Transcultural Competence and Relational Costs

Simple, discrete and dyadic exchange transactions cannot survive in societal interactions and their corresponding networks, and it is only their docking on cultural events of all types, that is, their transformation into relational transactions, that paves the way for economic processes of value creation. In this regard, culture is not to be understood as a superstructure or negative consequence of economic development. The relationalisation of economic codings is intertwined with that of societal and cultural codings and they spur one another on; it is a perpetual, self-unfolding process, the constantly growing complexity of which, stemming from commonality and difference, can be found today in the interactions between regional and global economic value creation and the connections between the regional and global worlds of cultural events. It is the respective system and organisation-specific codings that lend these events a cultural meaning, and which constitute the network of “signifying” (Hall in Representation: Cultural representation and signifying practices. Sage, 1997) events for a given transaction. And it is the successful structural couplings within this diversity of codings that determine the number of practical opportunities for either the discovery of existent commonalities or the emergence of new ones, no matter how fragile they may initially be. But the exchange of goods is only one side of the evolving transnational and global economy; the cooperation between its actors under conditions of growing cultural complexity as the relation between commonality and diversity is the other.