Negotiating multiple cultural contexts: Flexibility and constraint in the cultural selfways of Japanese academic migrants.
Sakamoto, Izumi
2001
Abstract
In past decades, social work has been motivated to address cultural differences. Nevertheless, there is little social work literature that critically examines how culture and the process of adaptation are conceptualized. Most of the literature has relied on fixed views of culture and acculturation, and fails to move beyond the concepts historically provided by the social science disciplines. In contrast, this dissertation constructs a dynamic model of cultural negotiation. A multi-method research project, inspired and informed by community-based research with multinational academic migrant families, was designed to investigate the boundaries and processes of culture as experienced. The two research methods addressed questions regarding the flexibility of cultural selfways. First, in-depth interviews were conducted to examine the experiences of Japanese academic migrant families, where a grounded theory analysis revealed the complex and fluid nature of cultural negotiation. These migrants expressed a sense of agency in the processes of negotiating multiple cultural contexts (e.g. transculturation), which was variously affected by occupational status, social power, gender (roles), and family relations. Concepts of Family-Based Cultural Adaptation and a <italic>Kaitenzushi</italic>/Smorgasbord Model of Cultural Adaptation emerged, leading to a new model depicting the non-linear, fluid, and uneven nature of cultural negotiation and transculturation. Second, an experiment tested whether the flexibility of cultural selfways reported in the interviews held true across cultural contexts. Ninety-one Japanese migrants in the US were randomly assigned to either the Japanese culture-salient condition or the American culture-salient condition, and responded to a questionnaire regarding cultural selfways in areas with known nationality differences between Japanese and Americans. The cultural environment was manipulated by changing the people, decor, and language in the room. Ninety-one American students served as comparisons. The results partially supported the thesis of flexible cultural selfways over immediate cultural contexts, and also highlighted the complex nature of cultural adaptation, which simultaneously involves both flexibility and rigidity, thus lending partial support to the new Model of Cultural Negotiation. The Model of Cultural Negotiation affords more sophisticated understandings of the properties of culture, by making room for the malleability of cultural socialization and for multiple identities. Implications for social work are discussed.Subjects
Academic Migrants Acculturation Constraint Contexts Cultural Flexibility Japanese Multiple Negotiating Selfways
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