Social domain theory: interpreting intercultural communication
Domain theory
Layder's model attempts to capture the social and temporal distancing of social relations from lived experience, while recognizing that, at the same time, every lived experience is embedded within the other domains.
The first of these social domains is that of 'psychobiography'. All human beings develop unique biographies in which 'personal feelings, attitudes and predispositions' contribute to a continuing selfhood, which is 'embedded in their daily routines and experiences' (Layder 1997: 2-3). Thus 'the notion of "psychobiography" points to the development of the self as a linked series of evolutionary transitions, or transformations in identity and personality at various significant junctures in the lives of individuals' (ibid.: 47).
The second social domain, which also focuses on human agency, is that of 'situated activity'. Despite the unique quality of our psychobiographies, human beings are pre-eminently social actors, much of whose life involves the negotiation of face-to-face interaction. 'Situated activity' refers to these experiences of social life.
The situated activity of face-to-face conduct, however, is itself embedded within what Layder identifies as the domain of 'social settings'. Here the focus shifts from agency - that is, what actors do and experience - to structures - the social context within which these interactions are situated. These are the physical and social contexts 'of social activities and specific social practices' (ibid.: 87), such as workplaces, schools or places of worship, and their routinized ways of doing things. Here, the resources of the cultural system are drawn on as actors interpret contexts, but, as discussed above, the practices they engage in will not be fully determined by the typical or predominant beliefs held in the society concerned.
This brings us to the domain which is most distant from actors' experiences. 'Contextual resources' refers to the anterior distributions of material and cultural capital which social actors inherit as a consequence of being born in a particular place at a particular time. While individuals have no choice about this, the distributions of these resources are systematically reproduced. This again entails a particular view of the relation between agency and structure, one in which each is regarded as possessing distinct properties, while they are also mutually influential.
We are not, of course, claiming that we experience these domains in this stratified way, as we live from moment to moment and day to day, but we nevertheless do want to insist that our lives are constantly shaped by all of them, and the relations between them, and that we are more aware of some of them than others. Structural domains involve institutional constraints and enablements that are themselves partly the product of the distribution and allocation of economic, political and cultural resources, which means that they may be opaquer to actors' knowledgeability. Actor knowledge is greater at the level of interaction. For example, 'Mrs Simpson' and the 'Indian student' are likely to be more aware of the choice of words each has used in their encounter than they are of the possible connections between their respective careers and the diplomatic or trading arrangements negotiated between politicians representing the United States and India in previous decades, which are themselves conditioned by long histories of imperialism, colonialism, conflict and conflict resolution.
'Culture', in this framework, infuses all of the domains, which are, in any case, 'completely interdependent' (Layder 1997: 77). Ideas available in the cultural system are known and responded to by individuals (psychobiography); utilized in interactions (situated activity); reinforced through routinized practices, whether explicitly articulated or not (social settings); and differentially available to different groups of people, both in themselves and as a result of inequitable distributions of material goods (contextual resources). As this is rather a dense presentation of these concepts, we shall attempt to exemplify them with reference to some actual experience.
