Intercultural Communication 9781501500060, 9781501510397

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Ling Chen (Ed.) Intercultural Communication

Handbooks of Communication Science

Edited by Peter J. Schulz and Paul Cobley

Volume 9

Intercultural Communication Edited by Ling Chen

The publication of this series has been partly funded by the Università della Svizzera italiana – University of Lugano. This volume has received support from the School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University, in the form of editorial assistantship.

ISBN 978-1-5015-1039-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0006-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0011-4 ISSN 2199-6288 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin Cover image: Oliver Rossi/Photographer’s Choice RF/Gettyimages Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series This volume is part of the series Handbooks of Communication Science, published from 2012 onwards by de Gruyter Mouton. When our generation of scholars was in their undergraduate years, and one happened to be studying communication, a series like this one was hard to imagine. There was, in fact, such a dearth of basic and reference literature that trying to make one’s way in communication studies as our generation did would be unimaginable to today’s undergraduates in the field. In truth, there was simply nothing much to turn to when you needed to cast a first glance at the key objects in the field of communication. The situation in the United States was slightly different; nevertheless, it is only within the last generation that the basic literature has really proliferated there. What one did when looking for an overview or just a quick reference was to turn to social science books in general, or to the handbooks or textbooks from the neighbouring disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, linguistics, and probably other fields. That situation has changed dramatically. There are more textbooks available on some subjects than even the most industrious undergraduate can read. The representative key multi-volume International Encyclopedia of Communication has now been available for some years. Overviews of subfields of communication exist in abundance. There is no longer a dearth for the curious undergraduate, who might nevertheless overlook the abundance of printed material and Google whatever he or she wants to know, to find a suitable Wikipedia entry within seconds. ‘Overview literature’ in an academic discipline serves to draw a balance. There has been a demand and a necessity to draw that balance in the field of communication and it is an indicator of the maturing of the discipline. Our project of a multi-volume series of Handbooks of Communication Science is a part of this coming-of-age movement of the field. It is certainly one of the largest endeavours of its kind within communication sciences, with almost two dozen volumes already planned. But it is also unique in its combination of several things. The series is a major publishing venture which aims to offer a portrait of the current state of the art in the study of communication. But it seeks to do more than just assemble our knowledge of communication structures and processes; it seeks to integrate this knowledge. It does so by offering comprehensive articles in all the volumes instead of small entries in the style of an encyclopedia. An extensive index in each Handbook in the series, serves the encyclopedic task of finding relevant specific pieces of information. There are already several handbooks in sub-disciplines of communication sciences such as political communication, methodology, organisational communication – but none so far has tried to comprehensively cover the discipline as a whole. DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-202

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Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series

For all that it is maturing, communication as a discipline is still young and one of its benefits is that it derives its theories and methods from a great variety of work in other, and often older, disciplines. One consequence of this is that there is a variety of approaches and traditions in the field. For the Handbooks in this series, this has created two necessities: commitment to a pluralism of approaches, and a commitment to honour the scholarly traditions of current work and its intellectual roots in the knowledge in earlier times. There is really no single object of communication sciences. However, if one were to posit one possible object it might be the human communicative act – often conceived as “someone communicates something to someone else.” This is the departure point for much study of communication and, in consonance with such study, it is also the departure point for this series of Handbooks. As such, the series does not attempt to adopt the untenable position of understanding communication sciences as the study of everything that can be conceived as communicating. Rather, while acknowledging that the study of communication must be multifaceted or fragmented, it also recognizes two very general approaches to communication which can be distinguished as: a) the semiotic or linguistic approach associated particularly with the humanities and developed especially where the Romance languages have been dominant and b) a quantitative approach associated with the hard and the social sciences and developed, especially, within an Anglo-German tradition. Although the relationship between these two approaches and between theory and research has not always been straightforward, the series does not privilege one above the other. In being committed to a plurality of approaches it assumes that different camps have something to tell each other. In this way, the Handbooks aspire to be relevant for all approaches to communication. The specific designation “communication science” for the Handbooks should be taken to indicate this commitment to plurality; like “the study of communication”, it merely designates the disciplined, methodologically informed, institutionalized study of (human) communication. On an operational level, the series aims at meeting the needs of undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and researchers across the area of communication studies. Integrating knowledge of communication structures and processes, it is dedicated to cultural and epistemological diversity, covering work originating from around the globe and applying very different scholarly approaches. To this end, the series is divided into 6 sections: “Theories and Models of Communication”, “Messages, Codes and Channels”, “Mode of Address, Communicative Situations and Contexts”, “Methodologies”, “Application areas” and “Futures”. As readers will see, the first four sections are fixed; yet it is in the nature of our field that the “Application areas” will expand. It is inevitable that the futures for the field promise to be intriguing with their proximity to the key concerns of human existence on this planet (and even beyond), with the continuing prospect in communication sciences that that future is increasingly susceptible of prediction.

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Note: administration on this series has been funded by the Università della Svizzera italiana – University of Lugano. Thanks go to the president of the university, Professor Piero Martinoli, as well as to the administration director, Albino Zgraggen. Peter J. Schulz, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano Paul Cobley, Middlesex University, London

Contents Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series

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Introduction

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Ling Chen Cultures, communication, and contexts of intercultural communication

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Part I. History, perspectives and theories

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John Baldwin Murky waters: Histories of intercultural communication research

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Uttaran Dutta and Judith N. Martin Theoretical perspectives on communication and cultures

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Yoshitaka Miike Non-Western theories of communication: Indigenous ideas and 67 insights George A. Barnett and Ke Jiang Issues in intercultural communication: A semantic network analysis

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Bradford ‘J’ Hall Cultural communication: Advancing understanding in a multi-cultural 119 world

Part II. Cross cultural comparison

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Stella Ting-Toomey and Tenzin Dorjee Multifaceted identity approaches and cross-cultural communication styles: 141 Selective overview and future directions

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Tae-Seop Lim Verbal communication across cultures

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Mary Bresnahan and Yi Zhu Interpersonal communication and relationships across cultures

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Hyisung C. Hwang and David Matsumoto 219 10 Emotion display and expression Valerie Manusov 11 A cultured look at nonverbal cues

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Deborah A. Cai and Edward L. Fink 12 What’s past is prologue: Lessons from conflict, communication, and culture 261 research from half a century ago Robert M. McCann, Howard Giles and Hiroshi Ota 289 13 Aging and communication across cultures Mohan J. Dutta 14 Culture-centered communication and social change: Listening and 309 participation to transform communication inequalities

Part III. Intercultural encounter James W. Neuliep 15 Ethnocentrism and intercultural communication

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Guo-Ming Chen 16 Issues in the conceptualization of intercultural communication 349 competence Jennifer Kienzle and Jordan Soliz 369 17 Intergroup communication Young Yun Kim 18 Interethnic communication: An interdisciplinary overview Anne-Marie Søderberg 19 Experience and cultural learning in global business contexts Shuang Liu 20 Cross-cultural adaptation: An identity approach Elisabeth Gareis 21 Intercultural friendship and communication

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Susan C. Baker, Bernadette M. Watson and Cindy Gallois 22 Exploring intercultural communication problems in health care with a 481 communication accommodation competence approach

Part IV. Interactions and exchange between cultures Michael G. Elasmar 23 Cross-border mediated messages

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Yunying Zhang 24 Stereotyping and Communication

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Panagiotis Sakellariou 25 Translation as intercultural communication: Survey and analysis

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Jian Wang 26 Consuming nations − Brand nationality in the global marketplace: A 581 Review Eddy S. Ng and Waheeda Lillevik 27 Intercultural communication in the world of business

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Robert Shuter 28 Intercultural new media studies: Still the next frontier in intercultural 617 communication Biographical notes Index

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1 Cultures, communication, and contexts of intercultural communication Abstract: As the volume overview, this chapter delineates the scope of this handbook with an eye on the up-to-date development of intercultural communication as a field of study and identifies major topics and main issues with related sub-/ fields. With the understanding that human communication is a process with varied degree of mediation, a key conceptualization matter is to clarify the affinity of and distinction between the key terms of culture and cultures, so the two are not confounded or taken as interchangeable. Organization of the handbook is explained to include four largely domain-based parts, unfolding into twenty-eight topic-based chapters and showcasing the current state of art in intercultural communication research. A brief, chapter by chapter, overview of the content is presented, followed by a concluding note on topics awaiting study for future reference. Keywords: culture, communication, intercultural communication, cross cultural communication

1 Cultures and intercultural communication: The scope and topics Culture is an ever-present part of any communication activity, yet is also often taken for granted. It is nevertheless though not always influential with a fluid and encompassing nature. Scholars from different disciplines with diverse perspectives have long taken interest in culture and communication, approaching and studying the subject in different ways, recognizing the relationship as a process of interaction at multiple levels. In keeping with its interdisciplinary root, communication scholars have carried out their exploration with more of a communication focus while building upon and extended from earlier works in human science and humanities. The study of intercultural communication (IC) is thus also quite interdisciplinary in nature. This volume aims to take stock of the current state of scholarship in this study area, where we stand and where we are going with respect to IC research. Scholars from communication and other disciplines are invited to contribute and, together, provide an inclusive state of art overview. IC studies in the broad sense as a subject area are earlier classified on base of two considerations (Asante & Gudykunst 1988), the objective of research (cross cultural comparison or understanding intercultural interaction) and the context of communication (interpersonal or mass media). This approach is adopted here with DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-001

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modification to be in line with the current literature, along with the classification of cross cultural communication and intercultural communication. With respect to the research objective, this volume covers both cross cultural communication – studies of communication practices across cultures for comparison and learning the connection between culture and communication in different societies, and intercultural communication in a narrow sense as a particular phenomenon, i.e., studies of communication activities involving parties of different cultural backgrounds. Media convergence as a result of information and communication technology advancement in recent decades has led to reconceptualization of communication to account for new forms involving use of new, or newer, media alongside the older and basic forms. One all-inclusive conceptualization treats human communication as a process with three degrees of mediation – face to face (or embodied) communication as the most basic form enabled by human body (mediation of the first degree), technically reproduced mass communication enabled by modern technologies (mediation of the second degree), and networked communication (of any source-receiver configurations) facilitated by digital technologies (mediation of the third degree, Jensen 2011). This line of thinking turns away from the dichotomous perspective (e.g., human vs. artifact, face-to-face vs mediated communication) to integrate all elements as well as forms into one process and helps in laying out the scope of this handbook with respect to the context of communication. Chapters and works covered by the chapters in this volume are mostly about (embodied and/or networked) communication between individuals. Scholarship about mass communication is selectively discussed, insofar as a communicative practice specifically involves people, as individuals or in collectives, in making sense and generating meaning. Many aspects associated with mass communication system or structures are beyond the scope here and touched upon only when necessary for understanding communicators as cultural members. Central to IC research is the notion of culture and its relationship with communication, the embodied, mass, or networked process of meaning creation, sense making, as well as message interpretation and outcome production. All this may differ across cultures and impact communicators in intercultural communication. Our focus is on communication practices that bear the hallmark of a culture as broadly defined and on cultural practices that affect or are affected by the communication process in part or in whole. The discussion here will relate communication to culture at various levels (national, regional, local or ethnic, and so on) (e.g., Belay 1995) or vice versa. For this reason, the literature on global/international communication and development communication is largely left out – even though it may be quite relevant to the fields, culture is not a central concern in much of the related research (but c.f., Mowlana 2014). An exception is Chapter 14 that is on culture centered approach to social change. Issues include perspective of the study (etic or emic) and role of culture (part or whole) in terms of methodology, importance of particular aspect or element (cul-

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tural comparison, identity and identification, power and control, etc.) in theorization, and understanding of related altitudes and actions in interaction (prejudice, stereotyping). A different topic in IC is the focus of each chapter to be explained in section 3 after conceptual clarifications discussed next.

2 Culture and cultures 1 Culture in this handbook broadly refers to the human phenomenon that has been fascinating scholars throughout the intellectual history implicitly or explicitly. Scholars and thinkers have approached the subject from many angles and provided numerous definitions. The conception of culture with all the nuance, richness and complexity commonly identifies it as a symbolic, thus communicative process, such that culture and communication, presumably to a large extent, produce and are constitutive of each other. While a definition is not necessary for the current volume with contributions of different perspectives and approaches, a general description helps delineate the scope of our discussion. Of the vast body of works on or closely related to culture, one distinction can be made that separates two parallel though somewhat overlapping domains of interest, interest in culture as a human phenomenon or as a social process2. Although the object of interest is the same symbolic process – every, and any, social process is by nature a human phenomenon, and, given the social nature of human beings, a human phenomenon would involve social processes of some sort, the study attention is on different aspects of culture. The interest in culture as human phenomenon and related inquiries is pursued for learning of (fundamental) characteristics common to the human race so as to understand advancement of human civilization in the struggle to survive and thrive in this and that environment. From this perspective, culture is understood through cultures, each being established in a natural and social environment and all involve material, relational and spiritual experience of people as cultural members. Also of interest to this domain are ways cultural commonality and differences are perceived or understood, how these affect people as they meet and interact across cultures, and how these impact respective cultures. The study of culture as human phenomenon necessitates cross cultural comparison to gain insight to the “software of mind” (Hofstede 2001), or the “structure of consciousness” (Gebser 1985), that describes culture and also serves as the blue print of cultures. The focus of attention is on cultures, each being shaped by and resulting from human adaptation to a unique environment and all combined to reveal a complete picture of culture and human development.

1 This part is built on and adapted from an earlier article (Chen 2016). 2 The term culture is also used to refer to a particular category of human activity, as in cultural activities, in contrast to other categories such as economic or political activities, etc.

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The interest in culture as social process and related inquires, on the other hand, is concerned with culture that is meaningful as a whole, with a host of complex relationships that create a general structure enabling and constraining behaviors and activities. All this produces culture, or society, and makes sense in and only in its social context at any level it happens to be (global, regional, societal, etc.). From this perspective, the aspect of culture as human phenomenon is but one of many elements in the social process. For the study of culture as social process, given the focus on the social structure and relationships, especially power structure and relationships that is always embedded in a social context (Hall 1988), cross cultural comparison is basically beside the point, even though cultural differences are taken as given since societies (thus social contexts) differ – although one may also argue that it is implied conceptually and empirically, for the knowledge gained naturally becomes a base for comparison, this issue however is for another place. The focus of attention for this line of study is on culture, the social system (and process) that is constituted with human activities and relationships as a way of life with an ideal, or “the state or process of human perfection” (Williams 1961/ 2001: 43), which can be a region within a country, a society, a geographical region or the world as an entity under study. Whichever is the case, culture generally takes shape after the dominant economic and political system of the society (Bourdieu 1977) with historical significance going forward and impacts other life domains aside from the political and the economic. In this vein, cultural studies focus on media and analyze media’s role in a society or region; global communication studies examine media and culture that may be of transnational, transcultural, international and interregional level and study their influence on the area covered; neither would much heed cultural difference or commonality as a matter of interest, nor attend to cultural variations as a force of consequence. At the same time, there are a few shared assumptions. Culture is recognized as the product of human activities and of history in its totality, that it is dynamic and that a culture contains enduring values/ideals, evolving beliefs over time, and competing ideas at any point in time. Enduring values reveal commonalities and differences of cultures as each survives and develops in their respective environment, in the common human struggle to survive and to thrive. The environment presents a few universal problems to all cultures alike, which have to be resolved and have been done in several ways; these solutions are a base of cultural variation (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck 1961). All this is part of a human phenomenon that is called culture and is also identifiable in a particular society regarded as a particular culture, and will be the focus of our discussion in this handbook. Scholars study intercultural communication as a process of interaction between culture and communication, an area quite interdisciplinary in nature. Cognizant of the role of culture(s) in communication, a major interest is cross-cultural comparison of communication practices and patterns as integral parts of human activities that may vary from culture to culture. Scholars view culture as a human

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phenomenon, and specific cultures or subcultures as social entities, and they attempt to identify commonality in the formation and components of culture, and to uncover various manifestations of culture in different contexts at all levels, from the individual to organizational, national, and global. They study ways communication reflects, constitutes, and changes a culture and its cultural institutions. Also of interest are how communication proceeds between people of diverse cultural backgrounds, at individual and at group levels, how culture interplays with social dominance and intercultural awareness, and how to mitigate adverse effects or to identify and understand the key issues structural or otherwise in intercultural communication.

3 Organization of chapters This handbook is divided into four parts. The first part covers fundamentals, of communication and culture, and includes five chapters. The second part is organized around the centrality of culture in communication by following research topics in cross cultural communication as a major direction in intercultural communication studies comparing cultures. Part two includes eight chapters that cover studies comparing cultures. Another major direction in intercultural communication is communication between cultures at different levels, the narrow sense of intercultural communication. This third part has eight chapters, which covers research on communication between cultures mostly at the level of individuals interacting in day-to-day contexts. The fourth part has six chapters and directs at research on communication between cultures at collective levels, comprised of individuals. Subsections below describe each chapter in each of the four parts.

3.1 Part I: History, perspectives and theories After this opening introduction, Chapter 2, by John Baldwin, discusses the history of IC studies with a view on competing descriptions of research and scholarship. The author presents and contrasts varied takes of the history by describing the commonly received version alongside alternative descriptions. This treatment brings forth the notion of “histories” and highlights the fact that there have been alternative viewpoints and perspective of research on intercultural communication. Somehow echoing this very notion of the alternative, Chapter 3, by Uttaran Dutta and Judith Martin, offers an overview of contemporary theoretical perspectives based on works published in the proceeding five years (up to 2015) in well recognized journals. The authors identify the meta-theoretical perspectives, related research context, focus and target cultural group of the publications. The chapter is a review of research approaches utilized and possible perspectives that are absent

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from the literature. Chapter 4, by Yoshitake Maiike, discusses Non-Western scholarship about communication, as possible cultural contrasts in their understanding of human communication. Afrocentric and Asiacentric theories are selected on base of ontological worldviews, epistemological foundations, or axiological approaches. The author aims to showcase indigenously developed insights and wisdom from Africa and Asia to learn about cultures, humans and communication. In Chapter 5, George Barnett and Ke Jiang provide a survey of topics in current research published in academic journals. By conducting a semantic network analysis of works in recent fifteen years, the authors attempt to identify connections among concepts and topics from a broad range of searchers. This approach helps discern some critical issues facing the field of intercultural communication research and identify research priorities and foci. Chapter 6 is on Cultural Communication, a particular approach in the ethnography of communication tradition. Approaching speech communities to uncover cultural patterns in everyday activities as symbolic systems for people in the cultural community, Brad Hall’s overview discusses four primary domains that Cultural Communication research works contribute to our understanding of a culture and how members make sense of their life world, in Feelings, Actions, Identities, and Relationships (FAIR), covering research in this area mostly in the past two decades or so.

