Conflict emerges through an interactive process based on the search for and creation of shared meaning. The interactive process is accomplished through and rooted in people's perceptions, interpretations, expressions, and intentions, which all grow from and cycle back to their common sense knowledge. Thus an important working assumption from this perspective is the idea that a person's common sense and accumulated experience and knowledge are the primary basis of how they create, understand, and respond to conflict. Culture is rooted in the shared knowledge and schemes created and used by a set of people for perceiving, interpreting, expressing, and responding to social realities around them. Understanding the connection of social conflict and culture is not merely a question of sensitivity or of awareness, but a far more profound adventure of discovery and digging in the archaeology of accumulated shared knowledge common to a set of people.
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. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press. The Social Construction of Reality.