Cross-Cultural Communication Investigation: Mexico

Amira Ramirez

COM-263

02/20/17

Reka Nagy

Cross-cultural communication investigation: Mexico.

Culture itself refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people during generations through individual and group striving (“Culture definition”, n.d.). As many other things like society and government, architecture is a vital part of a country’s culture. “Through architecture it's possible to gauge many things about a culture, such as lifestyle, artistic sensibilities and social structure” (Damen, 2008). When we think in a culture like Egypt we usually picture the pyramid on the dessert, this is because architecture fully represents a culture’s aspirations and hopes. Many of the most astonishing things in this world are architectural (Debate, 2017). Architecture defines a cultures background as well as communication, relationships, power distance and character each society has within its culture.

Mexican culture is defined as any work of architecture created within the Mexican culture. This includes a variety of bridges, pyramids, and even monuments. Mexican architecture is perhaps one of the most amazing displays once habited by ancient civilizations. Mayan, Aztecs and pre-Columbian buildings are all around this country (“Mexican architects - architecture of Mexico,” 1996). The style who made an impact on this culture was Colonial. This is because of the presence of Spanish colonizers and European influence. As the time went by, all the city was built around a cathedral or a town hall. Some of the most famous architects in Mexico during the colonial period included Juan Aguero, Manuel Tolsa, Fransicso Tresguerras and Antonio Rivas Mercado. The post- revolutionary government invested a lot of many into improving the infrastructure of the buildings, but many of the original buildings are still intact. One example of this is “El Palacio de Bellas Artes” (The palace of Bellas Artes). This building is all marmol, with colored glass. This is now a very popular museum in Mexico City. This architecture clearly shows the impact of the Spanish conquer in Mexican culture. The approach of Europe in Mexico made this culture grew in a architectural concept like no other. The early Mexican architecture was simple and plain, all the glamorous buildings made of beautiful materials and designs came from this conquer (“Mexican architects - architecture of Mexico,” 1996).

High context implies that a lot of unspoken information is implicitly transferred during communication. Low context implies that a lot of information is exchanged explicitly through the message itself and rarely is anything implicit or hidden. (Limited, 2017). Mexico in this case is part of a High context society (Limited, 2017) This is a relevant par of information any party who is making business whit someone in this culture should know for them to know what kind of communication style is preferable in distinct situations. The High context cultures tend to rely more on the durability of a relationship, also it is possible to experience misunderstanding when exchanging information, as well as most of the information given will be emphasized in a non-verbal manner, more likely to be a gesture or reaction towards something (Limited, 2017).

Many of this High or Low context cultures go hand to hand with either being polychronic or monochronic. Mexico is what Edward T. Hall termed a polychronic culture; the United States, a monochronic one. Mexico, like all polychronic cultures, ranks personal involvement and completion of existing transactions above the demands of preset schedules. Because Mexican culture is based in appointments, High range people tend to be overwhelmed in how much tasks they need to do, and to fix this, people with high authority rely deeply on subordinates who mainly take care of things they can’t personally attend (Advmeg, 2017). They also tend to prioritize this meetings into the ones who are more important for the high authority to attend rather than the one who can be taken care of by a subordinate. This also leaves space for those who meet to be in a more personal circle, and for parties be better acquaintance (Advmeg, 2017).

Power-Distance (large-small) is the extent to which cultures accept power in institutions and organizations. In Mexico, the power distance is very large (FLGconsulting, 2011).. This means the employees of high power distance society are likely to maintain a professional distance with their bosses. Mont of this employees tend to blindly obey the order their boss is giving to them. This can cause many goals in the company not being fellfield because of the lack of participation and decision making from the employees. This means a high level of inequality of power and wealth is within the Mexican society (FLGconsulting, 2011).

Uncertainty-Avoidance (low-high) indicates the extent to which a culture feels threatened by uncertain or ambiguous situations (FLGconsulting, 2011). By stating this we can say that most of the employees or the population in general become anxious when they don’t know what it is going to happened. This means the uncertainty avoidance in Mexico is extremely high. Statistics show the higher Hofstede in uncertainty avoidance is given to Mexico with a 82% on this dimension (Geert, n.d.). In this kind of cultures, they is an emotional need for rules, for them to feel safe and stable.