3.2 Part II: Cross cultural comparison Part II includes eight chapters that cover topics relating to the role of culture in communication. Most chapters introduce current works for comparison of communication practice across cultures, directly or indirectly, and review studies examining similarities and differences between specific cultures in general or in specific situations, each with attention on one aspect or area of intercultural communication – about ways communication reflects, constitutes, and changes culture and cultural institutions and how the latter constrain, enable and guide communication. An exception is Chapter 9, on relationship between persons from different cultures. Chapter 7, by Stella Ting-Toomey and Tenzin Dorjee, focuses on communication styles across cultures in light of the intimately related identity matters, a prominent culture-related topic in the past two decades or so. The discussion proceeds to review major works on culture-specific communication patterns, as an expression of cultural identity, and calls for integration of intercultural and intergroup perspectives of communication as well as of verbal and nonverbal aspects in our research. The discussion highlights an IC research trend two decades in the making that takes into account the omnipresence of cultural identity in communication. Chapter 8, by Tae-Seop Lim, is on language use and verbal communication across cultures. Lim recounts the extant scholarship to explicate the relationship between culture and verbal communication across cultures and presents an up-to-date re-

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view of studies on linguistic practices and verbal communication styles in different cultures. The discussion convers sociolinguistic research of contrastive speech features, functions, and styles in verbal interaction and synthesizes studies across disciplines that have explored general and specific cultural influence, in interaction with other factors, on verbal communication behaviors. Chapter 9 is on interpersonal communication and relationships, contributed by Mary Bresnahan and Yi Zhu. Rather than cultural comparison, the authors identify challenges two people from different cultures may face in the process of forming and building a relationship and review ways available studies have examined psychological, relational, contextual, and discourse or communicative strategies in interpersonal communication, which covers phenomena such as face, self-disclosure, and intercultural couples. Chapter 10 attends to emotion display and expression and is contributed by Hyisung Hwang and David Matsumoto. The two authors focus on facial expressions as emotional display through a most prevalent channel. The discussion proceeds on the premise of innate nature of certain emotions as is supported by the evolutionary theory of Darwin and reviews extant research to identify probable cultural influence on emotion expression and displaying patterns. Cultural influences have been evidenced from many cultures the research examined. Chapter 11 is contributed by Valerie Manusov. The author discusses nonverbal cues as signs in communication. Beginning with primary nonverbal cues (e.g., space, physical appearance, and time) and common use such as expression of emotion, identity displays, and relational messages, the chapter reviews works on the role of culture in nonverbal communication, describes likely challenges to people from different cultural groups interacting with one another, and points to implications to intercultural communication. Chapter 12 takes up intercultural conflict and related research. Deborah Cai and Edward Fink offer a review from a historical approach to identify issues and insights from decades ago in research related to culture, communication and conflict versus peace. The concerns then – over violence prevention, peace attainment, prejudice and attitude change, and hostility reduction, related to communication and conflict – were compared to current research focus so as to see what has changed and what continues to attract research interest. Chapter 13 is on aging and communication across cultures. The authors, Robert McCann, Howard Giles, and Hiroshi Ota, provide an overview of current research around critical issues such as age stereotypes, the changing roles of family and older person norms, intra- and intergenerational communication perceptions in general, and the subjective health implications of intra- and intergenerational communication. Particular attention is given to problems involving younger adults in communication with older adults, as well as to intergenerational communication in the workplace. Mohan Dutta contributes to Chapter 14 on culture-centered communication and social change. The author treats the role of communication in glob-

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al social change processes as integral to community-grounded solutions that are informed by local aspirations. The discussion focuses on the lived experiences of cultural communities at the global margins/South, using health related issues as an exemplar, and deliberates how they co-construct and communicate visions of change to their culture, and how this allows them to carry out transformative projects through participation.

3.3 Part III: Intercultural encounter People interact and communicate with one another in everyday activities and do so as individuals from different cultures. They also do this on behalf of, (or taken) as a representative of a group or a collective such as organization, ethnic group, community, or society – often done through many forms of communication between societies or groups. A central concern of intercultural communication about this is how communication takes place between people of diverse cultural backgrounds in such communication. A related concern is what the role of culture is as seen in cultures, which are all different in some ways and similar in others. Part III and Part IV cover research on intercultural encounters in exploration of related issues and analysis of factors that may block, hinder, facilitate or promote intercultural communication at both individual and collective levels. Part III attends to works about individuals’ (embodied or networked) communication practice, whereas Part IV is more on communication by groups, or collectives, comprised of individuals who perceivably communicate on their behalf with any degree of mediation. Eight chapters (15–22) in Part III review studies mostly about ways individual communicators manage to negotiate the situation or to mitigate adverse effects, and how at this level of contact culture interplays with many other factors, including social factors such as social dominance, and individual factors such as prejudice or intercultural awareness, or largely encompassing factors such as cultural identity/identification. At this level, communication tends to proceed with the first degree of mediation, or is done face to face, although by no means exclusively. Chapter 15 is written by James Neuliup. The author takes up the topic of ethnocentrism, a central theoretical concept in the study of intergroup relations and intercultural communication. Noting the functions of ethnocentrism and its negative impact, Neuliup traces the history of the relevant social scientific research, reviews current theories, and discusses related studies, particularly the few of those that focus on its measurement and studies of ethnocentrism in different intercultural contexts. Chapter 16 covers the topic of intercultural communication competence (ICC). Guo-Ming Chen reviews major works that focus and are developed from that in interpersonal communication research, providing a comprehensive examination of the fundamental issues and major positions in theory and research, and aims to address issues related to its conceptualization, operationalization, as

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well as application emerging with the impact of technological development and globalization. The discussion unfolds around six issues: meaning of ICC, trait vs. state, effectiveness vs. appropriateness, universal vs. culturally specific, knowledge vs. performance, and components and models of ICC. The author also offers suggestions and points to future directions. Chapter 17 is written by Jennifer Kienzle and Jordan Soliz. The authors concentrate on intergroup communication for relevance to and insight about intercultural communication. The chapter follows the social identity and intergroup research tradition to highlight the theorization as well as many studies of intergroup contacts. The discussion includes considerations of contexts, conditions, and communicative processes, and then deliberates how each influences intergroup contacts and how, as a result of such contact, differential outcomes may come about. Chapter 18 is devoted to interethnic communication. In this chapter, Young Kim outlines major works in social science that show the complexity of the topic. On this base, the author describes the communicator, the situation and the environment as three contextual levels of interethnic communication. The chapter focuses on everyday communication practices that associate or disassociate ethnic groups and people; the discussion connects interethnic interactions with the identity factors of inclusivity and security, the situation factors of ethnic proximity, sharing of goal structure, and personal network integration, and the environment factors of institutional equity, ingroup strength, and environmental stress. Chapter 19 deals with the topic of intercultural experience and cultural learning. With the focus on global business as the context and considering increasingly diverse populations (including bi-cultural and bi-lingual individuals), Anne-Marie Søderberg discusses relevant research with the aim for a deeper understanding of Cultural Others, further enhancing cultural self-awareness, and the ability to bridge multiple cultures. The studies covered communication situations with first or third degree of mediation between individuals and work teams. The author notes that intercultural experiences may create learning motivation for the cultural learning to proceed on base of long-held values and cognitive patterns; the learning may be better facilitated with a coach or instructor to transform the experience into cultural learning. Chapter 20 is devoted to identities communication in cross cultural adaptation given the changed and changing migration landscape. Shuang Liu attends to works on immigrants’ and sojourners’ experiences of communicating and negotiating their cultural and ethnic identities in a host culture context. Building on classical and recent theories on identity and identity negotiation across disciplines, the author considers especially adaptation contexts with varied, complex intra- and intergroup relations, alongside related identity negotiation strategies, and explores disparate outcomes as a result. The chapter ponders on bicultural identity and biculturalism and submits that acculturation identity negotiation is an ongoing process with adaptable outcomes and no fixed trajectories. The author calls for attention to the fluid nature of identity processes as a focus for future

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research approach and to issues associated with aging in immigrants and cross cultural adaptation. Chapter 21 covers work on intercultural friendship and communication. Elisabeth Gareis surveys the extant literature on intercultural friendship, particularly between international and domestic students, that being a most studied type and informative of intercultural friendship. Studies have identified benefits of friendship in intercultural relations and examined such influencing factors of intercultural friendship formation, as cultural similarity and differences in friendship conceptualizations, culture-general and culture-specific communication skills, friendship motivations, attitudes, and identity. In Chapter 22, Susan Baker, Bernadette Watson, and Cindy Gallois explore intercultural communication problems in health and health care situations. Taking a communication accommodation competence approach, the authors contend that intergroup issues may often be more salient and carry greater impact than interpersonal issues in this context. Informed by Communication Accommodation Theory and related studies, the authors argue for giving considerations to both in intercultural health communication training programs.

3.4 Part IV: Interactions and exchange between cultures Part IV is comprised of the remaining six chapters and covers research topics mostly addressing exchange and interactions between cultures as such, whereby intercultural communication occur largely at collective levels. Intercultural communication takes place mostly through the second degree mediation as in mass communication of different forms, even though not without involvement of individuals with an active or passive role. Chapter 23 opens Part IV with discussion of works on cross-border mediated messages in all forms of communication from early-day balloons to current day social media. From a historic viewpoint, Michael Elasmar details geopolitical and technological factors motivating the growth of cross-border mediated communication, reflects on the concerns over related societal and cultural impacts, and discusses major theoretical frameworks for understanding the process and influence of cross-border mediated messages. The author also contemplates the challenges for researchers to account for roles of transnational communication with the emerging technologies. Chapter 24 is on the topic of stereotyping and (intercultural) communication. Yunying Zhang provides an extensive overview of a vast body of works about cultural and ethnic groups across disciplines. The chapter begins with major definitions and approaches to stereotypes, follows a process model of stereotype communication to examine stereotyping as communication, and discusses the role of communication in different contexts of stereotype control and possible changes to stereotypes and how these are also messages. The chapter last identifies gaps for future research to fill and calls for more attention to stereotype

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communication at others than only intrapersonal levels, including interpersonal, small group, organizational/institutional, and societal/cultural levels. In Chapter 25, Panagiotis Sakellariou surveys studies of intercultural communication and translational action and briefly introduces the issue of culture in the translation study from 1950s up to now. The chapter proceeds to the development of research perspectives and notes changes of focus over time and evolution of stands. The author relates the earlier focus on texts, more recent attention on the mediation of translation, and, of late, increasing diversity in translation’s potential as a means of intercultural communication. Chapter 26 takes up the topic of brand national identity and consumer advocacy. The author, Jian Wang, places country image perceptions of foreign publics in the context of international relations and explores country-based attributes and characteristics in the consumption process with an eye on implications for corporate and brand reputation. The chapter reviews extant studies across disciplines to generate conceptual insights for an integrated understanding of the dynamics of national identity communication in consumption. The discussion considers the meaning of national identity, in terms of consumption that is itself communicative, and dissects the notion of brand nationality, the complex and subjectively perceived association between a brand and a country, which can be understood in three levels. Chapter 27 is devoted to intercultural communication related to business. Eddy Ng and Waheeda Lillevik focus on works about intercultural communication issues in business, related to international trade, foreign market expansion, and multinational firms. The discussion develops around intercultural competence that is based on conceptual understanding of culture and communication. The studies reviewed bring home the importance of effective intercultural communication to international business, including leadership and management of business negation, multicultural workforce, and foreign subsidiaries. Chapter 28 discusses intercultural communication research in today’s multiple media environments. Robert Shuter continues from an earlier project on intercultural new media studies (INMS), what he sees as the next frontier in intercultural communication. This chapter expands from the parameters of INMS, the new sub-field, to include most up-to-date development in a 21st century disciplinary research focus and its implications for intercultural communication theory and praxis.

4 Final words To conclude, the twenty-eight chapters in this handbook has covered most current research and scholarship in IC studies. What have become clear from going through the chapters are the somewhat changing perspectives in the research. In comparison to earlier years, we see welcoming development of broader participation in the intellectual endeavors. Scholars and researchers from other than west-

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ern cultures have been part of IC communication studies for decades, but their involvement and contribution are only just becoming visible and recognized. That being the case, their works remain far from sufficiently representative of available perspectives, which is a goal for the field as a whole. Also, IC research in recent decades has seen attention to even more real life situations, from aging, health and healthcare, to business, social change, and to new media. As is often the case, consideration of the limit of space and scope largely precludes more chapters for works related to mass communication, that with mediation of the second degree. The few chapters that discuss works on practices of communication so mediated and more works not included (e.g., Kim 2011) have shown that many aspects of mass communication are of ample relevance to intercultural communication and promise to open fruitful research directions for needed insight. In relation to the last point, some IC aspects that have been much less visited and are much less understood, as all contributors point out in respective chapters about each topic. A few additional, general examples stand out calling for our attention. Comparative studies are not readily available regarding possible cultural influence on digital-technology-facilitated-networked communication or on cross cultural adaptation. The former is more or less expected as we are facing a rather recent phenomenon. The latter however reveals a gap in the research on a well visited topic, which has gained new urgency recently because of the much broader involvement of diverse peoples in migrancy and various cross boarder settlement, with occurrence in greater frequency as well as larger scale. Additionally, the now rather common phenomenon of volunteering activities across cultures and in various intercultural events (e.g., Kramer, Lewis & Gossett 2015) is awaiting IC research. Also, with the media convergence along with greater than ever before access and exposure to foreign entertainment programs, para-social interactions between audiences and media characters from different cultures have emerged as a potential virtual context for intercultural communication and cultural learning. Last, another remaining issue in IC research to be addressed is for us to better understand the interaction between cultural factors and other social factors, such as social status or power, economic position (class), and particularly, spiritual aspects of life (i.e., faith and religion) and so on. Future studies need to strive for gaining much better understanding of how these are all part of human culture and yet distinct in their influence and communication. Acknowledgement: The author is grateful for the support of Professors Kara Chan and Yu Huang.

5 References Asante, Molefi Kete & William B. Gudykunst. 1988. Preface. In Molefi Kete Asante & William B. Gudykunst (eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication, 7–13. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Belay, Getinet. 1995. The (re)construction and negotiation of cultural identities in the age of globalization. In Hartmut B. Mokros (ed.), Interaction and identity: Information and behavior, 319–346. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chen, Ling. 2016. Learning the culture of a people: Chinese communication as an example. Intercultural Communication Studies 25. 53–65. Gebser, Jean. 1985. The ever-present origin (tran. N. Barstad with A. Mickunas). Athens: Ohio University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1988. New ethnicities. In Kobena Mercer (ed.), Black film, British cinema (ICA Documents No. 7), 27–31. London: A BFI Production Special. Hofstede, Geertz. 2001. Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. 2 nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Jensen, Klaus Bruhn. 2011. Meta-media and meta-communication – revisiting the concept of genre in the digital media environment. MedieKultur − Journal of Media and Communication Research 51. 8–21. Available at http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/mediekultur/article/ view/4032/5031 Kim, Youna. 2011. Female cosmopolitanism? Media talk and identity of transnational Asian women. Communication Theory 21. 279–298. Kluckhohn, Florence Rockwood & Fred L. Strodtbeck. 1961. Variations in value orientations. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson. Kramer, Michael W., Laurie K. Lewis & Lori M. Gossett (eds.). 2015. Volunteering and communication Vol. 2: Studies in international and intercultural contexts. New York: Peter Lang. Mowlana, Hamid. 2014. Global communication as cultural ecology. China Media Research 10(3). 1–6. Williams, Raymond. 1961/2001. The analysis of culture. In Raymond Williams, The long revolution, 57–88. Toronto: Broadview.

Part I. History, perspectives and theories

John Baldwin

2 Murky waters: Histories of intercultural communication research Abstract: Rather than presenting a simple or linear history of the field of intercultural communication, this essay suggests the idea of competing histories that both blend and oppose each other. It begins with coverage of the traditional trajectory of history from (and before) E. T. Hall and the Foreign Service institute through the growth of (largely social scientific) research and theory in the discipline. Then it introduces competing histories, developing at the same time but gaining prominence in the area of intercultural communication from the late 1980s to the present – including interpretive theories and approaches (such as ethnography of communication) and critical approaches (including postmodernism, postcolonialism, and Whiteness studies), as well as approaches that suggest any Western approach to communication might not explain Asian or African realities well (Asiaand Afrocentrism). Keywords: Intercultural Communication, history, paradigms, theory, critical theory, postcolonialism, Critical Race Theory, Whiteness, Asiacentricity, Afrocentrism

1 Introduction In a “creative date,” I took my girlfriend (now wife) in a canoe trip through the backwaters of the “Amazon,” outside of Manaus, Brazil, where I lived. Our guide would canoe us in and out of swamps and little rivulets, and we saw that some had brown water and some black water. That is because Manaus sits between two rivers – the Rio Negro, bringing black, plant-sediment filled water from the northern rain forests, and the Rio Solimões, brining sandy brown water downhill from the Andes mountains far to the west. Outside of Manaus, at a phenomenon called the “Meeting of the Waters,” the two rivers meet in the same river bed, but do not fully join for several kilometers, as one river is warmer and slower than the other. If we try to find out where the “Amazon” river starts, someone might say at this point – but others might trace it much further up the mountains into Peru. Determining the beginnings of the field of intercultural communication research is just as problematic. Many consider Edward T. Hall to be the founder of the modern study of intercultural communication; there were no departments with specialization in intercultural communication before his day. But this claim requires three caveats: 1. The history of research in communication and culture precedes Hall; 2. There are domains of research outside of the mainstream of “interculDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-002

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tural communication” that at times have forcefully entered the discipline; and 3. most histories of the study of intercultural communication consider primarily what has occurred within or in relation to the United States or English-speaking countries. In this essay, we will consider the background and main trajectory of the study of intercultural communication, some newer “histories” of research that have challenged that main trajectory, and issues that these approaches present to the field. Through a glimpse here at different histories we will see that the fields of inquiry, authors, and histories upon which one draws have major implications for what one considers to be culture, how one approaches the study of culture and communication, and the interaction of that research with issues of ethics and civic engagement.

2 Competing histories of intercultural communication research and theory Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz (1990) nests the emergence of the field of intercultural communication with the work of E. T. Hall and others within the Foreign Service Institute of the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. This marks an important point in one history of intercultural communication research, as it framed an approach to research that continues to the present day; however, before we consider this specific influence, we must consider the roots prior to this time, and then look ahead to the intellectual progeny of a movement that Hall and his colleagues began.

2.1 The prehistory of the modern study of intercultural communication Everett Rogers and William Hart (2002), outlining the histories of international, development, and intercultural communication, note the common focus in communication between peoples who have characteristic group differences, based on different group-held values and beliefs. They contend that, although development and international communication have been informed by macro-level concerns (e.g., sociology, national or group-based agendas), interpersonal communication theory and research have been the primary drivers of intercultural communication. Framing their discussion in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) work on the evolution of scientific paradigms, they argue that, while the work of the Foreign Service Institute solidly establishes a “paradigm” for intercultural research, there is – as Kuhn suggests there always will be – “pre-paradigmatic” work in which scholars debate issues and ways of seeing things until one perspective becomes dominant. Specifically, they summarize authors, beginning in the European anthropology (Boas, Sapir) and psychology (Freud). Sociologist Charles Darwin had both a direct

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Fig. 2.1: Roots of intercultural communication (based on Rogers & Hart, 2002).

influence, through his study of ethology (the study of animal behavior) and nonverbal behavior, and indirectly through the social evolutionary theories of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, who impacted other authors. Darwin’s ethology related to E. T. Hall’s work, for example, as he compared human use of space to that of birds, and Marx’s view impacted future authors who looked at the evolution of cultures. An early anthropologist, Franz Boas, critiqued the ethnocentrism in the work of Tylor and others, promoting, instead, a view of cultural relativism – the idea that the cultural standards of one culture cannot be used to judge other cultures (Rogers & Hart 2002). Some of Boas’ students (Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead) were influenced by Freud’s notions of the subconscious, which ultimately influenced the idea later used by E. T. Hall (1959) that people follow unconsciously learned patterns of culture. Figure 2.1 visualizes these cross-cutting influences. Rogers and Hart continue to describe how these and other authors began early research on standard topics of intercultural research, such as cross-cultural differences, nonverbal communication, ethnocentrism, cultural adjustment, competence, prejudice, and the notion of the stranger. Content analysis of top intercultural journals demonstrates that these topics continue to hold importance among scholars today (Arasaratnam 2015). While focusing on things such as the mind, social evolution, sociology, or anthropology, these authors touched upon topics that are communicative in nature. Many of the early anthropological ethnographies include at least some component of communication. Steven Kulich (2012), who later takes a biographical approach to the roots of the study to intercultural communication, wonders whether an early article by Francis J. Brown (1939) may be one of the first journal articles focusing

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specifically on culture and communication (personal communication, April 28, 2015). In this article Brown contrasts ethnocentrism to cultural pluralism, which he defines as “the perpetuation of the folk culture of the many racial and national group” (1939: 133), with implications for intercultural education.

