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What are we up to when we incorporate cultural concerns in our training? What do we mean by "culture" and how is it addressed? Who are we concerned about? What ultimately are our goals? Whose interests are served, both latent and direct, when culture enters the field of conflict resolution?
Three largely implicit premises seem to dominate the mainstream dispute resolution view of training about culture. First, we take a high view of the transferability of conflict resolution skills and processes. Second, we seem to assume that culture is an aspect of conflict resolution that can be reduced to technique, essentially through raising the level of sensitivity and skill of practitioners. Third, and a logical consequence of the technique orientation, much of what we do in terms of cultural training is aimed at empowering the professional and increasing the competence of the already trained.
My fundamental thesis is that we need to explore critically and at a much deeper level both the content and approach to conflict resolution training and its relationship to culture. I believe this is more readily accomplished if we move beyond the rhetoric of dispute resolution training, and what it purports to do, to a critical examination of training as a project, a socially constructed, educational phenomenon comprised of purpose, process, and content and inherently encompassing culture and ideology.
Stated bluntly, conflict resolution training in the dominant North American culture represents among other things the packaging, presentation, and selling of social knowledge. Whose knowledge, under what package, delivered through what mechanism, and received by what populations are all legitimate and necessary questions for investigation and study if we are to achieve a critical understanding of the training project.
Social conflict emerges and develops on the basis of the meaning and interpretation people involved attach to action and events. Social meaning is lodged in the accumulated knowledge, or what Schutz (1967) calls a person's "bank of knowledge". From this starting point, conflict is connected to meaning, meaning to knowledge, and knowledge is rooted in culture.
We must be careful not to push a single theoretical approach as the only mechanism for understanding social conflict. Experience, particularly from a practitioner's view, suggests the need for multidisciplinary perspectives (Moore 1986). However, in exploring the questions of culture and training, which I suggest is the packaging of social knowledge, a theoretical approach that places primary emphasis on the construction of meaning and the role of knowledge is especially justified.
Although my assumptions about conflict and culture may seem to be quite self-evident in some respects, I believe it helpful to clarify the basic working assumptions of my constructionist perspective:
Meaning is created through shared and accumulated knowledge. People from different cultural settings have developed many ways of creating and expressing as well as interpreting and handling conflict. Understanding conflict and developing appropriate models of handling it will necessarily be rooted in, and must respect and draw from, the cultural knowledge of a people.
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