HALL'S HIGH-CONTEXT AND LOW-CONTEXT ORIENTATIONS

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 621.

Anthropologist E.T. Hall categorizes cultures as high- or low-context, depending on the degree to which meaning comes from the contextual environment rather than the words exchanged during communicative interaction [82]. The assumption underlying Hall's classifications is that “one of the functions of culture is to provide a highly selective screen between man and the outside world. In its many forms, culture therefore designates what we pay attention to and what we ignore” [83]. Hall saw context as “the information that surrounds an event; it is inextricably bound up with the meaning of the event” [84]. His work revealed that cultures were often characterized by high- or low-context communication, which he described in the following manner:

A high-context (HC) communication or message is one in which most of the information is already in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicitly transmitted part of the message. A low-context (LC) communication is just the opposite; i.e., the mass of the information is vested in the explicit code [85]. Although all cultures possess some characteristics of both high- and low-context variables, most can be ranked along a scale for this particular dimension (see Table 2). To emphasize this fact, various cultures have been placed on a continuum rather than using only two opposing categories.