2.2 The Foreign Service Institute and E. T. Hall Many contemporary intercultural authors consider E. T. Hall and the work of the Foreign Service Institute to be central to the history (at least this history) of intercultural research – a hinge to which previous work looks forward and later work looks back. Hall and other scholars, under the impetus of U.S. President Truman, began a training program for U.S. diplomats that “conceptualized the new field of ICC [intercultural communication]” (Rogers & Hart 2002: 3; Rogers & Steinfatt 1999.) Rogers and Hart see this work as the foundation of a paradigm for seeing intercultural communication. Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz (1990) outlines the origins of intercultural communication in the Foreign Service Institute, detailing the specific work of E. T. Hall, the collaboration of scholars that worked together to create the training programs used in the Foreign Service Institute, and, most importantly for our discussion, the impact of these origins on the study of intercultural communication. Hall began outlining his view of intercultural communication in a 1955 article in Scientific American on the “anthropology of manners” and expanded this through a series of books based on his own experiences and interaction with expatriates, including The Silent Language (1959/1973), The Hidden Dimension (1966/ 1982), Beyond Culture (1976/1981), and The Dance of Life (1983). In these books, Hall presented constructs that scholars and trainers still use today – such as high and low context communication (1976, 1981), monochromic and polychronic time orientations (1966, 1982), the zones of personal space and the idea of high and low contact cultures (1966) and others. He saw culture as patterned, much like language, and patterns being invisible to most people, who follow them without thinking (1959). Culture is an “irrational force,” with the result that “people in culturecontact situations frequently fail to really understand each other” (1976: 214). Leeds-Hurwitz (1990) describes Hall’s contributions to the discipline in detail, including his shift from a wide-based anthropological and theoretical focus to a “micro-cultural” focus – that is, what were specifics of cultural behavior that diplomats could learn and become adept in – aspects of space, time, verbal and nonverbal communication, and other behaviors. This shift turned attention fully to the focus of communication in cultural contexts, with a special focus on communication between people of different national backgrounds. Hall saw culture as “patterned, learned, and analyzable” (1990: 263), using descriptive linguistics as a model for studying culture. He promoted training techniques still used today and expanded the relevant audience for intercultural knowledge beyond diplomats. Interestingly, Hall did not intend to start a new discipline, leading Kulich to conclude

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that he should “not be labeled as ‘founder,’ but more indirectly as an inspiration, impetus, or ‘grandfather,’ just as Margaret Mead, Clyde and Florence Kluckhohn, and Ruth Benedict were surely intercultural ‘grandparents’” (2012: 747). Regardless of how we see E. T. Hall’s role, Leeds-Hurwitz (1990) notes that the historical juncture of the Foreign Service Institute, and the paradigm of research that it inspired (Rogers & Hart 2002), was not due to Hall alone, but to a critical group of scholars gathered by the U.S. government within the Foreign Service Institute. These include many scholars who also form the history of the modern U.S. social scientific study of nonverbal communication (rather than a semiotic or critical view) – scholars who looked at aspects of nonverbal communication, but always with an eye on cultural differences. Central to the work of these scholars were the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics. Hall himself was an anthropologist, and Frank Hopkins, the director of the institute, had also studied both anthropology and linguistics. These authors used the “model of descriptive linguistics” (Leeds-Hurwitz 1990: 272) as their approach to culture, to suggest that cultural behavior was patterned and learnable, even without an “accent.” Important to our review here, linguistics at this time (1940s–1950s) “had acquired the reputation of being the most ‘scientific’ of the social and behavioral sciences,” with the Institute seeking to make anthropology “equally scientific” (272). Rogers and Hart (2002) note that the Institute established a firm paradigmatic base for the study of intercultural communication. We can see four important points based on these origins: 1. In modern parlance, even though based largely in anecdotal research (Hall’s narratives from diplomats and his own experience), the discipline saw the valid approach to culture and communication to be one that was “social scientific.” 2. In terms of the analysis of definitions of culture by Faulkner, Baldwin, Lindsley and Hecht (2006), the view of culture was a “structural” definition of culture – with culture treated much as a patterned set of components passed down, like a suitcase, from one generation to another (e.g., Samovar & Porter 2003: 8). 3. The focus of training and education became highly pragmatic, a “skills” approach, giving the travelers the “micro” information that the trainers felt they most needed to be effective in the host culture. Finally, 4. both the stories on which much of the work is based and the training the Institute provided were focused on individuals traveling to and from nations; thus, “culture” was treated largely in national terms, “used by relatively large numbers of people,” with cultural boundaries “usually, but not always” aligning with political or national boundaries (Gudykunst & Kim 2003: 17).

2.3 A trajectory of research As we have noted, Rogers and Hart (2002) suggest that the Foreign Service Institute began a paradigm of research that informed a generation of researchers. Several authors have done an excellent job outlining this history (e.g., Rogers & Hart 2002;

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Rogers & Steinfatt 1999). Guo-Ming Chen and William Starosta (1998: 8–13) provide a useful outline, roughly by decade, which can guide us through the work of this period (with titles for each period borrowed from Baldwin, Coleman, González & Shenoy-Packer 2014).

2.3.1 The 1950s: The decade of beginnings We have already seen the impetus or beginning of the modern academic study of intercultural communication in the Foreign Service Institute.

2.3.2 The 1960s: The decade of silence Rogers and Hart (2002) argue that during this decade (and into the next), the paradigm of intercultural communication begun by the Foreign Service Institute became accepted and developed into what Thomas Kuhn (1970), in his approach to the revolution of science (applied frequently to communication discipline) called “normal science” – an accepted way of doing things. Chen and Starosta (1998) note two major books in this era – Robert Tarbell Oliver’s (1962) Culture and Communication – a book of lectures by the author, and Alfred Smith’s (1966) Communication and Culture, an edited book of essays contributed by scholars from a variety of disciplines, four of which focus specifically on culture and communication. Michigan State University and the University of Pittsburg began teaching courses on the subject (Rogers & Hart 2002: 4).

2.3.3 The 1970s: The decade of research During the next few years, intercultural communication courses began to proliferate. The first doctorate in intercultural communication may have been given to William Starosta (Rogers & Hart 2002: 4). Doctoral programs began at several schools that offered coursework in intercultural communication. Both Chen and Starosta (1998) and Rogers and Hart (2002) enumerate the large number of first editions of intercultural texts that emerged during this period. In addition, edited books of readings appeared, as well as the first issue of the long-running International and Intercultural Communication Annual (Casmir 1974). The latter was similar to a semi-annual journal, with up-to-date research by a variety of scholars; similarly, William Starosta established The Howard Journal of Communications, which continues to publish articles related to intergroup communication, sex and gender, national cultures, and so on; and Dan Landis edited the first issue of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations (IJIR), a multi-disciplinary journal focused

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on all aspects of international and intercultural training and communication. Finally, divisions in intercultural communication began in the International Communication Association (ICA) in 1970 and in what is now the National Communication Association (NCA) in 1975 (Rogers & Hart 2002: 4) – both U.S.-based; each is now one of the largest divisions in the respective association. What characterizes this era of this history of intercultural communication is a focus on research. Chen and Starosta suggest (1998: 10) that intercultural research in the 1970s was characterized by “disorder,” with scholars pursuing their own directions, with little theoretical focus (1998: 10). It was an area of great growth in the discipline – with an array of new course texts and with edited books, journals, and scholarly associations dedicated to the study of intercultural communication.

2.3.4 The 1980s: The decade of theory This era runs from 1981 to the present. Chen and Starosta (1998) suggest that many scholars trained in the 1960s and 1970s (often in rhetoric), such as Molefi Kete Asante (formerly Arthur Smith), John Condon, Michael Prosser and William Howell, were now teaching intercultural communication courses. They list five edited volumes that promoted theory specifically in the 1980s: Intercultural communication theory (Gudykunst 1983), Theories in Intercultural Communication (Kim 1988), Handbook of Intercultural Communication (Asante, Gudykunst & Newmark, 1989), Methods for Intercultural Communication Research (Gudykunst & Kim 1984), and Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives (Kinkaid 1987). The focus on theory continued to the present time with two other major volumes, Intercultural Communication Theory (Wiseman 1995) and Theorizing about Intercultural Communication (Gudykunst 2005). In addition, two new journals began in the 1980s: Intercultural Communication Studies and World Communication. We can make several observations about the development of the field in the 1980s. First, we see the outstanding influence of William Gudykunst in the theorization in this history of intercultural communication. Steve Kulich (2012) notes both Gukykunst and Young Yun Kim among the most cited intercultural scholars in an author analysis of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations (see also Hart 1999). Further, if we trace the history of the International and Intercultural Communication Annual, we will see that all editors of the books from the seventh to the 19th editions (1983–1995) included Gudykunst, Kim, or their close colleagues.1 Along with this, we see the influence of the International and Intercultural Communication Annual (Gudykunst 1983; Gudykunst & Kim 1984; Kim & Gudykunst 1988; Wiseman 1995) in shaping the mainstream direction of the discipline, along

1 At one point, Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, and Wiseman all worked in the same department at California State, Fullerton.

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with the intercultural divisions of the ICA and the NCA (Chen & Starosta 1998). These are not the only authors, of course. A special issue of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations in 2012 turned from a focus on articles, books, or even events to focus on biographies of authors, with scholars contributing essays on 12 different authors, including Nobleza Asunción-Lande, Dean Barnlund, and others. Finally, we see ongoing debate about the direction and purposes of intercultural communication research. Scholars debated whether focus should be empirical or practical and what should be the topics of interest. Robert Shuter (1990) initiated and continues to lead a charge to keep the notion of “culture” central in our studies and has critiqued the narrow focus of intercultural research on a few select nations or regions of the world. If we trace the theories from the first volume in 1983, we note a trajectory. The first volume includes chapters on rules theories, rhetoric, grounded theory, and phenomenology, with Larry Sarbaugh and Nobleza Asunción-Lande (1983) outlining each of these perspectives. The authors also lament the largely western bias in theorization in the field. The second volume (Kim & Gudykunst 1988) included several social scientific theories, but also coordinated management of meaning – a rules perspective (Cronen, Chen & Pearce 1988), and Collier and Thomas’s essay on cultural identity theory, seemingly forced into the social scientific mold by including one out-of-place “theorem” among a series of assumptions that are much more interpretive in nature (1998)2. Gudykunst (2005), however, included theories that could be used interpretively or even that were explicitly based on power and social imbalance. The (causal) theories in intercultural communication often drew upon a set of core constructs, including the ideas of high and low context by E. T. Hall (1976) and Geert Hofstede’s dimensions of cultural difference (1980). Principal among these has been the construct of individualism-collectivism, which several scholars hold to be the primary driver of cultural difference. After the 1987 publication of an article critiquing Hofstede’s dimensions and suggesting a new dimension – Confucian work dynamism (Chinese Culture Connection 1987), Hofstede added that to his four original dimensions (individualism/collectivism, power distance, masculinity/femininity, and uncertainty avoidance), and recently added a sixth dimension, restraint (or propriety) versus indulgence (Hofstede n. d.).

2 This observation is based on my own experience in publishing in the Wiseman reader (Baldwin & Hecht, 2005). We framed our essay as a theory of intolerance. One reviewer lauded the essay; another hated it and did not want to publish it. The reviewer complained that it was not really a “theory” as it has no variables or causal propositions. In addition, it took a value stance that group-based intolerance is wrong, a stance that real (i.e., social scientific) theory should not take. We kept our claim that racism and sexism should be remedied, making these and Tamar Katriel’s mention contexts of “social disadvantage and powerlessness” present in the tourism context (2005: 278) the lone voices in the volume that did not take a social scientific and supposedly value-neutral perspective.

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In 1995, Min-Sum Kim added to individualism-collectivism the personal-level variable of self-construal, one’s perception of one’s self in connection to those around one’s self, adapted from Markus and Kitayama (1991). She argued at that time that one could not predict behavior well from only cultural-level variables (that is, “individualism” describes a whole culture orientation, not specific individuals), but also needed individual-level variable (does an individual consider her or himself independent from or dependent on others in making personal life and communicative choices?). Current versions of several theories now include self-construal; it has become conventional wisdom that theories of intercultural communication must account for both “cultural- and individual-level effects” (Gudykunst 2002: 166). Content decisions in what to study in intercultural communication in the early 1980s ranged from highly practical reasons of increased cultural adjustment, job skills, and development of personal relationships to personal cosmopolitanism and social change (Dodd 1982; Smith 1982). By 1984, Young Yun Kim outlined the main areas of focus of intercultural research: therapy/counseling, business/organizations, politics, immigrant acculturation and sojourner adjustment, education, and technology transfer. The field still treated “culture” largely as national cultures, with intercultural communication occurring between people of different nations (despite inclusion of media, interethnic communication, and rhetoric, occasionally, in books from the early 1980s on). Theoretical and topic foci in this area included much work on the diffusion of innovations, intercultural competence, mass media effects, cross-cultural relationships, intergroup communication, and prejudice.

2.3.5 The 1990s: The decade of debate Rogers and Hart report that “The ICC paradigm in the 1990s shows few signs of the anomaly and exhaustion stages, displayed few major shifts in research perspectives, and little important questioning of core tenets occurred” (2002: 5); rather, they suggest, scholars extended the existing paradigm to Japan and other nations. However, there seems to be more to the story, as evidenced what some might consider a rift, and others, simply growing diversity in the discipline from the mid1990s to today. We can anticipate this rift/growth in diversity by considering several characteristics of the “history” of intercultural communication so far presented. First, much, though not all, of this work characterizes a specific view of theory prevalent in the intercultural communication discipline at this time – a social scientific perspective based on a view of the world (ontology) that is grounded in cause and effect (often beyond the awareness of the communicator); a view of knowledge (epistemology) based on the accumulation of “fact” or evidence-based research and the use of some version of the scientific method, including survey or experimental research or controlled, quantitative field studies; and an approach to values (axiology) that sought to minimize their role in the communication research

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process. The purpose of the theory is not to provide specific understanding of behavior within the context of a specific culture, but to use “cultural differences as operationalizations of dimensions of cultural variability (e.g., individualism versus collectivism)” (Gudykunst & Nishida 1989: 21). Such a view could be related to the fact that intercultural communication entered the communication discipline in the 1970s, at a time when one of the major influences in the field was social psychology as it relates to relational growth, with a view that intercultural communication is merely a context of interpersonal communication (Casmir & Asunción-Lande 1990; Gudykunst & Kim 2003). This is not to say that the writers were unaware of other perspectives. As noted above, compilations of essays throughout the period included essays on rules and systems perspectives, reflecting application of the famous 1977 debate in the Quarterly Journal of Speech on “covering laws,” rules, and systems approaches to understanding communication. At the same time, authors sometimes made limiting choices. For example, Young Yun Kim, in her survey of “current research in intercultural communication,” notes that “other research endeavors such as historical, critical, rhetorical, or linguistic studies will not be included in this review” (1984: 20). Gudykunst and Nishida note the early rhetorical work of Prosser and others, but suggest, in 1989, that “there has been little recent work in this area” (33). If we consider ethnic and co-cultural groups as “cultures,” as well as regions of a country, and so on, a search of rhetorical research in the 1970s and 1980s would likely reveal much work that is cultural in focus, such as work on protest and countercultural rhetoric. At some point, several of these authors have used qualitative research in their own studies. Authors and editors of the driving theoretical works were also aware of the major “ferment in the field” reflected in a 1983 issue in Journal of Communication, an issue in which communication scholars debated scientific (post-positivistic), humanistic (interpretive), and critical “paradigms” of research. Karl Erik Rosengren (1983), in that issue, introduced the sociological paradigm-organizing work of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan (1979). Burrell and Morgan’s original point is that research ranged from more objective (cause-driven behavior, predictability, reality external to observer) to more subjective (choice-making behavior, rule-following, reality as individual perspective). Our authors applied this continuum to understand theory of the time. Gudykunst and Nishida divide theories into objective and subjective theories, the latter including linguistic theory, ethnography of communication and Collier and Thomas’ (1988) theory of cultural identity. Others reproduce this bi-fold distinction of theories (Gudykunst, Lee, Nishida & Ogawa 2005). Young Kim characterizes objective theories as “analytic-reductionistic-mechanistic-behavioral-quantitative” and subjective theories as “synthetic-holistic-ideographic-contextual” (1988: 16–17). While the authors delineate some theories covered as humanistic/interpretive, “the influence of atomistic, reductionistic assumptions as to how understanding is produced played a significant role” in the theorizing of this time period (Casmir & Asunción-Lande 1990: 282).

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An alternative voice in these volumes includes perspectives of intercultural communication that are phenomenological, rhetorical (metaphorical, Burkean), observational, or based in grounded theory. Further, the volumes evidence the presence of a focus on media and culture from as early as 1983; however, the “theory” books focus little on qualitative and media research. Chen and Starosta (1998) note the strongly quantitative (or social scientific focus) of intercultural theory books through the 1980s and mid-1990s. Other work may have evaded the purview of theory-book editors because their work did not coincide with the narrow view of theory noted above, an approach that is, admittedly, a Western, Eurocentric social construction. A second issue is that this tradition represents only one of the two continua in Burrell and Morgan’s (Burrell & Morgan 1979; Rosengren 1983) – the continuum that pertains to the ontology and epistemology of the theories. A second dimension of theory includes axiology – specifically whether theory or research merely observes (and reproduces) the status quo ideas of a discipline or society, or whether it deliberately seeks to change it. Although Gudykunst and Nishida admit the need to recognize the “ideology” that is “inherent in any communication theory” – and the need to address ideology in future coverage of communication theory, as it is so present in the theorizing of other countries and regions (1989: 39; e.g., Europe, Latin America), it receives little attention in the theory books.

3 Ferment in the field: Revisionist “histories” of the study of intercultural communication Over the next several years, major changes came about within the discipline, as authors seemingly sought to “correct” for E. T. Hall’s additions to the field of intercultural communication. Rather than seeking to understand communication only within its physical and geographical contexts, scholars proposed that communication should be understood also in social, economic, historical, and other power contexts. Michael Hecht and his colleagues (1993), for example, suggested that we could not understand Black-White communication within the United States apart from 400 years of shared and often conflictual history. Scholars balked against the highly pragmatic focus of much intercultural research that sought to make businesses better, instead wondering whom such research really benefits. From within the social science discipline, people began to challenge traditional intercultural inquiry, such as the use of Hostede’s dimensions (e.g., Courtright, Wolfe & Baldwin 2011). Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama (1999) suggested that we think more “dialectically” both about different aspects of communication (e.g., similarity and difference), but even the way we understand ideas such as “objective” and “subjective.”

