The Master Key to Intercultural Management

THE MASTER KEY

TO

INTERCULUTRAL MANAGEMENT

TRANSCULTURE

"Transculture" or the transcultural approach as an extension and an enhancement of the intercultural approach is the master key that unlocks any culture. It is a cultural superhighway and lingua franca destined for the ushering in and the sustainable management of the global age. The intercultural approach fits the age of the 20th century where cultural interfacings were still more overseeable. But in the 21st century the players will multiply and interfacings will be less overseeable and controllable. Therefore the world needs an approach to culture and its management that can deal will myriads of diversity and cultural diversity in particular simultaneously in a holistic way; a culture general approach that functions as an cultural autopilot to effectively navigate global diversity at all scales in all shapes, forms and types.

Diversity will increase as knowledge keeps increasing. Specializations and their need of integration will further augment. Diverse lifestyles and cultures will be the rule at every step, in the public and in the private sphere, in any institutional or organizational environment. It is impossible to prepare oneself cognitively for the innumerable interfacings of professional, national and personal cultural profiles. Therefore an approach, a sort of cultural master key or panacea for culture conflict prevention and cultural integration is imperative. The intercultural approach serves well for limited intercultural interfacings, where the backgrounds of the participants are intellectually controllable. But when myriads of cultures interface simultaneously and the interfaces become less transparent and foreseeable a more holistic approach is required.

This approach is of a more synthetic nature than the more analytical intercultural approach. It entails a growth and a movement from a more quantitative approach to a more qualitative approach that has the characteristics of a panacea which can be operationalized in order to manage otherwise unmanageable and uncontrollable scenarios, when culture specific remedies cannot provide the cure of cultural ills.

In order to discover such a panacea-like master key to culture with its myriads of diverse programming at the collective and the individual level, a deeper understanding of culture is required. From this deeper understanding a more highly evolved approach to culture can emerge. There are panacea like methods and instruments in physiology, where one can tune the organism in an optimum way so as to put it in the best possible state and condition for the maintenance and recovery of psychosomatic health. A normalized, coordinated and integrated terrain can constitute such a master-key to psychosomatic health. Conventional medicine can be compared to the intercultural approach. Both are effective when more predictable specific interventions are required.

In the domain of religion such a master-key of spiritual health might be the principle of love. So, in the spiritual domain as well as in the psychosomatic terrain there are panacea-like master-keys that go beyond specifics, capable of creating and restoring a spiritual-psychosomatic optimum state in the interest of life; optimal conditions for the threefold human spiritual-psychosomatic wholeness of man.

Is there a similar non-specific cultural master-key to culture that can address the issue holistically and synthetically without arduous and time consuming prior learning? That is the question to be investigated and answered:

In order to answer this question, the cultural recording or conditioning has to be considered in its holistic human context. Where is it located and what are the consequences of this location with regard to its more profound understanding and management. We consider it as a phenomenon of the mind and therefore tend to call it collective mental programming that differentiates groups of people. The mind is the superordinate level of the psychosomatic duality in our Western civilization. And neurophysiology has already identified a law that can be applied for the integration, management and control of this psyche-soma duality. It has the following attributes:

Structurally it postulates a hierarchy of higher and lower neurophysiologic levels. It implies that the psychological level of the twofold human constitution can - in analogy to the neurophysiologic principle - be said to integrate the somatic level.

Functionally the superordinate level of the hierarchy therefore subordinates its lower levels.

This law ensures that humans are hierarchically integrated into structural unity. The ereismatic (support) function of the extrapyramidal system probably supports this hierarchically integrated system into viable oneness and unity. This is a simplification but the two principles, that of functional subordination and structural integration and the ereismatic function of the extrapyramidal system can illustrate two features of interest – among others – which can play a role in the quest for the key to culture and its management.

On the premise, however, that neurophysiologically higher nervous centers govern lower ones, one can assume such hierarchical subordination, integration and control by the psychological level with regard to the somatic level. However, the psychological level with its mental component, or the mind, where cultural conditioning seems to be stored, would also require a superordinate centre for its functional subordination and integration. Yet, the psychosomatic duality of man which largely is a product of Western mainstream civilization seems to ignore such an additional level that would complement the psycho-somatic duality and perform a function of integration and control with regard to the latter, in line with the afore-referred to principle of functional subordination and structural integration identified by neurophysiologists in the first half of the past century.

Dr. Thérèse Brosse, the late French cardiologist, has dedicated her life as a scientist to the investigation and identification of such a third level of integration. This trinitary structural assumption of man’s constitution would boast the capability of integrating the psychological level with the mind as the carrier of culture and would therefore be a neurophysiological-psychological key to the management and control of cultural conditioning per se. That amounts to a non-specific panacea for the otherwise largely uncontrollable myriads of multidimensional features of cultural and other conditioned and natural human diversity which may escape a culture-analytical approach. It is a mental product of the same level as cultural conditioning itself. But in order to effectively control that level, a higher level of the human constitution needs to be operationalized, based on the referred to neurophysiologic principle which is used here as a likely psychological analogy.

There is cross-cultural evidence for the existence of that third quid. In religious world views, in Greek philosophy and in Eastern epistemologies the required missing link that has eluded Western mainstream perception can be traced. It would confirm the trinitary structure of man with a top bottom hierarchical control and integration logic. Instrumental investigation has also provided evidence of the validity of the trinitary assumption of man with the associated logic referred to. That means that there is indeed a panacea for culture conflict mediation, prevention and resolution that transcends mental intercultural reconfiguration of intercultural balances which are ephemeral and reversible by virtue of a resource that is structural and more sustainable due to its structural-functional properties. The management of specific culture traits has its use in specific cultural interaction and its limits due to its quantitative and mental preference which can both be enhanced and complemented by a qualitative, supramental approach which draws on a structural level beyond the mind and which – based on neurophysiologic analogy – impacts, controls and fosters the integration of the psychological level with the mind as the carrier of cultural conditioning. That resource is the agent which can provide a key to the management of culture per se, because it is that structural resource which can lead to the integration of the mind and thereby to cultural integration.

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