The Parking Lot of Global Growth: Of Mon(k)ey Man and Time Shifts Transitioning entire developing economies to the purposes of export trade in the last few decades has been the "get rich, quick fix" for quite a number of nations, namely those willing to play ball with the developed world. However, much of international trade practice has been about putting more and more players on the team, requiring longer and longer walks out into left field, those players with possibly fewer collective team-playing skills may have merely virtually extended the field of play beyond perceptible fences to many spectators. Hall was one of them. One could assume local games are now played on a global diamond which extends far and beyond the "parking lots" similar to what some educators might consider inascribable viewpoints and perspectives, those which are set aside, namely, ideas which have fewer adherents. When do issues sent to the parking lot ever really get addressed? It is generally a nice way of saying your idea is just too complex for the average player. Unfortunately the definition and parameters of "average" themselves keep shifting in cultural values systems. Hall's ideas about cross-cultural perspectives are fairly simple. But who, other than business sponsored agencies actually profits from them? These are the questions which should not necessarily be in the parking lot.
Economists cluck satisfactorily about rises in real wage rates among many developing nations; they make a good case for the perceivable local benefits of global greenfield or economic direct investments versus the efforts of NGO donorships and aid agencies with perhaps at times fewer measurable progressive effects for their conquerent billions poured into numerous African nations for example. But what are some of the other cultural effects of extensive economic development among developing nations which may be evaluated on cross-cultural levels besides a transference to western time management systems? Many in developing nations claim the question is moot. That such determinations are entirely irrelevant topics for discussion.
Expertise in this field of cross-cultural research is an acquired skill, many claim to have it while few probably actually do by the way. Such determinations of skill must be found through dredging the depths of a perhaps culturally filtered concept of individual experience, and in giving relevancy to linkages of perhaps diffusive patterns of information usually only through established measures of recognition which at times holds empirical repute and is delineated by higher qualification than this author posesses. Without evidence of any research, how can a theory on the cross-cultural effects of rapid industrial growth in developing societies be measured? What would constitute one? It remains to merely make attempts at connections between pieces of relevant information here, and thankfully spending over two years seeking a position which would provide the "experience" to further such skills development has provoked a flurry of stuffy rejection letters and a form of personal educational retirement to the libraries of the mind on these topics.
Developing nation workers are locked in to probably the most cut-throat economic competition on the planet today mostly among themselves. It only takes a few outings in developing nations to realize that the majority of the people on our planet are not wired, not investing, not prospering. It seems most are merely transiting from subsistence farming and precarious self-sufficiency to urban or semi-urban poverty with fewer options for self-sufficiency with variable and sometimes questionable rates of success. Measure the developed world industrial age to see similar trends or patterns of cultural development, with possible similar outcomes but simply on a grander global scale of cultural and economic risk.
These many are just lucky enough to scratch at breaking even in often unbelievable hardships. Education, literacy, AIDS, life expectancy, for the vast majority of earth's population it is a "dog eat dog" world where immediacy and urgency require immediate base needs fulfillment of the bare necessities of life, be they food, clothing, and shelter. One may take positions akin to Jared Diamond on the factors or those of David Landes. Thus a dollar is worth more than a traditional language or custom imbued with thousands of years of immesurable investment? For most seemingly it is not even up for debate. Who really can afford to make that choice?
Remember Hall posits one is unaware of values orientations without comparable contrasts and recognition of patterns. Who has time to ruminate upon them if all life consists of is one long competition to an early finish? At any point in a contract for employment under such realities in a developing nation, a worker may expect none of the minimum standards set out only near the turn of the century in currently developed nations. These millions, billions are considered lucky to earn a few dozens of dollars monthly in an economic world which has only increasingly pushed free market terms of engagement to the poorest nations of the earth. These are players without bats, mitts, practice, or even coaches it seems. But all appear extremely happy to be playing the game. There are no rain days.
While it seems to run towards baseball, the topic here is whether or not evidence exists of cross-cultural time shifting, or namely does what Edward T. Hall have to say about time patterns really exist on dimensions of cultural impacts of economic development? Start with the most easily compared dynamics upon which Hall has repeatedly relied: languages. He has repeatedly used contrasts and comparisons in language patterns, sets, and isolates to define cross-cultural differences. Namely, their cultural underpinnings are in question. Can a culture be considered to exist beyond the extinction of its language? Apparently not.