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Newer researchers challenged our traditional notion of how to do research, of what constitutes “theory” and of what the focus of our studies should be (e.g., Alexander et al. 2014). Increasingly, studies looked at co-cultures within larger cultures, at marginalized cultures on the “borderlands” (Conquergood 1991; Cooks 2010), and textbooks developed to present the voices of members of marginalized groups (González, Houston & Chen 1994) and to teach interracial communication (Orbe & Harris 2001; though see also Rich 1973). Whereas Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) has assembled some 150 definitions of culture, Baldwin, Faulkner, Hecht and Lindsley (2006) collected 313, noting new strands in the way of defining culture since the 1950s, especially in the directions of interpretive and critical research. The interpretive and critical strands represent different “histories” in the study of intercultural communication, for, even though they became prominent in the discipline after 1995, they were present long before, either within or beyond the disciplinary walls of intercultural communication.

3.1 The rise of interpretive approaches The first major approaches that, while long present in some form within the field of intercultural communication research, received major impetus in the field from the 1990s forward is the field of qualitative and interpretive inquiry of different sorts. We introduce two strands of that approach.

3.1.1 The ethnography of communication Ethnography is not new and was a principal tool of the anthropologists noted above in the backgrounds of the discipline. Many authors credit linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes with laying the groundwork for a focus of observational research specifically on communication behavior (e.g., Carbaugh & Hastings 1995). Ethnographic writers, talking about theory, provide an explanation of connections between phenomena within a specific speech community regarding a specific action. This theory (e.g., grounded theory) is developed through systematic observation, notetaking, and verifying findings with local participants, with criteria to ensure systematic and quality results that reflect the realities of research participants. Through time, researchers’ stance toward the research has changed, with earlier researchers describing what they saw as if it was real and they were neutral observers, but more recent researchers admitting their own role in co-constructing their findings with the participants. Communication studies of people in specific cultures are not new in the field of intercultural communication. Gerry Philipsen’s (1975) now-classic study, “Speaking ‘like a Man’ in Teamsterville,” which describes the communication of White, working class men in a Chicago neighborhood, would be considered “cultural” commu-

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nication by today’s standards and clearly under the broad umbrella of the studies of culture and communication. As early as 1986, Philipsen and one of his students, Donal Carbaugh, published a list of 250 studies of communication from local cultures around the world. From these studies, Philipsen (Philipsen, Coutu & Covarrubias 2005) presents a theory with propositions about the nature of culture and communication. Today, observational studies, either using a speech codes approach or not, are frequent fare in intercultural journals. In sum, ethnography of communication has a long history, though is more recent to mainstream of intercultural research (see Chapter 6, this volume, for more on Cultural Communication).

3.1.2 Phenomenological, semiotic, and other traditions Rather than use a pre-set approach like speech codes theory, some scholars follow the work of social science researchers such as Alfred Schutz, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Lindlof & Taylor 2011), investigating the perspectives of participants in a cultural situation from within their own life situations, an approach known as phenomenology. As one example of this, Mark Orbe (Orbe 1998; Orbe & Spellers 2005) has developed a theory based on in-depth analyses of the life/communicative perspectives of African Americans in dominant White U.S. American culture as well as many other co-cultural groups (people with disabilities, LGBTQ individuals, and so on) to develop co-cultural theory. Phenomenological perspectives, which usually seek to impose no previous theory, are common in intercultural research today. Another perspective that has gained force is semiotics. Following the work of the wide field of semiotics, including but not limited to writers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Umberto Eco, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, and others, many students of culture, language and communication are relying on semiotics. Leeds-Hurwitz (1993) applied this approach to culture in a 1993 book that considers aspects of culture as representative of underlying values and belief systems. She later (2003) applied this and other approaches to understand how weddings represent cultural identities. This approach does not have as much traction in studies of face-to-face communication (with more research on semiotics and communication occurring, for example, in the journal, Semiotica, than in communication journals), though it is very prominent in studies of media culture and identity.

3.2 Cultural criticism Dreama Moon defines culture as “a contested zone” in which “different groups struggle to define issues in their own interests” with unequal access to “public forums to voice their concerns, perspectives, and the everyday realities of their lives” (2002: 15–16). This approach breaks from earlier “histories” that sought

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either to predict communicative outcomes with cultural variables or to simply provide in-depth, contextual understanding of the communicative lives of research participants from their own perspectives. But rather than seeing this approach as a new development, like observational research, we should realize that it has a long history outside of the intercultural field. Some aspects include traditional critical theory, cultural studies, critical semiotics and language studies, queer theory, feminist theory, postmodernism, and new approaches related to anti-racism and postcolonialism – each with its own history beyond the scope of this chapter.

3.2.1 Critical theory and cultural studies Recent authors have outlined a new critical agenda for intercultural communication, with impacts on how we see culture, intercultural communication, and research (Cooks 2010; Halualani, Mendoza & Drzewiecka 2009). Critical theory has roots in the ideas of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and others. Marx’s original theory focused on how the elite gained control over the means and relations of production, seeking a cheap labor pool for the production of goods. One way the elite maintain control is through deliberate manipulation of the idea structures (ideology) of the masses, known as false consciousness. The Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist scholars fleeing Nationalist Germany in the 1930s, introduced critical theory through such works as the classic edited book on anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950), with an objective, variable-analytic (but politically motivated) view of the word. Later authors (e.g., Althusser, Gramsci) modified Marxist ideas, with more complex notions of ideology and hegemony. The work of these authors had immediate relevance in how one viewed social struggle between ethnic groups and the ideological control of those groups (see Baldwin 1998). As one of the key tools for shaping the sets of ideas and assumptions (ideology) held by a group of people within a culture, the media became a ready focus for the application of these conceptual tools. Thus, a group of scholars in Britain began a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding how popular culture produces and reproduces ideology that serves the interests of some groups over others, calling this new field cultural studies (Turner 1990). Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart wrote as early as the 1950s and 1960s. In 1979, Dick Hebdige wrote Subculture: The Meaning of Style – an analysis of how British youth use fashion to mark their identities; and in 1981, Paul Willis describes how communication within the social environment of the British working class reproduces job expectations. Throughout this time, Stuart Hall wrote several essays analyzing popular culture, with specific application to British racism. By 1992, Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler produced a compendium of cultural studies essays on an array of aspects of cultural ideas, identities, of hegemony and resistance and empowerment, of ra-

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dio broadcasts and interpersonal messages – though with little attention from scholars traditionally seen as from the intercultural communication “discipline.”

3.2.2 Feminist studies and queer theory Increasingly, as intercultural scholars turned their attention away from strictly national “cultures,” any topic of group-based difference became useful material for research, including supposed gender differences in communication (a review of which is beyond the scope of this chapter). Feminist authors (e.g., Rakow & Wackwitz 1998) summarize various views of feminism that have importance in studies of culture, difference, and patriarchy, such as liberal, radical, and ecofeminism. Sharon Marcus (2005) notes that feminism and queer theory share similar aims; while feminism challenges patriarchy and restrictive ideological constructions and structures that limit women’s options and potential, queer theory is a field of inquiry that challenges the social norms that make heterosexuality seem normal and the social structures that privilege heterosexual relationships. Queer theory has gained force through many studies and essays (e.g., Yep et al. 2004). Queer theory seeks to reappropriate the term “queer” from its use as epithet to give solidarity to gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual individuals (Marcus 2005: 196). Borrowing ideas from Michel Foucault and others, queer theory has received much attention since the early 1990s.

3.2.3 Postmodernism Also influenced by the ideas of Michel Foucault, along with Jacques Derrida and others, postmodernism rejects traditional notions of single narratives to explain all reality, of order and centrality, and so on (Rosenau 1992). Postmodern assumptions have become largely embedded in modern thought and intercultural research, though Rueyling Chang (2003: 27–29) makes them explicit, arguing for an end to studies that “essentialize” other cultures, especially by treating a culture as some score on a Hofstedian value like individualism. Chang opposes such dualisms as individualism/collectivism, but also disdains logical positivistic research in favor of studies that promote “multivocality and inclusivity” (34). Further, postmodern research considers how groups negotiate power through discourse (language, images, etc.).

3.2.4 Whiteness, critical race theory, and postcolonialism Where the traditional paradigm of intercultural research treated intercultural communication largely as an extension of interpersonal communication (between indi-

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vidual of diverse cultural backgrounds), these new approaches consider larger social structures, arguing that sex and gender, sexual orientation, “race,” and other identities exist within larger social structures that include media representation, legal policy, job discrimination, educational opportunities, and so on. This final set of aspects of the critical tradition extends this structural-communicative approach into new directions. Whiteness research, often traced to the early roots of works by Richard Dyer (1988) and Ruth Frankenberg (1993) focuses on how “Whiteness” is and is maintained as an invisible center of power. That is, being White (in European and North American and some other cultures) gives one privileges of which one is not aware. Whiteness is “a tremendous social force in mobilizing how people act and interact … in the ways they think of themselves and others” (Wander, Nakayama & Martin 1999: 23). It is maintained through discourses such as only describing White in terms of it being “not” something else, promoting “color blindness,” or confusing Whiteness with nationality, such as assuming in one’s mind that an American will be White (Nakayama & Krizek 1995). The purpose of Whiteness research is to expose how cultures think in White terms and promote White welfare, usually unintentionally, with an aim at resisting White dominance (Wander et al. 1999: 22). Critical race theory, a perspective that arises in the field of legal studies, begins with a critique of injustices in the legal system, arguing that countercultural groups within a larger culture have a different view of social reality than the “reigning order” (Delgado & Stefancic 2013: iii). Critical race theory includes such notions as how knowledge is structured in a way to privilege Whites over those of other races. Similar to radical feminism, which challenges the very structures of patriarchy rather than simply promoting women’s equality within the existing system (liberal feminism), critical race theory is overtly political, advocating “engaged, even adversarial scholarship” (Delgado & Stefancic: iii). Scholars across disciplines have adopted this perspective, with communication scholars noting its usefulness, for example, in discussion of hate speech and naming (Olmstead 1998). Finally, postcolonialism relates to ideas articulated by Edward Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism. In this work, Said discusses the way that the European West rhetorically constructs the Middle East and its peoples through literature and art. Key ideas from this perspective include the idea of Othering – thinking and speaking of those who are of different groups in a way that treats them as exotic and different (and thus justifies domination, marginalization, or oppression). Like other critical notions outlined above, Orientalism has received acclaim, critique, and debate across disciplines. A search in my own Illinois university library system reveals over 12,000 book entries referencing Orientialism. Postcolonialism extends orientalism to look at the politics of colonizing nations and peoples and the results of that colonization on various aspects of life. Raka Shome and Radha Hegde (2002: 250), in the opening essay of an entire issue of Communication Theory devoted to postcolonialism, note that the approach is, above all, “interventionist and highly

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political”. Informed by Marxism and other approaches, it breaks markedly from postmodernism. Where the latter proposes that there are no overarching discourses that can explain all social life, postcolonialism proposes a distinct approach not only to colonized cultures but those that colonized, as Western knowledge and life situation is based in some way upon the conquest of colonized countries by the Western world (251). This perspective is often interested in ideas such as migration, resistance to colonial ideas, the hybridity of cultural influences (usually with a power disparity in who determines and manages the mixture), diasporic peoples, and so on (257–260). Notably, rather than promote intercultural communication competence as a way to ease tensions and promote good business contexts in a globalized world, postcolonialism tends to complicate globalization by noting its adverse effects on economically weaker nations. The various perspectives used here (aside from postmodernism, which rejects metanarratives) are sometimes used together. In fact, the cultural and critical perspectives detailed in this section, each with their own histories, and using a wide variety of ethnographic, rhetorical, historical, and other methods, are prominent in the field today. Thomas Nakayama and Rona Hualalani (2010) edited a specific handbook of essays and studies based on this array of critical perspectives. These approaches are prominent in communication fields in many countries outside of the United States, as well as in the intercultural division of the NCA, with traditional research being more common in the ICA (based on my own perception of conference offerings). Of course, such summarizations merit caution. What we can say is that cultural and critical perspectives have long histories outside of the field of intercultural communication and that they were both admitted and even used by many scholars within the field even in the early 1980s. What I am arguing here is that these perspectives received little attention and were perhaps even marginalized (with no intent of said marginalization implied here) until the latter part of the 1990s.

3.3 Challenges to a Eurocentric tradition In contrast to even the critical perspectives noted above, there is one last set of ‘histories’ of intercultural communication research that we must consider: Those histories that object to any attempt of Western theorists to impose a framework to understand people of specific groups, including even feminism, Marxism, or other critical approaches. Ironically, these approaches might imply a postcolonial approach that resists initiatives by Western writers to impose a narrative upon them; but they do provide a single narrative to describe people of a particular descent. Early communication researchers had already promoted the study of rhetoric and forms of communication from China, India, and other countries (for example, see contributions to Kinkaid’s volume on Eastern and Western communication theory, 1987). At this same time, communication scholar Arthur Smith adopted a

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new name, Molefi Kete Asante. As long time director and chair of African American studies at Temple University, Asante (1987: 6) describes Afrocentrism as “placing African ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior” and, by extension, the communication behavior of any African-descended peoples. He argues that Eurocentric ideas, – be they universalism and objectivity or Marxist approaches, are “limiting, restricting, and parochial” (9), often promoting unrealistic dualisms (e.g., mind-body). Instead, African behavior must be understood in terms of the interrelationship between “feeling, knowing, and acting” (17), in terms of the “generative and productive power of the spoken word” (the idea of nommo, 17), and circular, rather than linear view of the world. Asante’s work serves as a foundation to much intercultural research, to the point that he received focus as one of the most influential intercultural communication scholars in the 2012 IJIR issue noted above (Anderson 2012). In like fashion, Yoshitaka Miike (2003, 2015) promotes an “Asiacentric” perspective based on harmony between individuals and between elements of human existence (material, behavioral, and mental aspects). He suggests that we should learn from other cultures, rather than about them, as the former approach makes us more humble in our investigation of other cultures, while the latter treats other cultures like texts and “their members like objects of analysis” (2015: 29). Traditional Eurocenrtric research “Otherizes” other people and their cultures, often comparing the communication of other cultures with that of the United States (creating the U.S. as another invisible “center” in communication research) (2003: 247–248). The Asiacentric perspective rests on the notion of non-separateness: “Communication is a process in which we remind ourselves of the interdependence and interrelatedness of the universe” (2015: 32). Shinsuke Eguchi (2013) blends the dialectical approach described above with Asiacentric notions to suggest dialectical tensions in identities of U.S. Asian Americans. See Chapter 4 of this volume for non-Western theories of communication.

4 Conclusion: Future histories of intercultural communication As we have seen, rather than a single history of intercultural communication research, there are concurrent, confluent traditions: Much like the murky backwaters of the Amazon river, we sense currents of all approaches in each of the others, but each has separate origins, separate histories, as it flows in and out of the domain of what we have socially constructed (and politically argued through competing discourses) as the appropriate “history” of intercultural communication research. Starosta and Chen discuss the field of intercultural communication as a dialogue about whether there is truth to the claim of a “critical turn” in the field (2003: 3),

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using the same metaphor of “ferment” that we saw in the communication field at large in 1983. They introduce the critique of E. T. Hall’s approach, which “reifies,” crystalizes, or essentializes our views of national cultures (15) and urge a dialogic approach among those of different perspectives as we enter the next age of intercultural research: “Should ‘qualitative and quantitative approaches have to run like two parallel rivers without the hope of possibility of reconciliation’? Certainly not” (19). They later (2010: 144) argue for a more complex view of identity in intercultural research – one that is fluid and reflects “tensions, shifting definitions and boundaries, temporary alliances across differences, or cultural morphing.” In a similar way, S. Lily Mendoza argues that we should avoid monolithic claims about cultures and see them, rather, as complex and in “motion” (2005: 243), as she takes a radically political, historical, and dialogic view to theorizing about cultures. At the same time, she admits the usefulness of a generalized understanding of a group as a starting point in understanding that group. In brief, one valuable direction for the history of our field would be increased dialogue between those of different views to see how these can work together to inform our understanding of culture, identity, intercultural communication, and related themes. At the same time, we will continue to see growth in traditional domains of intercultural research, though they need more focus on specific geographic regions and cultures, such as Africa (Miller et al. 2013). As old lines of adjustment, competence, business and health communication and others grow, so will the new field of social media and computer mediated communication, as exemplified by the work of Robert Shuter (2012; intro to special issue in China Media Report Overseas, 2013; special issue of Journal of International and Intercultural Communication [Vol. 4, Issue 4, 2011],) and the Center for Intercultural New Media Research. Other researchers will continue to collect research to demonstrate the growing history of intercultural communication research in different regions of the world, such as the work of Steve Kulich, Michael Prosser, and colleagues at the SISU Institute in Shanghai to document not only the history of intercultural communication scholarship in general (e.g., Kulich 2012), but that in China specifically (Hu & Fan 2010; Kulich & Chi 2009), a project also embraced by other scholars (e.g., Lu, Jia & Heisey 2002), or similar efforts to document the history of intercultural communication in France, Germany, or other countries (Averback-Lietz 2013). And, while new communication research will continue to investigate traditional areas like “face,” competence, and adaptation, it is also turning its attention to health communication and to less studied cultures (Croucher, Sommier & Rahmani 2015). Communication research appears in a wide number of mainstream communication journals, as well as journals dedicated to the discipline, such as Journal of International and Intercultural Communication and Journal of Intercultural Communication Research. The various streams of history – social scientific, interpretive/humanistic (including ethnography, phenomenology, and rhetorical theories), critical theories (including postcolonialism, Whiteness research, feminist approaches, and others)

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each continue to flow forcefully in the field of intercultural communication, sometimes with dialogue and cross-over between the streams, much as the backwaters of the Amazon meet, flow together for a while, and then separate. Each approach has its own implications for how we understand culture, our ethical role as researchers and communicators, and the way we treat others in our everyday lives. Our best understanding of issues of identity, of intolerance, of culture and cultural communication will likely come from dialogue among these seemingly competing perspectives.

5 References Adorno, Theodor, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson & R. Nevitt Sanford (eds.). 1950. The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper. Alexander, Bryant Keith, Lily A. Arasaratnam, Lisa Flores, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, S. Lily Mendoza, John Oetzel, Joyce Osland, Yukio Tsuda, Jing Yin & Rona Halualani. 2014. Our role as intercultural scholars, practitioners, activists, and teachers in addressing these key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 7. 68–99. doi: 10.1080/17513057.2014.869526. Anderson, Reynaldo. 2012. Molefi Kete Asante: The Afrocentric idea and the cultural turn in intercultural communication studies. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 36. 760– 769. doi: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2012.08.005. Arasaratnam, Lily A. 2015. Research in intercultural communication: Reviewing the past decade. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8. 290–310. doi: 10.1080/ 17513057.2015.1087096. Asante, Molefi Kete. 1987. The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Asante, Molefi Kete, William B. Gudykunst & Eileen Newmark (eds.). 1989. Handbook of international and intercultural communication. Newbury Park: Sage. Averback-Lietz, Stefanie. 2013. Pathways of intercultural communication research: How different research communities of communication scholars deal with the topic of intercultural communication. Communications 38. 289–313. doi: 10.1515/commun-2013–0017. Baldwin, John R. 1998. Tolerance/intolerance: A historical and multi-disciplinary view of prejudice. In Michael L. Hecht (ed.), Communicating prejudice, 24–56. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Baldwin, John R., Robin R. M. Coleman, Alberto González & Suchitra Shenoy-Packer. 2014. Intercultural communication for everyday life. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Baldwin, John R., Sandra L. Faulkner, Michael L. Hecht & Sheryl L. Lindsley (eds.). 2006. Redefining culture: Perspectives across the disciplines. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Brown, Francis J. 1939. Sociology and intercultural understanding. Journal of Educational Sociology 12(6). 328–331. Burrell, Gibson & Gareth Morgan. 1979. Sociological paradigms and organizational analysis. London: Heinemann. Carbaugh, Donal & Sally O. Hastings. 1995. A role for communication theory in ethnographic studies of interpersonal communication. In Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz (ed.), Social approaches to communication, 171–187. New York, NY: Guilford. Casmir, Fred L. (ed.). 1974. The international and intercultural communication annual, Vol. 1. New York, NY: Speech Communication Association.

