Acculturation Process

Biculturalism - A Model of the Effects of Second-Culture Exposure non Acculturation and Integrative Complexity C.T. Tadmor and P.E. Tetlock

The article is about the process of acculturation, or the steps that people exposed to a new culture pass through, affected by the person's internal views as well as external influences, towards reaching a certain level of acceptance of the norms and values of the new culture. The research aims at giving ideas about how multinational organizations can benefit from having employees capable of accepting different acculturation strategies in their overseas enterprises, that best correspond to achieving the goals of the company.

People that face a new culture interaction can either go to the extreme position, that is fully accept or totally reject the new culture and thus become assimilated respectively separated, or manage to internalize both cultures and develop integrated/bicultural behavior. The authors distinguish 5 steps in this process.

Step 1 Increased Attention Scope

Culture enables people to make automatic choices given a certain situation, but when an expatriate first encounters and distinguishes the differences of the new society (culture) his normal scheme of behavior and perceptions will no longer be appropriate and the individual will pay conscious attention to his surrounding, i.e. the attention scope increases.

Step 2 Accountability

According to the author, the acculturation strategy an individual follows will depend on the accountability pressures the individual experiences, which can be internal, like beliefs and norms as well as external, in the form of single or mixed audience. An individual that is held accountable to a single audience will opt for assimilation or separating strategy, depending on to what audience he is accountable to. An individual accountable to both old and new culture will opt for the bicultural strategy and eventually internalise both cultures.

Step 3 Experiencing Dissonance

Changing peoples mindset is a process that is accompanied by experiencing dissonance, which causes discomfort, stress and disharmony with the new situation. The level of dissonance is predetermined by to whom the person is accountable. Assimilated or separated individuals (interacting with single audience) will experience a