-known model of understanding and interpretation schemes do not work, and therefore, another culture is presented as something mysterious and sometimes dangerous. This can lead to the fact, that the tourist experiences a state of culture shock or acculturation stress. The authors see the main reason of the appearance of the cultural shock are various demographic, socio-cultural, economic, geographic and psychological factors, thus, these factors create motivational patterns that influence human behavior (Cross Cultural Behavior in Tourism, 2003, p. 279).
A number of external factors affect the dynamics of adaptation and culture shock, in particular, the age and gender. Young people tend to be more sociable and extroverted than people of middle and old age, while men feel more at ease in unfamiliar situations than women. The suggestion can be attributed to external factors determining the dynamics and the emergence of culture shock. If during choosing a tour a potential client is pressured and this tour does not coincide the motivational aspirations of the individual, then during the trip his behavior will be suppressed. This tour is likely to lead eventually to the culture shock, because in such a situation, the tourist will resist the communicative effects and will not be able to enter the cultural environment, which causes him primarily a psychological rejection. Besides, any new culture influences on people by psychological factors.
Part three: the measures of social contact and its similarities and differences.
In the socio-cultural aspect tourism, as an indicator of the level and quality of life, contributes to the preservation of cultural heritage and historical values, to the formation of a mutual interest of people of different religions, ethnicities, to the formation of tolerance and respect between them, to the stabilization of inter-ethnic and international relations. In fact, tourism acts as a form of open cultural exchange and borrowing the patterns of behavior and changing cultural stereotypes. Due to the Reisinger and Turner, there are a great number of variables that can be used to measure social contact. Allport (1954) indicated 30 variables, including area of contact, social atmosphere and status of the people who are in contact. Cook (1962) method of measuring is analyzing the characteristics of the contact situation, the participants, their attitude and beliefs, expectations and furthermore, the influence of rules and norms.
The measurement of cross-cultural contact is difficult due to the great amount of differences of cultural meanings of the measuring variables. There are three best-known measurement techniques of social contact: Bale’s measurement, Triandis’ Social Distance Scale and Hall’s Social Zones. The Bale’ssocial contact measurement (1950) is based on observation of interactions. Although, this method is difficult to apply in order to examine all potential types of interactions. Triandis’ Social Distance Scale (1960) is a measure of social contact between people of different cultural backgrounds. The main object in this measurement is the differences in the social distance across the cultures. Hall’s measurement (1966) consists of four physical and social distance zones: intimate, personal, social and public. The main point, that he had noticed was that different cultural groups prefer different social distance. Thus, we can make a conclusion, that there are a lot of different approaches to measuring the social contact. There are three main approaches, they are different, but all three are based on the consciousness of the social distance across the cultures.
Part four: the cultural values in the context of tourism.
The culture is a fundamental basis for the process of development, conservation, strengthening of the independence, sovereignty and identity of the people. In most countries, there is a process of the democratization of culture and tourism, which are the integral part of society. Self-awareness and knowledge of the world, personal development and achievement of the objectives would be unthinkable without the acquisition of knowledge in the field of culture. Cultural expression of the people causes always an interest. The natural curiosity of a tourist on the various parts of the world and their peoples forms one of the strongest incentive tourist motives.
Reisinger and Turner see tourism is the best way to get acquainted with a another culture. The humanitarian importance of tourism is to use its opportunities for personal development, its creative potential, the expansion of the horizon of knowledge. The desire for knowledge has always been an integral feature of the human nature. Combining relaxation with the knowledge of life, history and culture of other people is one of the tasks that tourism is fully capable to resolve. While getting to know the culture and customs of another country, the tourist enriches his spiritual world.
The cultural heritage of every nation is made not only of the works of artists, architects, musicians, writers, works of scientists, but also of the intangible heritage, including folklore, handicrafts, festivals, religious ceremonies and many more. It has been a long time since was separated and became independent a cultural or educational type of tourism. Its basis is the historical and cultural potential of the country, including the entire socio-cultural environment with traditions and customs, especially in the home and economic. While visiting other countries, tourist perceives the whole cultural complexes, which are the integral part of the nature. The attraction of the cultural complexes is determined by their artistic and historical value, by fashion and availability in relation to local demand. The particularities of the culture of different regions of the world increasingly encourage people to spend holidays in the journey. The places, visited by tourists, contribute to the enrichment of their memories, while culture is one of the main elements of tourist interest.
Part five: the cultural model of conceptual relationships in the context of tourism.
The conceptual model of intercultural communication is influenced by a significant transformation of intercultural communication, which becomes an important paradigm of global society. Intercultural communication is a tool to influence the culture contact in the modern multicultural and multilingual world. Its contents, types and forms are updated as development of the information society as a global phenomenon. This is particularly true, in cases where new information technologies remove the barriers of space and time in the terminals and turn the people of intercultural communication in everyday human individuals and communities. At the same time, significant changes are taking place in the content and form of, previously cultivated by mankind, types of intercultural communication, which can no longer continue to develop along the traditional path and acquire new meanings, enter into the new combinations of meaning.
That is the reality and the prospect of the changes of cross-cultural communication in the field of international tourism, which acts as a multi-faceted and multi-functional system of interaction of different cultures: individuals and groups who realize their interests, needs, motivation in the types and forms of tourism professionals who are professionally engaged in tourist activity, initiative (tourist guides) and receptive (host countries) communities, for which the international tourism has become a part of everyday life and a distinct fragment of linguistic culture. The effectiveness of cross-cultural interaction in international tourism depends on adequate knowledge, understanding, interpretation and operation of tourism concepts, is a fact (or processes) the substitution of tourist reality, symbolic signs and marker tourist space and forming a proper concept sphere (system of concepts).
Works Cited
Reisinger, Yvette, and Lindsay W Turner. “Cross-Cultural Behaviour In Tourism”. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003. Print.