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Casmir, Fred L. & Nobleza Asunción-Lande. 1990. Intercultural communication revisited: Conceptualization, paradigm building, and methodological approaches. In James A. Anderson (ed.), Communication Yearbook 12, 278–309. New York: Routledge. Chang, Rueling. 2003. A postmodern critique of cross-cultural and intercultural communication research: Contesting essentialism, positivist dualism and Eurocentricity. In William J. Starosta & Guo-Ming Chen (eds.), Ferment in the intercultural field: Axiology/value/praxis, 24–55. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chen, Guo-Ming & William J. Starosta. 1998. Foundations of intercultural communication. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Chinese Culture Connection. 1987. Chinese values and the search for culture-free dimensions of culture. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 18. 143. doi: 10.1177/00220022187018002002 Collier, Mary Jane & Milt Thomas. 1988. Cultural identity: An interpretive perspective. In Young Yun Kim & William B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication, 99–120. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Conquergood, Dwight. 1991. Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics. Communication Monographs 58. 179–194. Cooks, Leda. 2010. Revisiting the borderlands of critical intercultural communication. In Thomas K. Nakayama & Rona T. Halualani (eds.), The handbook of critical intercultural communication, 112–129. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Courtright, Jeffrey L., Rachel Wolfe & John R. Baldwin. 2011. Intercultural typologies and public relations research: A critique of Hofstede's dimensions. In Nilanjana Bardhan (ed.), Public relations in global and cultural contexts, 108–139. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cronen, Vernon E., Victoria Chen & W. Barnett Pearce. 1988. Cultural identity: An interpretive perspective. In Young Yun Kim & William B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication, 66–98. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Croucher, Stephen M., Mélodine Sommier & Diyako Rahmani. 2015. Intercultural communication: Where we’ve been, where we’re going, issues we face. Communication Research and Practice 1(1). 71–87. doi: 10.1080/22041451.2015.1042422 Delgado, Richard & Jean Sefancic. 2013. Introduction. In Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic (eds.), Critical race theory: The cutting edge, iii–xxxii. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Dodd, Carley H. 1982. Effecting options in presenting content in teaching intercultural communication. Southern Speech Communication Journal 42. 63–269. Dyer, Richard. 1988. White. Screen 29(4). 44–65. Eguchi, Shinsuke. 2013. Revisiting Asiacentricity: Toward thinking dialectically about Asian American identities and negotiation. The Howard Journal of Communications 24. 95–115. doi: 10.1080/10646175.2013.748556. Faulkner, Sandra L., John R. Baldwin, Sheryl L. Lindsley & Michael L. Hecht. 2006. Layers of meaning: An analysis of definitions of culture. In John R. Baldwin, Sandra L. Faulkner, Michael L. Hecht & Sheryl L. Lindsley (eds.), Redefining culture: Perspectives across the disciplines, 27–51. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White women, race matters: The social construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. González, Alberto, Marsha Houston & Victoria Chen (eds.). 1994. Our voices: Essays in culture, ethnicity, and communication: An intercultural anthology. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson & Paula A. Treichler (eds.). 1992. Cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Gudykunst, William B. (ed.). 1983. Intercultural communication theory. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Gudykunst, William B. 2002. Issues in cross-cultural communication research. In William B. Gudykunst & Bella Mody (eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication, 2nd ed., 165–177. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Kulich, Steve J. 2012. Reconstructing the histories and influences of 1970s intercultural leaders: Prelude to biographies [Special Issue Introduction]. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 36(6). 744–759. Kulich, Steve J. & Ruobing Chi. 2009. Coming of age − Developing intercultural communications as a field in China. In Y. X. Jia & Guo-Ming Chen (eds.), Intercultural Communication Research 1(1). 48–74. Beijing, China: Higher Education Press. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. 1990. Notes in the history of intercultural communication: The Foreign Service Institute and the mandate for intercultural training. Quarterly Journal of Speech 76. 262–281. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. 1993. Semiotics and communication: Signs, codes, cultures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. 2003. Weddings as text: Communicating cultural identities through ritual. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lindlof, Thomas R. & Bryan C. Taylor. 2011. Qualitative communication research methods, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lu, Xing, Wenshan Jia & D. Ray Heisey (eds.). 2002. Chinese communication studies: Contexts and comparisons. Westport, CT: Ablex. Marcus, Sharon. 2005. Queer theory for everyone: A review essay. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31. 191–218. doi: 10.1086/432743. Markus, Hazel Rose & Shinobu Kitayama. 1991. Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review 98(2). 224–253. Martin, Judith N. & Thomas K. Nakayama. 1999. Thinking dialectically about culture and communication. Communication Theory 9(1). 1–25. Miike, Yoshitaka. 2003. Beyond Eurocentrism in the intercultural field: Searching for an Asiacentric paradigm. In William J. Starosta & Guo-Ming Chen (eds.), Ferment in the intercultural field: Axiology/value/praxis, 243–276. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miike, Yoshitaka. 2015. “Harmony without uniformity”: An Asiacentric worldview and its communicative implications. In Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter, Edwin R. McDaniel & Carolyn Sexton Roy (eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader, 14 th ed., 27–41. Boston, MA: Cengage. Miller, Ann Neville, Christine Deeter, Anne Trelstad, Matthew Hawk, Grace Ingram & Annie Ramirez. 2013. Still the dark continent: A content analysis of research about Africa and by African scholars in 18 major communication-related journals. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6. 317–333. Moon, Dreama. 2002. Thinking about ‘culture’ in intercultural communication. In Judith N. Martin, Thomas K. Nakayama & Lisa A. Flores (eds.), Readings in intercultural communication: Experiences and contexts, 2 nd ed., 13–21. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Nakayama, Thomas K. & Rona Tamiko Halualani (eds.). 2010. The handbook of critical intercultural communication. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Nakayama, Thomas K. & Robert L. Krizek. 1995. Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech 81. 291–309. Oliver, Robert Tarbell. 1962. Culture and communication: The problem of penetrating national and cultural boundaries. Springfield, IL: Thomas. Olmstead, Audrey P. 1998. Words are acts: Critical race theory as a rhetorical construct. The Howard Journal of Communications 9. 323–331. doi: 10.1080/106461798246934 Orbe, Mark P. 1998. Constructing co-cultural theory: An explication of culture, power, and communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Orbe, Mark P. & Tina M. Harris. 2001. Interracial communication: Theory into practice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

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Orbe, Mark P. & Regina E. Spellers. 2005. From the margins to the center: Utilizing co-cultural theory in diverse contexts. In William B. Gudykunst (ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication, 173–191. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Philipsen, Gerry. 1975. Speaking “like a man” in Teamsterville: Culture patterns of role enactment in an urban neighborhood. Quarterly Journal of Speech 61. 13–22. Philipsen, Gerry & Donal Carbaugh. 1986. A bibliography of fieldwork in the ethnography of communication. Language in Society 15. 387–398. Philipsen, Gerry, Lisa M. Couto & Patricia Covarrubias. 2005. Speech codes: Restatement, revisions, and response to criticisms. In William B. Gudykunst (ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication, 55–68. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rakow, Lana F. & Laura W. Wackwitz. 1998. Communication of sexism. In Michael L. Hecht (ed.), Communicating prejudice, 99–111. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rich, Andrea. 1973. Interracial communication. New York: Harper & Row. Rogers, Everett M. & William B. Hart. 2002. The histories of intercultural, international, and development communication. In William B. Gudykunst & Bella Mody (eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication, 2 nd ed., 1–18. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rogers, Everett M. & Thomas M. Steinfatt. 1999. Intercultural communication. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Rosenau, Pauline Marie 1992. Post-modernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads, and intrusions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosengren, Karl Erik. 1983. Communication research: One paradigm or four? Journal of Communication 83(3). 185–207. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Samovar, Larry A. & Richard E. Porter. 2003. Understanding intercultural communication: An introduction and overview. In Larry A. Samovar & Richard E. Porter (eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader, 10th ed., 6–17. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Sarbaugh, Larry E. & Nobleza Asunción-Lande. 1983. Theory building in intercultural communication: Synthesizing the action caucus. In William B. Gudkyunst (ed.), Intercultural communication theory, 45–60. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Shome, Raka & Radha Hegde. 2002. Postcolonial approaches to communication: Charting the terrain, engaging the intersections. Communication Theory 12. 249–270. Shuter, Robert. 1990. The centrality of culture. Southern Communication Journal 55. 237–249. Shuter, Robert. 2012. Intercultural new media studies. The next frontier in intercultural communication. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 41. 219–237. doi: 10.1080/ 17475759.2012.728761 Shuter, Robert. 2013. Research and pedagogy in intercultural new media. China Media Report Overseas 9(1). 1–5. Smith, Alfred G. (ed.). 1966. Communication and culture: Readings in the codes of human interaction. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Smith, Alfred. G. 1982. Content decisions in intercultural communication. Southern Speech Communication Journal 42. 252–262. Starosta, William J. & Guo-Ming Chen. 2003. “Ferment,” an ethic of caring, and the corrective power of dialogue. In William J. Starosta & Guo-Ming Chen (eds.), Ferment in the intercultural field: Axiology/value/praxis, 3–23. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Starosta, William J. & Guo-Ming Chen. 2010. Exploring the circumference of intercultural communication study. In Thomas K. Nakayama & Rona T. Halualani (eds.), The handbook of critical intercultural communication, 130–146. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Turner, G. 1990. British cultural studies: An introduction. London: Unwin Hyman. Wander, Philip, Thomas K. Nakayama & Judith N. Martin. 1999. Whiteness and beyond: Sociohistorical foundations of Whiteness and contemporary challenges. In Thomas K.

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Nakayama & Judith N. Martin (eds.), Whiteness: The communication of social identity, 13–26. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Willis, Paul E. 1981. Learning to labor: How working-class kids get working-class jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Wiseman, Richard L. (ed.). 1995. Intercultural communication theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yep, Gust A., Karen Lovaas & John P. Elia (eds.). 2004. Queer theory and communication: From disciplining queers to queering the discipline(s). New York: Harrington Park.

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3 Theoretical perspectives on communication and cultures Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of contemporary theoretical perspectives in culture and communication scholarship, based on a review of articles published 2010–2014 in 5 well-known culture and communication journals. The analysis identified four characteristics of each article/abstract: meta/theoretical perspective (critical, interpretive, social science), research context (face to face, mediated etc), focus (intracultural, cross cultural, intercultural), and target cultural group (e.g., African-Americans, Asians, etc); as well as primary topic/s addressed. The review revealed a broad range of topics, foci and contexts. In addition, while the tripartite framework appears useful in understanding the range of current meta/ theoretical perspectives, there is a lack of interrogation of these Western approaches, as well as a lack of attention to economically, politically and geo-strategically less-powerful countries, resulting in “silent zones” in our theorizing. The chapter then calls for scholarship that really matter to contemporary humans as as nearly half of humans live on less than $2.50/day, there are more displaced people in the world than at any other time in human history, and ethnic and religious conflicts threaten the stability of vast world regions. Finally, specific research strategies are identified that may enhance our knowledge and more effectively apply this knowledge to critically important global communication challenges. Keywords: culture, communication, intercultural, theory, paradigm

1 Introduction This undertaking – providing an overview of contemporary culture and communication theoretical perspectives – is daunting, to say the least! The contemporary scholarship includes a range of metatheoretical perspectives, varying in research goals, metatheoretical assumptions regarding epistemology, ontology, axiology and preferred research methods and investigates a broad range of intercultural communication topics and contexts. In addition, communication scholars from all areas of the world contribute to extant knowledge, although they have noted the need for more research about Africans and communication, and studies by Africanaffiliated scholars (Miller et al. 2010; Miller et al. 2013) as well as studies focused on the Middle East (Heisey 2011).

DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-003

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2 A review of research published in five primary culture and communication journals In order to gain a better understanding of current theoretical perspectives, we systematically reviewed the contents of articles published during the past five years (2010–2014) in five well-known culture and communication journals: Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC), Journal of Intercultural Communication Research (JICR), International Journal of Intercultural Relations (IJIR), Language and Intercultural Communication (LAIC) and Intercultural Communication Studies (ICS). The total number of articles/abstracts reviewed was 750. Our content analysis/review was two pronged and included: 1. a close reading of approximately 25 % of the abstracts/articles to identify four characteristics of each article/abstract: meta/theoretical perspective, context of research, focus of research, and target cultural group, e.g., African-Americans, Asians, etc; and 2. identification of primary topics in each of the 760 abstracts/articles using qualitative content analysis software. The specific methods of these two analyses are described below.

2.1 The big picture: Paradigms, focus, context, and cultural groups Approximately 25 % of the 700 abstracts (n = 200) were randomly selected for close reading and each of the abstracts was categorized by the second author for four characteristics: 1. metatheoretical perspective using the well-known tripartite framework (social science, interpretive, critical) (Martin & Nakayama 1999), concentrating primarily on the research goal, 2. research context (face to face, old/ traditional media, new media), 3. research focus (intercultural, cross-cultural or intracultural), and 4. target cultural group(s), e.g., African-Americans, Asians, etc. In addition, a note was made of any specific theories or theoretical notions mentioned. In instances where there was not enough information in the abstract to make a judgment about a particular characteristic we consulted the published article; we also noted instances where it was not possible to categorize one or more characteristics (e.g. theoretical articles which did not mention a cultural group or a context). 2.1.1 Paradigms The results of this analysis revealed that, first, the tripartite framework continues to be useful in understanding the range of meta-theoretical and theoretical perspectives in culture and communication scholarship. Specifically, approximately 45 % (n = 89) of the articles seem to reflect the social science, functionalist paradigm (explicit or implicit goal of predicting human behavior and assuming causality); 40 % (n = 80) reflected interpretive assumptions (goal of understanding and

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describing) and 12 % (n = 25) reflected the critical paradigm (research goal of identifying unequal power relations and ultimately eliminating oppression). That said, it should be noted that many articles reflect a blending of paradigmatic assumptions or lack of explicit assumptions, e.g., descriptive studies that did not explicitly state predictions but seemed to assume a predictive model, e.g., interpretive essays that incorporated critical sensibilities, that is, acknowledging the influence of macro contexts on analyses of intercultural communication phenomena (e.g. historical, political, socio-economic) as well as the importance of social justice issues (Halualani, Mendoza & Drzewiecka 2009). There were 6 articles where it was not possible to identify a clear paradigmatic stance (3 %). It is instructive to note that if we eliminate the International Journal of Intercultural Relations abstracts (the most interdisciplinary of these journals), then the three paradigmatic perspectives are almost equally represented. Each of the five journals seemed to favor particular paradigmatic perspectives and their goal statement and topics of interest reflect these preferences. For example, the International Journal of Intercultural Relations expressly denotes topics of interest in the stated publication goals: “immigrant acculturation and integration, intergroup relations and intercultural communication” (https://www.elsevier.com/journals/ international-journal-of-intercultural-relations/0147-1767/guide-for-authors) – topics that have historically been investigated from a social science perspective. The Journal of International and Intercultural Communication articles reflected the broadest metatheoretical range – research from all three paradigmatic perspectives and explicitly state the goal: to publish “diverse perspectives and methods, including qualitative, quantitative, critical and textual approaches in these contexts (democracy, the environment, gender and sexuality, globalization, health, identify, media, organization, postcolonialism, technology, transationalism, among others)” (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope& journalCode=rjii20). Intercultural Communication Studies and Journal of Intercultural Communication Research articles seemed to reflect primarily social science and interpretive paradigmatic assumptions; Intercultural Communication Studies stating the general goal of publishing research “that brings something new and pertinent to the field of intercultural communication” (http://web.uri.edu/iaics/iaics-journal/) and the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research’s to publish “qualitative and quantitative research that focuses on interrelationships between culture and communication” … in non-mediated contexts”. The paradigmatic preferences for Language and Intercultural Communication are stated more explicitly – “to promote an interdisciplinary understanding interplay between language and intercultural communication, … to resist reductive and hegemonic interpretations … stimulated by contemporary critical perspectives” (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/ journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rmli20). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to identify all the theoretical perspectives in extant literature, we hope to describe some of the dominant topics, theories and approaches, note recent trends and also identify future theoretical

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and metatheoretical directions. Continuing with the big picture, we describe the primary contexts, foci, and cultural groups that emerged from our analysis of research published in the journals identified above.

2.1.2 Contexts Our analysis of the 200 abstracts/articles reveals that most research therein (55 %, n = 111) focuses on face to face contexts (note: this doesn’t mean researchers study actual face to face encounters but the focus is on face to face communication in various interpersonal, organization, and public settings.) Only 15 % of the articles (n = 29) focused on “old” mediated contexts (film, newspapers, television) and only 7 % (n = 15) examined intercultural encounters in new media contexts (blogs, SNS, email etc) and 8 % (n = 17) focused on written texts (poetry, novels). In 28 articles (14 %) it was not possible to identify a context (e.g. the article was theoretical or author did not specify a context). It seemed surprising that there were so few studies conducted on new media, given the proliferation of mediated communication today and it is also worth noting that although the new media studies represented all three paradigmatic perspectives, many of the studies seemed descriptive and atheoretical, suggesting a need for more examinations and theorizing about this fast moving communication phenomenon (see Shuter 2011).

2.1.3 Focus The content analysis also revealed the primary foci of current intercultural communication research (e.g. intercultural, cross cultural or intra/cultural). Not surprisingly, the majority of the 200 abstracts/articles seemed to focus on intercultural communication encounters (61 %, n = 122), the remainder of the research focused almost equally on cross cultural studies (15 %, n = 30) and cultural (17 %, n = 34). It seems that there are fewer cross cultural studies and more focus on intercultural interaction than in previous eras. Note: Again while the focus is on intercultural interaction, much of the research does not investigate actual interaction, but on interaction in the abstract (e.g. acculturation of immigrants which assumes intercultural contact between immigrants and members of host culture without actually observing or describing the encounters).

