Intercultural competence as an aspect of the communicative ...

[…] (e.g. x culture values the elderly)’ (ibid) which, while on one hand instils the sense of
belonging, on the other hand contrasts the experience of one culture to that of others.
Summarizing different definitions with functional elements, Faulkner et al. (2006) point
that in this view, culture is a design for life, a tool to organize collective life and to deal
with everyday problems. It is then transmitted to other members, including immigrants, as
this design reduces the number of interpretations of ideas, individuals, and events and
thus helps organize the world. However, it is such simplified framework that causes
intercultural misunderstandings.
Finally, in the cognitive approach the means of organising the experience are not
something observable, rather, ‘culture is a computer programme, with the programme
differing from culture to culture’ (Lochtman, Kappel 2010: 13), similarly to how
Hofstede characterized culture – as a programming of the mind (Hofstede 1997). While
agreeing that behaviourist and functional approaches can help students better understand
a foreign culture and predict some cultural behaviour and also heighten their awareness of
other culture, anthropologists believe that these approaches rely too much on empiricism
which might prevent, rather than promote, understanding. The view is that not everything
that is present in a culture and globally shared is observable.
For Goodenough (1964), who is one of the main representatives of cognitive
theories of culture (influenced by structural linguistic), culture is not static in its nature
and it is not only comprised of ‘things, people, behavior, or emotions’ (p 36).
Goodenough sees culture as a combination of all these things – the ‘model of perceiving,
relating, and otherwise interpreting’ (p. 36) things, people, behaviours, emotions. An
important view here is that culture is represented as a guiding and monitoring aspect of
relationships between individuals, what has been named ‘the socially transmitted
information’ (Cronk 1999: 12 in Faulkner et al. 2006: 34).
In more recent cognitive theories of culture, knowledge is still seen as the most
important element, since individuals need to possess it ‘in order to act as they do, make
the things they make, interpret their experiences in the distinctive way they do’ (Holland,
Quinn 1987: 4).
The criticism against cognitive theories of culture is aimed at their too narrow a
focus on internal mental processes and separation of them from external interactions. The
more recent theories are therefore taking into account relationship between those internal
processes and meanings that are shared in a society. Another criticism is that cognitive
theories present a static image of culture. Some changes have been made in regard to this
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