“Each language is the means of cultural expression of the intangible cultural heritage of people... With the death and disappearance of such a language, an irreplaceable unit in our knowledge and understanding of human thought and worldview is lost forever.” - The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (Lydia Rieck:2004)
Culture values are lost in a rapid rush to industrialize developing nations and involves standards for observing informal and formal cultural reorientations, which implicates local national cultures in ways which may never be effectively measured. The speed and rate of language extinction exemplifies that the rate of adaptive evolution of local languages and cultures to suit process and production requirements is difficult to measure in terms of time orientations, for those that begin taking on massive concentrations of new loan words, namely those of business do so in agreement that some sacrifices must be made for new measures of success. The transitions taking place may be too great to measure, themselves representative of new cultural patterns and determinants as similarly rates of technological change may also perhaps impede objective analysis of their cultural impact. Historical evidence may be of little value to local cultures if no one chooses to write it down, read about it and or thus measure it. Why would it matter if all that matters is economic growth from an unmeasured, undetermined point of historical context to an undetermined, unmeasured point of progress?
At what point does a developing nation begin to evaluate rate of historical cultural changes beyond which it is or is not the context of rampant industrialisation? Hall expounds on time interrelatedness and challenges of communication cross-culturally from a historical persepective; similarly global cultural stereotypes continue to cloud the issues of cross-cultural communication. What are the actual purposes of understanding anything about cultures without realisable contrasts if they are resolutely disappearing along with the languages which were once their building blocks? Progressive industrialisation remains a desirable method to advance economically internationally. But for what real purpose other than to provide greater capital investments and products sales? Whose culture really determines such capitalisation? Do businesses in the developed world actually set out to improve the lives of developing nations workers, as they claim to be doing, or do they simply set about creating new consumers for capitalist systems seemingly devoid of cultural underpinnings other than the corporate ones? This inning all evidence suggests an economic growth of industrial workforces without any real provocative alternatives to develop union concessions and or minimum work standards originally deployed in the developed world.
Another consideration, perhaps entirely unrelated but simply quite interesting can be made in a reading of Clyde Kluckhohn's "Navaho Witchcraft" (1944). In this text, Kluckhohn made ethnographic studies of traditional Navaho customs and values associated with witchcraft. At the same time he collected various extensive interview data. Through cross-referencing his materials, he seemed to delineate a pattern of those accusing and those accused of witchcraft in Navaho societies. Anyone who has read "The Crucible" (Arthur Miller, 1953) may guess the conclusions of Klukhohn. Invariably, those accusing others of witchcraft, or those especially concerned with casting grudge spells or the like, were almost never first sons, or almost never possessed of powerful social hierarchical or leadership status in the local community. Those most likely accused were often community members of high social status. Kluckhohn concluded that witchcraft was the domain of the disenfranchsied, the powerless, and thus the means by which weaker members of a community might gain status, and the stronger members might lose status. That would make the corporates my chieftans?
It is an interesting aside to discuss the cultural patterns in thousands of factories in developing nations in such a context. Among many of the working poor, mostly young women, assembling countless components for countless product lines for sale in developing nations, local cultural superstitions often seem to mirror Klukhohn's conclusions on the status of witchcraft. Thousands of women logging thousands of hours in repetitive orders cycles, long hours, having hysterical fits and requiring traditional cleansing rituals practiced by local shamans to cleanse greenfield factories of ghosts, spirits or the like. The power status positions of managers and supervisors versus low-skilled, low-wage working women in developing nation cultures under such circumstances appears to suggest that it is no longer necessarily accusations of witchcraft against employers which is required but simply claims that a workplace or process of industrialisation is to blame, which is a haunting reflection of shifting status.
Obviously it is not necessarily income which determines dynamic cultural changes impacted by economic development, but particularly, changes in status for individuals. But under factory-working systems, which offer few developments or educational benefits, increases in wages, or improvements in working conditions for the poor, status remains unchanged, traditional superstitious belief systems are perhaps merely redirected to the process of industrialisation itself.
That most workers would prefer a day in a factory versus a day in the fields is probably true. It is the argument ham-fisted capitalists use over and over again. But the effects of globalised production makes it virtually impossible to make that choice over time. The production cycle makes certain that even the fields soon become a non-profitable option for most. Individuals do realize perhaps subconsciously that their filtered-sense of culture is being relentlessly manipulated and attacked by advertising and marketing, and technological changes which perhaps reveal themselves in hysterias like "The Monkey Man of India" or such events in shoe assembly plants which might require the visits and sacrifices of local witch doctors. It is a sense of powerlessness and perhaps an inability to adapt individual concepts of culture to new economic and process time orientation requirements invariably led by changing international trade dynamics.
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