2.1.4 Cultural groups Our analysis revealed a rather bleak picture, exposing vast “silent zones” in extant culture and communication research – described in more detail later in the chapter. Specifically, the 200 abstracts/articles under review revealed a focus on ap-

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proximately 236 different cultures/regions of the world 1. Given that we reviewed articles in U.S. American and European journals, it is not surprising that the largest majority of the articles focused on cultural groups within North America and Europe (17 % and 27 % respectively, a total of 44 %). However, Asian countries (including the South Asian country of India) represented 27 % (n = 65), with China representing 13 % (n = 30) of all cultures mentioned! (compared to Japan with 6 %, n = 14). As scholars have noted, research foci follow the money – seen so clearly in the emphasis on Japanese cultural phenomena during the Japanese economic heydays of the 1980–2000, and now the strong emphasis on China, the more recent economic powerhouse. There are three vast geographical areas that are completely neglected in the scholarship reviewed here. Of the 236 specific cultural groups mentioned, only four countries within the entire African continent were mentioned and there were two other general mentions of “Africa,” a shameful absence noted by Miller et al. 2013. Similarly, Central and South America cultures/countries are also absent: Mexico was mentioned twice; Costa Rico and Chile once, representing 2 % of all cultural groups mentioned. Middle Eastern countries/cultures (including Turkey) fared slightly better – representing 13 % (n = 30) of cultural groups mentioned; but given the current world and regional conflicts, it seems imperative that culture and communication scholars focus more on this important geographical region. It should be noted that a number of articles focused on encounters/relations between Jews and Muslims within Israeli contexts.

2.2 Overview of topics and theoretical perspectives In order to better understand the topics represented in current culture and communication scholarship, for our second content analysis, all the articles and their abstracts published in the aforementioned journals in last five years (2010–2014) were downloaded in a single file. Then a qualitative data analysis software tabulated frequencies for all the words appearing in those journal abstracts; articles and prepositions (the, a, and, etc.) were then deleted, in order to focus more on the keywords related to culture and communication. The top ten words, appearing an average of 500 times each, are: intercultural, research, study, cultural, communication, social, students, language, identity, and Chinese. For the next step, we considered only those words which appeared at least 50 times in the abstracts, yielding a total of 184 words. These words were arranged

1 In instances of cross cultural or intercultural studies, all cultures were noted, e.g., an article focusing on “Moroccan immigrants in France” was tallied as focusing on both Morocco and France. Also, some groups were referenced rather vaguely, e.g., “international students”, or “immigrants in Australia” (n = 13).

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alphabetically to identify similar keywords (e.g. cultural, culture and culturally; or language and languages) and these words were grouped under single keywords (e.g. culture and language respectively). Then these keywords were grouped (by the first author) based on their meanings and interconnectedness; for example, words such as pedagogy, teaching, student and teachers were grouped together. In cases of doubt, close reading of the words in actual contexts was done, in consultation with the second author, in order to gain a better understanding of the meanings and implications of the keywords. Finally, the following eight topic domains in culture and communication research emerged and are described in the next section, along with specific theories identified in the earlier analysis (close reading of 25 % of the articles/abstracts). These topic categories are not mutually exclusive by any means; many of the articles could be considered for multiple categories. Topics are presented in alphabetical order as follows.

2.2.1 Academic interactions and intercultural communication Academic training, orientation and pedagogical, aspects are integral processes of various intercultural communication praxis. Journal articles in this category are both descriptive and prescriptive. Some describe behaviors, beliefs and practices, primarily from a social science paradigmatic stance, e.g. measuring teacher characteristics and their impact on student learning in various cultures (Goldman, Bolkan & Goodboy 2014) or investigating the relationship between intercultural competence and motivations of the learners (Mirzaei & Forouzandeh 2013). Scholars described cases from conventional classroom situations (Keshishian 2013) as well as online settings and in study abroad contexts (Sandel 2014). The more prescriptive articles described strategies for strengthening intercultural competencies of both teachers, e.g. internationalization of education through network-based international collaborations (Dooly 2011) and face to face training in interculturality (Garduño, Puga, Manzano & Taipa 2012) and students, e.g., applying newer pedagogical tools in intercultural training such as usage of audiovisuals/films and social media (Truong & Tran 2014). There are also a few critical studies of intercultural communication in academic contexts, e.g., using a post-colonial, post-structural lens to question the effectiveness of interreligious dialogues for accomplishing and promoting intercultural pedagogy (Riitaoja & Dervin 2014), using cosmopolitan pedagogical framework to examine global competencies of students in Chicago’s underserved communities (Sobré-Denton, Carlsen & Gruel 2014).

2.2.2 Acculturation, competence and intercultural negotiations Contemporary scholars continue paying attention to topics of acculturation, competence and face negotiation, and much of the primary theorizing in intercultural

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communication scholarship still focuses on acculturation. The review revealed that the social science theories employed in investigations of these topics are many of those identified and described in Gudykunst’s 2005 edited volume, Theorizing Intercultural Communication, most notably those covering acculturation (e.g. Communication scholar Kim’s Integrative theory, Gudykunst’s Anxiety/Uncertainty Management theory (AUM) theory) (see Yuan 2011; Zhang & Goodson 2011), effective intercultural interaction (e.g. Oetzel’s Effective Intercultural Work Group Communication Theory), and adaptation in intercultural interaction (e.g. Giles and colleagues’s Communication Accommodation theory, Burgoon’s Expectancy Violations theory). In addition to communication theories identified above, current scholarship also builds on social psychology theories, including Berry’s four strategies of acculturation (see Jibeen 2011), Ward and Searle’s model of psycho cultural and sociocultural dimensions of adaptation, and Black’s theory of transition (Lin, Chen & Song 2012). Our review reveals that the social science scholarship (especially in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations) is replete with explorations of variables connected to acculturation, including social capital, emotional displays, leadership, happiness, satisfaction and well being, stress, language learning, extended kin, cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence, food consumption, and stereotyping. In recent years, various papers have been written on the roles of media exposure, social support, and individual coping in the context of acculturation (Hanasono, Chen & Wilson 2014). Aspects such as cultural fusion and cultural adaptation are also addressed by various authors (Sandel & Liang 2010). It should be noted that, whereas previous research focused on business expats and student sojourners, current research is extended to immigrant groups’ transitions and adaptation – described later in this chapter. Narratives on face and discussion on face-negotiation theory emerged from scholarship of several researchers, much of it based on Ting-Toomey’s well-known work in face negotiation (see Gudykunst 2005), for example, face-ideology in the context of cross-cultural business communication (Shi 2011). Our review also revealed a great deal of social science research that extends interpersonal communication scholarship/theorizing (usually based on psychology research) to intercultural contexts, e.g., relational schemas, social penetration, elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, nonverbal expectancy theory, willingness to communicate, and similarity-attraction paradigm, too numerous to cite all specific examples here. Two examples address intercultural relationship aspects – one examines cultural variations in self-disclosure and emotional closeness (Maier, Zhang & Clark 2013) and another examines conflict styles of interracial couples (Lawton, Foeman & Braz 2013). Related research on intercultural competence is another important area of theorizing. Building on previous research, scholars examined the relevance and impacts of communicative aspects on intercultural competence such as cultural sensi-

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tivity on ethnocentrism (Chen 2010), dialogic/questioning behaviors and diffused resistive enactments (Araújo e Sá, Carlo & Melo-Pfeifer 2010) and sensation seeking (Arasaratnam & Banerjee 2011).

2.2.3 Conflict, peace-building and intercultural communication Intercultural communication studies have recently considered peace building and conflict resolution as one of the central foci of the discipline, both on the individual and societal level. On the individual (interpersonal) level, the domain of conflict is studied from various perspectives by contemporary scholars, including the impact of individualistic and collectivistic culture on conflict, role of trust/distrust in resolving conflict, and racial attitude and intergroup communication in constituting/resolving conflict (Allison & Emmers-Sommer 2011). Scholars also use theories from organizational communication – e.g., Rahim’s conflict strategies (Cheng 2010). In the peace building context, various frameworks that embrace community engagement, reflexive dialogue and solidarity building were described and discussed as well as interest in discovering how best to encourage intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding, especially in the complex arena of intractable conflicts (Broome & Collier 2012). Another more recent area of theorizing investigates the potentials of intercultural dialogue and its transformative possibilities [see special issue of Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (Vol. 4, issue 2) in face to face as well as online interaction (Carbaugh et al. 2011; Witteborn 2011)].

2.2.4 Diversity, underrepresented populations and intercultural communication Building on Co-cultural theory (Orbe & Spellers in Gudykunst 2005), recent research questions the dominant discourses and foregrounds co-cultural agencies and identities. To explain co-cultural communication theory, Camara and Orbe (2011) noted that it is grounded in muted group and standpoint theories as well as phenomenology , and is founded on the experiences of a wide range of co-cultural groups, including members of racial and ethnic groups, women, persons with disabilities, gays, lesbians and bisexuals, and those with a lower socioeconomic status. Issues of hegemonic structural violence, imposition of dominant ideologies, and maintenance of privileges are discussed in several papers (Milazzo 2015). In response to discrimination and violence, scholars explore the relevance and necessity of co-cultural agentic engagements such as intercultural dialogue, civic engagements, and empowerment of co-cultural groups (Camara & Orbe 2011; MacLennan 2011). The issue of multiculturalism in many contexts is also explored (see Arasaratnam 2013).

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To understand the processes and impacts of discriminations and prejudices, research also focuses on several intercultural aspects such as construction of cultural “other”, effectiveness of face-to-face and mediated prejudice reduction, cocultural responses and discrimination negotiation strategies (Jun 2012; Shulman, Collins & Clément 2011), as well as a focus on white privilege (Lacy 2010). Research also addressed the issues of minority identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, caste-based minorities) and identity struggles using postcolonial approaches, critical race theory and various foci on race and white privilege [See Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 2015 special issues (Vol 8, issues 1 and 2) on “Race(ing) Intercultural Communication”]. A most recent focus is on a cultural group that has been undertheorized in intercultural communication – the LGBTQ community [see 2013 Journal of International and Intercultural Communication special issue (Vol 6, Issue 2) (Chavez 2013)]. For example, LGBTQ issues such as body images and homonormativity are discussed (Aiello et al. 2013). Issues of other underrepresented groups such as foreign domestic helpers (Ladegaard 2013) and HIV/ AIDS victims are also addressed in contemporary intercultural journal articles (D’Silva, Leichty & Agarwal 2011).

2.2.5 Globalization, west-centric imperialism and intercultural communication The processes of globalization and its manifestation are also studied by intercultural communication scholars; global diversity, global citizenship and global communication are some of the aspects discussed; see for example, Witteborn’s (2010) examination of the role of transnational NGOs in promoting global citizenship and globalizing communication practices. Contemporary intercultural articles also examined the roles of traditional and new media in globalization, extending Everett Roger’s theory of diffusion of innovation, as well as other theories including cultivation theories, dependency theories, uses and gratifications theories. See for example, the study of Bedouin and Tel-Aviv teens and their use of mobile phones (Samuel-Azran 2012). In understanding Eurocentric and west-centric imperialism, scholars examined several cultural aspects such as markers of desire, white supremacy, and white privilege (Lacy 2010). Roles of cultural diplomacy, discursive initiatives and local/ regional media are studied in the context of building national images and legitimizing transnational issues (See Da 2013; Su 2012).

2.2.6 Identity, resistance and intercultural communication Our analysis reveals a continuing focus on identity, using many of the theories included in Gudykunst’s (2005) Theorizing … noted earlier: Collier’s theory of iden-

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tity, Hecht’s Communication theory of Identity, Ting-Toomey’s Identity negotiation theory as well as her Facework theory. Critical conceptions of identity include the notions of hybridity where identity is articulated and expressed in complex and often dialectical competing tensions (Bardhan 2011) and the importance of physical space and place in understanding identity for various cultural beings (Sekimoto 2012); others incorporate work of European critical theorists (e.g. Foucault, Bakhtin etc). Many scholars, particularly those who use a critical lens, study global capitalism and structural inequity to understand poverty, voicelessness and marginalization in the underserved spaces (Murphy 2013). Scholars paid attention to how construction of minority and hegemonic discriminatory policies reify power imbalances and resource disparities (see Martínez-Guillem’s 2011 discussion of European attitudes toward the Roma). Cases of resistive co-cultural enactments and communicative activism were presented in several articles (Antony 2010); these papers are primarily guided by the theoretical perspectives of feminism and co-cultural discursivity and seek to create avenues for social change (Miles 2010). Some of the relevant aspects emerged from the discussion of contemporary scholars are interplay between global/universal and local/non-western realities/experiences and identities (e.g. how intercultural dialogues and creativity used to study the global-local interplay (Uddin & Hill 2010), and dehistoricized cultural othering of the underserved (Weiguo 2013)).

2.2.7 Language and intercultural communication Linguistic aspects remains one of the primary areas of investigation in intercultural communication research and theory; particularly among European language scholars who conduct studies using discourse analysis, Speech Act theory, politeness, conversational strategies, and cultural scripts, in various contexts. A primary context is second language learning. For example, some research discusses intercultural willingness to communicate (Mertins & Baus 2010) and others the emotional aspects in the context of second-language learning (see Horan 2013). Scholars also argued in favor of linguistic pluralism and legitimizing underrepresented voices; in doing so, they criticized and questioned linguistic hegemony, American modernism and global capitalist competitions (Lee, Han & McKerrow 2010). In addition, the issues related to translation also got substantial attention from the contemporary intercultural scholars. Several aspects of translation such as audiovisual translations, ideological aspects, culture specific vocabularies, manipulation of narratives, disappointing translations, global processes and portrayal of local languages in translation processes are discussed (see Heller 2011; Li 2012). Other language orientated theories include rhetorical analysis, as well as the role of language in identity negotiation and expression (see Fay & Davchevea 2014; Spencer 2011).

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2.2.8 Migration, diaspora and intercultural communication Research investigating migration and diasporas might be seen as an extension of the longstanding social science investigations of acculturation and adaptation and often include recent critical approaches, espousing a more nuanced and complex view of these topics, incorporating power relations and more fluid conceptualizations of culture and identity. For example, Kinefuchi (2010) describes a diasporic view of acculturation that also involves spatial negotiations. Issues of language and migration also receive attention [See Language and Intercultural Communication 2014 special issue (Vol 14, issue 3) on “Migrating Languages: Multidisciplinary perspectives on Refugees, Asylum, Migration and Language”]. Issues of migration are studied from macro as well as from micro perspectives. Immigration policies of nation-state, resettlement policies are important foci (e.g., Cheah et al. 2011). Individual and micro-level negotiations of migration issues are addressed; for example, transnational marriages and inequalities caused by migration processes (Drzewiecka & Steyn 2012). Researchers also studied different cultural perspectives from host and migrant standpoints, and processes of negotiating and constructing social cultural values to foreground immigrant and diasporic narrativization (Hua 2010). In such contexts, nonverbal communication, social political diversities, and the impacts of globalization and transnationalization were examined (Flynn & Kosmarskaya 2014).

3 Current trends and future directions This review of contemporary theorizing in intercultural communication reveals several trends. First, research now seems to include works with less emphasis on cultural values frameworks (e.g. Hofstede’s cultures values framework) that were so dominant in the 1980’s and 90’s and have been critiqued for promoting a static, essentialist conceptualization of culture (Fougère & Moulettes 2007). Research using these frameworks is still being published (see Merkin, Taras & Steel 2014 for a review of research findings connecting cultural values and cultural variations in communication patterns), but viewing all cultural variations through the lens of value frameworks is less common. Recent scholarship has pointed out existing gaps in intercultural communication theorizing promotes more nuanced views on popular topics like acculturation, identity, competence and reveals some initial forays into new and social media. For instance, Lim, Kim and Kim (2011) discuss Holism, a concept or a missing link in individualism collectivism research, which shed new light in understanding individualistic-collectivistic imperative. This trend likely reflects the recent impact of critical studies on current intercultural communication research (Inuzuku 2013). There are still many descriptive studies but scholars are calling for more discussions of power relations, especially

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in language and communication studies (Horan 2013; Lee, Han & Mckerrow 2010; Miles 2010).2 Critical theorizing addresses some of the same topics as social science and interpretive researchers, e.g. acculturation, and identity. However, while critical sensibilities are gaining in influence, an important challenge is how to understand and deconstruct power in intercultural encounters and not succumb to nihilism or abstract intellectual arguments that don’t reach beyond our academic journals or our conversations. As Jing Yin in Alexander et al. (2014a: 43) notes so aptly, “struggle over power and meaning should not end in the act of deconstructing the narratives that normalize the relations and rationalities that work against the interests of the marginalized … [but] should be seen as a possibility for reconstructing alternative narratives, imaginaries, cultural spaces and identities”. Second, our review also revealed a lack of interrogation of Western paradigmatic approaches to theorizing. While there are examples of scholarship that critique approaches to particular topics in current research, e.g., approaches to competence (Dasli 2012), the “culture of war research” (Kim 2012), and the 2014 Journal of International and Intercultural Communication issue that described issues and challenges in current intercultural communication scholarship (Alexander et al. 2014b), the critique of naive dialecticalism (Spencer-Rodgers, Williams & Peng 2012), a postcolonial critique of cultural intelligence and globalization (Dutta & Dutta 2013), there were few metatheoretical explorations; that is, there were few essays that questioned or critiqued the underlying assumptions of the current traditional (western) approaches and few that proposed alternative epistemologies. We strongly suggest that it is time to move beyond the Western tripartite paradigmatic frameworks, and the Western/nonwestern dichotomy to a more inclusive metatheoretical umbrella and to more exploration of alternative perspectives, e. g., to incorporate or highlight centric metatheoretical perspectives, and to apply more varied and diverse concepts to examine common communication issues in innovative ways of theorizing (Miike 2007). Miike and Asante are two scholars who have proposed alternative paradigmatic perspectives – the Afrocentric and Asiacentric approaches (Asante & Miike 2013). For example, Miike (2017) comprehensively and persuasively argued that the praxis of centering paradigmatically legitimizes local histories, philosophies, religions, aesthetics and languages in representing local culture and phenomena in a nonethnocentric and non-essentialist manner. Grounded in the principles of self-realization and self-determination, centering seeks to ethically contribute to cultural reaffirmation, renewal, reconstruction and re-humanization. In the recent past, several alternate philosophies and epistemologies emerge in the domain of culture and communication (Brummans & Hwang 2010), e.g., the “sarvodaya” (progress

2 We should note that this chapter would cover more critical theories had we included in this review the culture and communication journals that focus exclusively on critical research e.g. Communication and Critical Cultural Studies.

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for all) approach based on Gandhian philosophy, as well as alternate development approaches based on Buddhist philosophy, the African emancipatory philosophy of “ubuntu”, and the “maat” philosophy of Egypt for harmony, balance, order, justice, truth, righteousness, and reciprocity. Dialogues and engaged interactions between West centric approaches and nonWestern centric approaches might yield possibilities for bringing about social justice and equity. For instance, Rao (2010) suggests that we should reject the false dialectical opposition of the global-local, center-periphery, universality-particularism models as inadequate and rather proposes the notion of glocalization, citing Robertson (1995: 29) that “captures the dynamics of the local in the global and the global in the local”. The theory of glocalization sees global and local not as opposites, but rather as “mutually formative, complementary competitors, feeding off each other as they struggle for influence” (Kraidy 2003: 38). Rather than pitching global against the local, glocalization breaks down the “ontologically secure homes” of each and presents them as interconnected forces (Rao 2010: 5). Thus scholars are proposing a more inclusive and dialogic-dialectic approach of theorizing culture and communication matters. Third, scholars further emphasize that intercultural communication research should examine topics that really matter to contemporary humans as the majority of people in this world live on less than $2.50/day, there are more displaced people in the world than at any other time in human history, and ethnic and religious conflicts threaten the stability of vast world regions. While some scholars address the issues of the underserved and emphasize theorizing communication matters emerging from and situated in marginalized spaces, e.g., M. J. Dutta’s (2008) culture-centered approach, and Orbe’s co-cultural communication theory described earlier, our analysis revealed that vast geographical regions of the globe remained understudied by intercultural communication scholars. More specifically, more than 60 % of the global population lives in African, Latin American and Asian (except for East Asia) countries, and yet less than 10 % of the articles we reviewed focused on those countries and populations. This can hardly be explained by the publication language and researcher affiliation alone (also see below). This lack of scholarly attention to studying economically, politically and geo-strategically lesspowerful countries creates a knowledge gap or “silent zones” in intercultural communication research and calls us, as intercultural communication scholars, to study these regions and populations in order to enhance our knowledge and more effectively apply this knowledge to critically important global challenges. For example, U. Dutta’s recent research to studying underdevelopment and social disparity in South Asia region sought to foreground voices and issues of the underserved (Dutta 2015). The larger question is, what should we as culture and communication scholars focus on in our research? A group of eminent (and diverse) scholars recently responded to this question in a multivocal conversation, suggesting the following:

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giving voice to the marginalized, questioning the hegemony of English, the need for rethinking the concept of similarities/difference and redefining racial and ethnic identities (Alexander et al. 2014b). Other issues that are woefully unaddressed are socio-economic class and intercultural communication, preservation of co-cultural artifacts (especially those are on the brink of extinction) and endangered languages, religious and ethnic conflicts happening in various areas of the globe, and a lack of focus on inter religious interactions and challenges. Some scholars have accepted the challenge (see Broome 2013; Cheong & Poon 2009; Dutta & Dutta 2013). Fourth, in recent years, scholars have suggested several innovative methodologies for advancing the discipline of critical intercultural research. Some of the prominent theoretical leads in this direction are critical race theories and decolonizing theories linked to indigenous methodologies, activism based methodologies, and performative methodologies (Willink et al. 2014). Learning about alternative epistemologies situated in local spaces such as local/indigenous wisdom, knowledge, and communication praxis are crucial in creating newer communication research-dialogues and knowledge production avenues. Emergent global dynamics and advancement of communication technology lead contemporary scholars to conduct research to make the world a better place and communication for social change and information technology aided culture and communication research (see Dutta & Das 2015). Exploration of transdisciplinary avenues and dialogue with scholars and practitioners from other disciplines are crucial for enhancing the culture and communication scholarship. Explorations and collaborative researchers working in the domains of information sciences, communication technology, communication design, human dimensions of engineering and management could potentially yield new knowledge production avenues. Critical communication scholars consistently question and challenge hegemony praxis, which creates disenfranchisement, displacement, as well as conditions of poverty, hunger and marginalization (Antony 2010), while constructing group boundaries. In order to create a better world, scholars emphasize meaningful communication praxis for creating avenues of social transformation; some of them are building community dialogue, creating avenues for foregrounding issues of the underserved in their own voice and propose horizontal methodology of authorship (Aldaya 2012; Daniel 2012). Empathetic knowledge production emphasizing projective empathy (imagining future communications), communicative ecology (based on equity, freedom, capabilities, sustainability), sharing (knowledge, space, wealth, power, responsibility), and localocentric innovation and creativity are instrumental in bringing about social change in the era of globalization. For bringing about social justice, scholars argued in favor of a more engaged and reflexive research approach. Many critical scholars called for activism-oriented research, which emphasizes solidarity, reflection and commitment for creating openings for social change and addressing critical issues including environmental

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inequity, climate change, global health disparity, and global sustainability – issues underlying some ostensibly intercultural issues. Such research essentially calls for searching alternate avenues and meanings of health, development, empowerment and social justice. Similarly, addressing the peace imperatives, scholars have noted that while conflict is inevitable, ethically engaging and harmony-yielding communicative praxis are instrumental in bringing about peace; they emphasized humanness principles, rootedness and indebtedness, respect and care for promoting dialogue, peace and human rights and dignity, and preservation of cultural heritages, worldviews, home and communities (Miike 2017). In search of newer theoretical and methodological approaches, we have seen many scholarly works that embraced autoethnography (Root et al. 2013) and creative non-fictions in the recent years. Increasing emphasis on visual and sensory methodologies (Pink 2009) aided intercultural communication scholars in discovering new grounds/avenues of engaged communication research. For instance, contemporary scholars are now proposing auto-videography (Chan & Ng 2013) for advancement of culture and communication research. Finally, proliferation of new media and information technology (at large) prompts culture and communication scholars to examine phenomena in the emerging field of intercultural new media studies (INMS). One of the leading scholars in this field, Shuter (2012: 219) noted, “INMS investigates new digital theories of intercultural contact as well as refines and expands twentieth-century intercultural communication theories, examining their salience in a digital world”. INMS also opened up avenues for incorporation of multiple media and multimodal communicative possibilities (Pfister & Soliz 2011) including virtual and artificial intelligence enabled interactions. Scholars argued that such interactions and emergence of newer communicative accesses would bring about greater digital democracy/equity and thereby ensure more democratic participation and representations in new media spaces (Johnson & Callahan 2013). Advancement of information and communication technology and increasing emphasis on participatory/community-centered research enabled culture and communication scholars to explore transdisciplinary research avenues such as mixed media and online/digital-based research. For instance, real-time creation and sharing of audio-visual information in online platforms by community members would be instrumental in foregrounding underserved voices in discursive spaces of decision making. Moreover, usage of newer techniques for pedagogical and communicative purposes also yielded new possibilities; utilization of video-games for teaching languages, and avatar mediated communication for virtual proxemics can be considered as some examples.

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4 Conclusion While intercultural communication scholarship has contributed a great deal in understanding and facilitating encounters between people from different cultures, current global conditions compel us to explore more inclusive, equitable, and creative theorizing to meet the technological, immigration, peace, and demographic challenges facing humanity today, of which culture is but one element, yet it remains a consequential consideration to many.

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Mirzaei, Azizullah & Faranak Forouzandeh. 2013. Relationship between intercultural communicative competence and L2-learning motivation of Iranian EFL learners. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 42(3). 300–318. Murphy, Alexandra G. 2013. Discursive frictions: Power, identity, and culture in an international working partnership. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6(1). 1–20. Orbe, Mark P. & Regina Spellers. 2005. From the margins to the center: Utilizing cocultural theory in diverse contexts. In William B. Gudykunst (ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication, 173–191. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pfister, Smith & Damien Soliz. 2011. (Re)conceptualizing intercultural communication in a networked society. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 4(4). 246–251. Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage Publications. Rao, Shakuntala. 2010. “I need an Indian touch”: Glocalization and Bollywood films. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3(1). 1–19. Riitaoja, Anna-Leena & Fred Dervin. 2014. Interreligious dialogue in schools: Beyond asymmetry and categorisation? Language and Intercultural Communication 14(1). 76–90. Robertson, Roland. 1995. Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (eds.), Global modernities, 25–43. London: Sage. Root, Elizabeth, Tara D. Hargrove, Anchalee Ngampornchai & Mathew D. Petrunia. 2013. Identity dialectics of the intercultural communication instructor: Insights from collaborative autoethnography. Intercultural Communication Studies 22(2). 1–18. Samuel-Azran, Tai. 2012. The mobile phone and indigenous teens: A comparative analysis of Bedouin and Tel-Aviv Teens. Journal of Intercultural Research 41(2). 153–171. Sandel, Todd L. 2014. “Oh, I’m Here!”: Social media’s impact on the cross-cultural adaptation of students studying abroad. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 43(1). 1–29. Sandel, Todd L. & Chung-Hui Liang. 2010. Taiwan’s fifth ethnic group: A study of the acculturation and cultural fusion of women who have married into families in Taiwan. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3(3). 249–275. Sekimoto, Sachi. 2012. A multimodal approach to identity: Theorizing the self through embodiment, spatiality and temporality. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 5(3). 226–243. Shi, Xingsong. 2011. The impact of face on Chinese students’ simulated negotiation practices with Americans. Language and Intercultural Communication 11(1). 26–40. Shulman, Jessica L., Katherine A. Collins & Richard Clément. 2011. In consideration of social context: Re-examining the Linguistic Intergroup Bias paradigm. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 4(4). 310–332. Shuter, Robert. 2011. Introduction: New media across cultures: Prospect and promise. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 4(4). 241–245. Shuter, Robert. 2012. Intercultural new media studies: The next frontier in intercultural communication. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 41(3). 219–237. Sobré-Denton, Miriam, Rob Carlsen & Veronica Gruel. 2014. Opening doors, opening minds: A cosmopolitan pedagogical framework to assess learning for global competency in Chicago’s underserved communities. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 40(1). 141–153. Spencer, Anthony. 2011. Americans create hybrid spaces in Costa Rica: A framework for exploring cultural and linguistic integration. Language and Intercultural Communication 11(1). 59–74. Spencer-Rodgers, Julie, Melissa J. Williams & Kaiping Peng. 2012. Culturally based lay beliefs as a tool for understanding intergroup and intercultural relations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 36(2). 169–178. Truong, Le Bach & Ly Thi Tran. 2014. Students’ intercultural development through language learning in Vietnamese tertiary education: A case study on the use of film as an innovative approach. Language and Intercultural Communication 14(2). 207–225.

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Uddin, Mahbub & L. Brooks Hill. 2010. Creativity and entrepreneurial behavior. Journal of Intercultural Communication Studies 19(3). 221–234. Weiguo, Qu. 2013. Dehistoricized cultural identity and cultural othering. Language and Intercultural Communication 13(2). 148–164. Willink, Kate G., Robert Gutierrez-Perez, Salma Shukri & Lacey Stein. 2014. Navigating with the stars: Critical qualitative methodological constellations for critical intercultural communication research. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 7(4). 289– 316. Witteborn, Saskia. 2010. The role of transnational NGOs in promoting global citizenship and globalizing communication practices. Language and intercultural communication 10(4). 358– 372. Witteborn, Saskia. 2011. Discursive grouping in a virtual forum: Dialogue, difference, and the “intercultural”. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 4(2). 109–126. Yuan, Wenli. 2011. Academic and cultural experiences of Chinese students at an American university: A qualitative study. Intercultural Communication Studies 20(1). 141–157. Zhang, Jing & Patricia Goodson. 2011. Acculturation and psychosocial adjustment of Chinese international students: examining mediation and moderation effects. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35(5). 614–627.

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4 Non-Western theories of communication: Indigenous ideas and insights Abstract: This chapter presents an overview of non-Western communication theories for cross-cultural and intercultural research. The chapter specifically focuses on selected Afrocentric and Asiacentric theories of communication because they represent communication theories whose ideas and insights spring from indigenous cumulative wisdom of non-Western cultural traditions. The chapter first explicates the significance and scope of non-Western communication theories and then reviews a total of seventeen theories within Afrocentric and Asiacentric communication scholarship. The indigenous theories under review are classified into three philosophical categories: 1. six theories predicated on Asian ontological worldviews; 2. four theories derived from African and Asian epistemological foundations; and 3. seven theories guided by African and Asian axiological parameters. The present chapter concludes by discussing future challenges of non-Western communication theorizing. Keywords: Afrocentricity, Asiacentricity, axiology, communication theory, cultural tradition, epistemology, indigenous wisdom, non-Western scholarship, ontology, spirituality

As the sixteenth century was the Portuguese century, so the seventeenth century was the Spanish and Dutch century, the eighteenth century was the French century, the nineteenth century was the British and German century, the twentieth century was dominated by the American nation with its aggrandizing conquest of knowledge … [T]he combination of the European centuries gives us about four to five hundred years of solid European domination of intellectual concepts and philosophical ideas. (Asante 2011: 22–23) Any interpretation of African culture must begin at once to dispense with the notion that, in all things, Europe is teacher and Africa is pupil. This is the central point of my argument. To raise the question of an imperialism of the intellectual tradition is to ask a most meaningful question as we pursue African rhetoric, because Western theorists have too often tended to generalize from a Eurocentric base. (Asante 1998: 71) – Molefi Kete Asante

1 Introduction: Indigenous ideas and insights in non-Western cultural traditions The aim of this chapter is to overview non-Western theories of communication for the study of intracultural and intercultural interactions. By non-Western theories of DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-004

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communication, the chapter means communication theories whose concepts, assumptions, principles, and models originated from indigenous cumulative wisdom of non-Western cultural traditions. The chapter, therefore, does not survey and summarize non-Western communication theories as the appropriated and localized forms of Western theories for non-Western communicators and contexts. The term non-Western refers to vast and varied regions of the globe. Due to space constraints, it is impossible to cover all indigenous theories of communication in all areas of the non-Western world. The chapter thus limits itself to selected theories of communication that are grounded in Afrocentric and Asiacentric traditions (Asante 1998, 1999, 2000, 2005, 2014, 2015; Asante & Miike 2013; Miike 2006, 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2014b; Miike & Yin 2015). These traditions represent indigenous theorizing activities in the discipline of communication, in general, and in the field of intercultural communication, in particular. Two caveats are in order. First, as Ahmad Murad Merican (2005a, 2005b) intimated, non-Western theories of communication necessarily encompass spiritual, philosophical, and historical considerations regarding who we are and where we have come, how we know what we know, and what we feel important, good, and beautiful. Many years ago, Tulsi B. Saral (1983) maintained that understanding these “deep structure” features, rather than the “surface structure” features such as verbal and nonverbal styles, in a given culture makes a real difference in our ability to communicate in the non-Western world. The deep structures of humanity, culture, and communication have been shaped by metaphysical assumptions about the definitions of truth and reality, the place of an individual in the universe and her or his relationships with other living and non-living beings, and the concepts of space and time.1 Second, non-Western theories of communication should not be indiscriminately applied in Western contexts. Fred L. Casmir’s (1990: 57) stance is correct and commendable: “Until I can be certain that I understand why and how certain paradigms developed, and how and why they are anchored to a specific cultural foundation, I cannot begin to venture more than a guess as to their applicability, or even transferability to some other culture[s].” Communication theories in the multicultural world can be classified into three philosophical categories: 1. theories centering on ontology (the origin and nature of being), 2. theories grounded in epistemology (the way of knowing and understanding), and 3. theories emanating from axiology (values, ethics, and aesthetics). Accordingly, after expounding on the significance and scope of non-Western communication theories, the present chapter first takes a cursory look at Asiacentric theories of communication predicated on Asian ontological worldviews. The chapter then sheds light on Afrocentric and Asiacentric theories of communication de-

1 Ling Chen (1993) probed into three domains of consciousness, namely, space and time, human and nature, and ego and society in Chinese and U.S. American cultures in order to ameliorate intercultural communication between U.S. Americans and the Chinese.

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rived from African and Asian epistemological foundations, and valorizes Afrocentric and Asiacentric theories of communication guided by African and Asian axiological parameters. All indigenous theories of communication under review have historical significance and contemporary relevance. This chapter concludes with some discussion on the future challenges of non-Western theorizing in a post-Western era of scholarship.

2 The significance and scope of non-Western communication theories Theory is broadly defined in this chapter. As a matter of fact, the meaning of theory is etymologically broad. According to Cees J. Hamelink (2015), the English-language word came from the Greek-language word theoria, which literally means “vision.” As such, for the present chapter, theory is not narrowly and rigidly delimited as a set of relationships between/among operationalized concepts for empirical research in the postpositivist sense or as the so-called “high theory” in the terrain of critical inquiry. The chapter proceeds with the premise that “theorizing takes many forms, [and] that it can be, in fact, culturally specific” (Christian 1996: 245). It goes without saying that the significance and scope of theory building converge and diverge in Western and non-Western academic settings. In both intellectual contexts, as Robert T. Craig (2013a, 2013b) elucidated, the role of theory is to describe and explain social phenomena or deconstruct and reconstruct social practices. Nevertheless, for non-Western peoples who have long been objects and spectators rather than subjects and actors in the 500-year history of European domination, the additional raison d’être of theory points inevitably to the tasks of the decolonization of the mind, self-definition and self-determination, and cultural preservation and revitalization. From an Afrocentric standpoint, Asante (2005: 201– 202), who is of the opinion that there can be no liberation without theory, avowed: Theory is important because it directs us to the proper questions to ask and the methods to use to acquire data that can be interpreted in a way that makes cultural, psychological, and literary liberation more certain … Theory, particularly Afrocentric theory, drives us closer to explaining how conceptual distance from our own centers leaves us on the margins of the European reality.

From a Maori point of view, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 39–40) contended that “new ways of theorizing by indigenous scholars are grounded in a real sense of, and sensitivity towards, what it means to be an indigenous person.” She further articulated the role and importance of theory in the process of indigenization and revitalization:

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I am arguing that theory at its simplest level is important for indigenous peoples. At the very least it helps make sense of reality. It enables us to make assumptions and predictions about the world in which we live. It contains within it a method or methods for selecting and arranging, for prioritizing and legitimating what we see and do. Theory enables us to deal with contradictions and uncertainties. Perhaps more significantly, it gives us space to plan, to strategize, to take greater control over our resistances. The language of a theory can also be used as a way of organizing and determining action. It helps us to interpret what is being told to us, and to predict the consequences of what is being promised. Theory can also protect us because it contains within it a way of putting reality into perspective. If it is a good theory it also allows for new ideas and ways of looking at things to be incorporated constantly, without the need to search constantly for new theories.

Many researchers in the non-Western world belabored the difficulty of applying Western communication theories in non-Western contexts. Usha Vyasulu Reddi (1988), for example, questioned the usefulness of Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance in the Indian milieu. Indian society today is fully of dichotomies and contradictions due to the historical confluence of non-Western spiritual traditions and Western materialism and scientism. The multi-religious and synthetic nature of Indian culture, along with Western colonial experiences, made Indian communicators very adaptive and pragmatic. They came to have the intellectual tolerance and capacity to entertain mutually incompatible ideas and reconcile and transcend diametrically opposing concepts. Indeed, as Nemi C. Jain (2015) pinpointed, this spirit of tolerance has been responsible for multicultural and multilingual co-existence in contemporary India. Akira Miyahara (2004) underscored harmony-maintaining non-assertiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other-directed accommodation, and self-depreciation and self-criticism as characteristics of Japanese “mature,” “modest,” and “competent” communicators. These characteristics are, more often than not, interpreted as signs of internal strength. In the West, self-criticism, the act of revealing one’s own inadequacies, may be a form of “powerless speech” and can be taken as a lack of confidence. In Japan, however, it is “a display of the individual’s willingness to engage in the process of self-improvement that may be accomplished only by maintaining harmonious relationships with others” (Miyahara 2004: 284–285). Likewise, some U.S. Eurocentric interpersonal communication textbooks made the statement that helping others is one of the effective ways to raise one’s self-esteem and deal with loneliness when she or he is at the relationship dissolution stage with significant others. Such a selfish motivation can be regarded as socially inappropriate or even unethical in the Japanese cultural context. June Ock Yum (2012) observed that communication competence from Western perspectives is commonly understood as management and manipulation or a set of interaction strategies for achieving individual goals. Communication competence in a South Korean sense, on the other hand, focuses on the ability to maintain proper relationships and enhance the level of harmony. Yum (2012) submitted that communication competence in South Korea thus should be assessed not at the

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individual level but at the interpersonal level. The notion of mutual competence or incompetence is more important than that of individual competence or incompetence. She also held the view that emotional concern and emotional contagion rather than perspective taking are central to empathic communication processes in South Korean relationships. Given the foregoing discussion, the significance of non-Western theories for cross-cultural and intercultural communication research is threefold: the intracultural significance, the intercultural significance, and the global significance. First, non-Western theories a) resonate more thoroughly with the cultural ethos of nonWestern peoples, b) more accurately describe and interpret the complexities of non-Western cultures and communication, and c) critique negative practices and cultivate positive activities within the local context (Dissanayake 1988; Miike 2010a; Miyahara 2004). Second, non-Western theories offer cross-cultural insights for a) cultural outsiders who seek to understand non-Western cultures and b) cultural insiders who strive to explain non-Western cultures within and beyond local contexts (Kumar 2014; Miike 2014a; Mowlana 2014a). Third, non-Western theories provide a basis of cross-cultural comparison and potentially extend the intellectual horizons of Western theories, allowing non-Westerners to shift from ignorant objects to knowing subjects on the global scene (Kincaid 1987; Merican 2005b; Shuter 2014).

3 Non-Western communication theories from ontological perspectives Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. The origin and nature of being are critical issues in ontological inquiry. This section highlights Asiacentric theories of communication grounded on Asian ontological worldviews: 1. the Taoist I-Ching paradigm and the Chinese harmony theory of communication competence; 2. the Buddhist dependent co-arising paradigm and the eight-wind theory of relational communication; 3. the Indian theory of silence and communication; and 4. the double-swing theory of intercultural communication.

3.1 Taoist I-Ching paradigm and the Chinese harmony theory of communication competence Shelton A. Gunaratne (2008), a Sri Lankan forerunner in the field of Asian communication theory, went so far as to say that the Taoist I-Ching (Daoist Yijing) paradigm and the Buddhist dependent co-arising paradigm are two Eastern metatheories that would serve as alternatives to the Western scientific dogma and as global-

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ly significant local knowledge for a new humanocentric science. Gunaratne (2008: 80) summed up the I-Ching [Book of Change] ontological worldview as follows: [E]verything begins with the transcendental and ineluctable Dao (Supreme Reality), which alternates between Wuji (Nonpolar) and Taiji (Supreme Polarity). The Dao produced the One (space–time reality). The One produced the Two (the complementary antinomies of yin and yang). The Two produced the Three (energy, matter, and the laws of physics). The Three gave birth to Ten Thousand Beings (all things in the universe), who carry yin on their backs and embrace yang in their front, blending these two vital breaths to attain harmony.

Jensen Chung (2011: 233) laid out four basic tenets of the Taoist I-Ching paradigm: 1. Yin and yang, which are oppositional forces, rotate in the universe; 2. The yinyang status is always tentative and temporary and thus subject to change; 3. The yin-yang cycle is a longtime process; and 4. The yin-yang dynamics results in a composite of change and creativity. An important point to be made here is that “when yin reaches its maximum state, yang will rise, and vice versa”. In consonance with this Taoist I-Ching cosmology, Chung (2011) then formulated four fundamental assumptions of human communication: 1. The processes and elements of communication contain the properties of yin and yang; 2. The dynamic yin-yang interplay in communication can generate certain qi/ki/gi [energy flow], which itself can be categorized as yin or yang; 3. Communication is the process of coordinating the yin-yang dialectics; and 4. Communication is a means to balance the two opposite forces and reach harmony. These tenets are also the underlying principles of the Chinese feng shui theory of nonverbal communication (see G.-M. Chen 2007). Hawaiian culture subscribes to a similar ontology of ku and hina, where life energy is called mana. In passing, the Northeast Asian concept of life energy (qi or chi in Chinese, ki in Japanese, and gi in Korean) is of special importance in its general relevance to the multiple levels and contexts of communication and in its overlapped influence in the Northeast Asian region. Roichi Okabe (1991: 87) dwelled on the significance of constructing Eastern theories of communication based on the qi/ki/gi ontological worldview: From ancient times, the word ki has been in wide use in the East for a great number of things from the universal to everyday things around us. It is widely regarded as a key to understanding the mentality and character in general and the communication patterns and human relationships in particular of Eastern peoples. It encompasses a wide variety of meanings and feelings. Ki is defined in physical, mental, or emotional terms as something filling up the whole universe, similar to physical air, and something drifting and floating, although clearly unseen, which is related to a mental atmosphere or state. Easterners’ communicative behaviors and human relations are strongly controlled by these double meanings, both external and internal. Eastern students of communication and rhetoric should profitably explicate the communicational and rhetorical functions, potentialities, and mechanisms of the concept ki from cultural perspectives, so that they can further enrich the theories of communication and rhetoric in the East.

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The concept of qi/ki/gi was used to build interpersonal and organizational theories of communication in Northeast Asia (see Chung 2008; Hara 2006), but the most widely acknowledged and frequently cited theory is perhaps Youichi Ito’s (1990, 1993a, 1993b) tripolar kuuki model of Japanese mediated communication. He defined kuuki as “an air, atmosphere, or climate of opinion requiring compliance,” which is similar to qi feng in Chinese and to kong ki in Korean. He maintained that “when two of the three components of political consensus formation [i.e., the public, the mass media, and the government] agree with each other, … kuuki … is created and functions as a social pressure on the third component,” and that [w]hen this kuuki pressure is strong enough, the third component concedes and a consensus is formed [in Japanese society]” (Ito 1993b: 316).2 Based on the ontological foundation of the Taoist I-Ching paradigm, Guo-Ming Chen (2009, 2014) constructed a Chinese harmony theory of communication competence with nine interrelated concepts. The theory is predicated on the following two assumptions: 1. Harmony is the end, not the means, of human communication; and 2. The ability to reach a harmonious state of human relationship is the main criterion that Chinese people use to evaluate the quality of communication. Intrinsically, according to the theory, the Chinese communicator is expected to internalize jen/ren (humanism), yi (righteousness), and li (propriety). Extrinsically, the Chinese communicator should accommodate shih (temporal contingencies), wei (spatial contingencies), and ji (the first imperceptible beginning of movement). Strategically, the Chinese communicator may exercise guanxi (inter-relation), mientz (face), and power at the behavioral level. The theory hypothesized that, when she or he successfully manages these nine dimensions, the Chinese communicator can experience a feeling of security and togetherness and benefit from the interaction (G.-M. Chen 2009). Jen/Ren signifies co-humanity (two persons supporting each other) and human-heartedness springing from love, kindness, empathy, and reciprocity. Yi is the integrity of faithfulness, loyalty, and justice leading to appropriate and ethical behaviors. Li symbolizes the propriety and civility of human conduct. Shih means temporal relationships for appropriate and effective communication, while wei consists of physical and social contexts of communication. Ji is the hidden sign of

2 With the rise of critical intercultural communication studies, the impact of power has captivated a great amount of scholarly attention in recent years (Miike 2014b). Power does not completely determine the content of communication in intracultural and intercultural settings, but it does direct the structure and course of intracultural and intercultural interactions. Furthermore, the source and form of power differs from culture to culture. Asiacentric critical theories of communication need to delve into power as responsibility rather than rights, power from relationships rather than from individual achievement and status, and power in the private sphere rather than in the public sphere. One nonWestern viewpoint on the concept of power is the power of kuuki, which constitutes communication contexts and sometimes function as interpersonal and social pressure for compliance.

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the beginning of a movement that may be known through sensitivity and sincerity. Guanxi dictates particularistic ties that can be used as social resources for persuasion and influence. Mientze is faces or positive images that should be maintained for smooth relationships. Power in Chinese societies often manifests in the forms of seniority and authority and is embedded in the hierarchical structure of a social network. It is Chen’s (2009, 2014) contention that the functions and interplay of these aspects reveal a holistic picture of Chinese harmonious communication.

3.2 Buddhist dependent co-arising paradigm and the eight-wind theory of relational communication In Gunaratne’s (2008) opinion, the other Eastern paradigm that should assume a global role in the alternative human sciences is the Buddhist dependent co-arising (paticca samuppāda) paradigm. This paradigm is essentially the Buddhist theory of multi-causality with ontological and epistemological implications. Gunaratne (2008: 78) proffered the following elucidation: The [Buddhist] bhavacakra [Wheel of Becoming] forms a web of interactive factors – both environmental and hereditary – that condition the individual’s genesis so that his/her personality is made up of the fusion of the dynamic consciousness coming down from a previous life with what is derived from his/her parental stock, his/her psychological past … and the desires and beliefs that motivate his/her behavior.

To put it differently, the thrust of the Buddhist doctrine of interdependent co-origination and co-arising is that every being co-originates and co-arises within the multilayered contexts of its predestined relationships with all other beings across space and time. The doctrine should not be misconstrued as fatalism because it presumes that everything is not predetermined and unchangeable but preconditioned by its interpenetrated relationships with all other things. Hence, there is some room for individual agency and autonomy. Notwithstanding the presupposition that each and every being is a significant factor in its own destiny, everything is embedded in a network of myriad relationships across space and time and is not totally up to any individual being because nothing stands alone and cannot be independent of ten thousands things (Dissanayake 1983, 2013; Miike 2014a, 2015).3 3 Wimal Dissanayake (1983: 42), who is a Sri Lankan trailblazer in the field of Asian communication theory, is probably the first communication scholar who drew out the general implications of this dependent co-arising for theorizing human communication (see also Dissanayake 2013): The distinction that the concept of dependent co-origination enforces between determining and conditioning is an important one for human communication. Every communication event has a cause. But this does not mean that every communication event is pre-determined … In human communication, one is not ordering or commanding someone to act in a specific manner. One is only conditioning the other’s potential behavior. He obviously has the freedom to behave and respond in a way unanticipated by the person who initiated the communication

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Interesting enough, there are cosmological worldviews in African cultures akin to dependent co-arising such as nkrabea in Akan culture (see Asante & Chai 2013). The Buddhist dependent co-arising ontology, which is commonly known as yuan in Chinese, en in Japanese, and yon in Korean (see Chang 2011; L. Chen 2009; Ishii 1998; Yum & Canary 2003), explicitly and implicitly influences the ebb and flow of communication in human relationships, especially in romantic relationships, in Buddhist-influenced cultures. For example, when they establish or develop good human relationships, Northeast Asians may attribute them to good yuan/ en/yon. When human relationships deteriorate or terminate, they may attribute them to bad yuan/en/yon. Moreover, they may not be strongly motivated to pursue or maintain certain relationships and easily let them go under the impact of the yuan/en/yon way of thinking. A virtually unknown and yet practically useful theory of relational communication within the Buddhist ontology of impermanence and insubstantiality is the theory of eight worldly winds or eight laws relating to the vicissitudes of life (astha loka dharma). Metaphorically, according to the Mahasanghika Vinaya, four favorable and four adverse winds can be blowing to everyone in daily social interactions. As Hsing Yun (1998) illustrated, they come and go and arise like the weather as a natural part of life. The favorable winds are 1. profit (lābho), 2. fame (yaso), 3. praise (pasaṁsā), and 4. joy (sukha), while the adverse winds are 1. loss (alābho), 2. defamation (ayaso), 3. blame (nindā), and 4. suffering (dukkha). The Buddha admonished us to be “unmoved” by any of these communicative winds in interpersonal relationships so as to lead a meaningful and purposeful life because they are not permanent but transitory. Otherwise, we would easily end up losing ourselves in the process of self-actualization. In the words of Hsing Yun (1998: 3–4), the Buddha instructed us that “we should regard them as temporary conditions that present us with a chance to learn something new,” and that “[c]ontemplating the impermanence and essential sameness of all of the Eight Winds is a very good method for helping us see beyond the delusions of the self-centered self.”

3.3 Indian theory of silence and communication Nemi C. Jain and Anuradha Matukumalli (2014) theorized the forms and functions of silent communication in the Indian landscape. In line with the Hindu and Jain worldviews, they stipulated the communicative functions of silence at the individual, interpersonal, and public levels. From a Hindu-Jain ontological viewpoint, at the individual level, silence serves as the means for the inner self or atman [the individual soul] to achieve union with the supreme power or Brahman [the univer-

act. The idea of conditioning, as opposed to determining, is central to the Buddhist conceptualization of human communication.

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sal soul] in the Hindu practice of yoga. Yoga, which shares the same etymological root as the English-language word yoke, means to unite (or yoke together) and to place under discipline (or bring under the yoke). In Sanskrit, shantam refers to a state of being with the connotations of peace and bliss, whereas maunam is a state of becoming through a deliberate effort of restraining from speech. Shantam and maunam are equivalent respectively to silence and silences in Thomas J. Bruneau’s (2007) theoretical framework of silence, silences, and silencing (see also Bruneau & Ishii 1988). It is the Hindu teaching that one should consciously create maunam and then experience the world of shantam because “a true sense of detachment [from the material world] requires shantam or silence. In fact, the first temptation that a person needs to overcome is the temptation to communicate [with others]” (Jain & Matukumalli 2014: 250). In Hindu philosophy, “[i]t is believed that selfrealization, salvation, truth, wisdom, peace, and bliss are all achieved in the state of meditation and introspection when the individual is communicating with himself or herself in silence” (Jain & Matukumalli 2014: 250–251). At the interpersonal level, there are three main functions of silence in Indian social interactions: 1. to affirm harmony or agreement, which implies no urgency to talk about a problem; 2. to avoid conflict, disagreement, disharmony, and discord; and 3. to punish others like “silent treatment.” At the public level, as manifested in the civic sphere of Indian life, silence can be used as a means of 1. protest against social and political injustice, 2. purification and self-control, and 3. meditation and self-realization especially in religious rituals. Commenting on Gandhi’s use of silence in the Satyagraha movement, Jain and Matukumalli (2014: 252) made the following observation: “The concept of satyagraha extends the value of silence from self-purification at the individual level to mass education at the public level … Gandhi demonstrated that ‘silence as protest’ can be used effectively. His vows of ‘fast unto death’ were coupled with vows of silence, because he strongly believed that the way of peace is the way of truth.” Jain and Matukumalli (2014: 253–254) called for future cross-cultural and intercultural research on silence and communication in three avenues of inquiry: 1. cross-cultural differences in the use of silence in interpersonal interactions; 2. the role of silence in social movements; and 3. silence and the process of adaptation to a new culture. They urged communication scholars and students to resurrect the sound of silence in intracultural and intercultural interactions in the technological age: We feel that the global industrialization and communication revolution have subdued the value of silence in human civilization. We are becoming a talkative civilization. Silence is not necessarily an enemy, which ‘civilized’ people are supposed to subdue, but rather a powerful force, capable of fostering or hindering healthy communication. We need to realize the full potential of silence. We need to view silence not as periods in which there is an absence of communication but rather as an active agent, an important vehicle for significant communication at the individual, interpersonal, and public levels.

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3.4 Double-swing theory of intercultural communication Many non-Western theories of communication are explicitly intracultural in nature and implicitly intercultural in scope. Muneo Yoshikawa’s (1987b, 2015) doubleswing model is one of the few intercultural communication theories that are of distinctly non-Western flavor. It is very non-Western in the sense that the model is simple, metaphorical, and imaginative rather than complex, analytical, and categorical (Miike 2008) and thus can be widely applicable not only for intercultural communication but also for spiritual communication and environmental communication. Although it builds partially on Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy of “ItIt” and “It-Thou” relationships, the model rests heavily on the Buddhist ontology of impermanence and non-duality and the Buddhist satori [enlightenment] as the transcendence of binary opposites. Yoshikawa especially threw light on the “notone, not-two” logic of soku and the “Middle Way” and wisely utilized the Möbius strip or the infinity symbol (∞) as a visual model to construct his double-swing theory of intercultural encounters. The double-swing model’s all-important ontological assumption is that any two beings, whether individuals, groups, organizations, communities, or nations, are simultaneously independent and interdependent. They are both united and divided. Simply put, they are neither one nor two. Nevertheless, we are often prone to “cling to” the monistic perception (absolute reality) or the dualistic perception (relative reality) and fail to walk in the middle way and see “identity-in-unity” or “duality-in-unity.” The model posited, therefore, that, when we overcome such epistemological clinging and attain the “double-swing” mode of perception of the paradoxical “not-one, not-two” nature of any ontological relationship, we can develop our intercultural identities while maintaining our intracultural identities and make our intercultural encounters truly dialogical and meaningful for co-creation and co-evolution. In light of the double-swing theory, then, intercultural communication is viewed as 1. a changing, spontaneous, and transcending process between communicators as proactive and co-creative agents and 2. a non-dualistic and common sphere of “dynamic in-between-ness” in which self-awareness and other-awareness are enhanced, our limits are minimized, and our potentials are maximized. Yoshikawa (1988) illustrated his double-swing theory in the context of U.S.-Japanese organizational communication with specific examples. He also employed the double-swing model to account for the process of intercultural adaptation and mapped out five stages of perceptional development: 1. contact; 2. disintegration; 3. reintegration; 4. autonomy; and 5. double-swing. In the double-swing stage, in his theoretical account, one can incorporate five modes of perception: 1. the ethnocentric perception; 2. the sympathetic perception; 3. the empathic perception; 4. the mirror-reflecting perception; and 5. the meta-contextual perception (Yoshikawa 1987a).

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4 Non-Western communication theories from epistemological perspectives Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge. The way and process of knowing and understanding are central issues in epistemological inquiry. This section reviews Afrocentric and Asiacentric theories of communication derived from African and Asian epistemological foundations: 1. the Dogon theory of knowledge and communication; 2. the Hindu theory of six ways of knowing in communication; 3. the Buddhist consciousness-only theory of intrapersonal communication; and 4. Japanese enryo-sasshi theory of interpersonal communication.

4.1 Dogon theory of knowledge and communication According to Asante (2010), Maulana Karenga (1997), and Denise Martin (2010), the cultural trove of Dogon people in Mali adumbrated a developmental theory of authentic knowledge and communication. They specified four stages of knowing and communicating: 1. giri so (fore-word); 2. benne so (side-word); 3. bolo so (backword); and 4. so dayi (clear-word). Giri so is the first stage of describing what you see and what you hear. This giri so “descriptive knowledge” consists of visible things, hearable words, and observable deeds. Benne so is the second stage of interpreting what you describe. In other words, it is the process of deepening the beginning knowledge by engaging in a below-the-surface search for its meaning and relevance (Karenga 1997). It involves the art of contextualizing what you initially know while connecting the visible with the invisible, especially in a spiritual sense, and of giving a deeper interpretation to the description (Martin 2010). This benne so “analytical knowledge” can be a synthesis found in “the intersections of myths and philosophy, social and cultural trajectories, and iconic symbolisms and aesthetics” (Asante 2011: 155). Bolo so is the third stage of comparing what you analyze with others across space and time and completing the giri so and benne so knowledge. This bolo so “comparative knowledge” refers especially to historical, cross-cultural, and transnational comparisons (Martin 2010). So dayi, which is also called “good word” or “fourth word,” is the final stage of communicating what you came to know for the sake of the world because “knowing the clear word, the sound truth, imposes an obligation to share it and act on it” (Karenga 1997: 97). This so dayi “active knowledge” places a special emphasis on the communicator’s moral responsibility to improve the human condition and enhance the human prospect. As Karenga (1997: 92) succinctly summarized, “these stages as fore-word, backword, side-word, leading to the clear word suggest a multi-dimensional and holistic approach to knowledge, viewing every side, analyzing them, comparing and linking them within a whole framework and then extracting a clear conception from both the product and the process.” Asante (2010) made the case that this Dogon conceptualization

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of so dayi is in concordance with the Yoruba notion of oro-la in Nigeria. The search for clarity is central to the communication process in both Dogon and Yoruba cultures.4

4.2 Hindu theory of six ways of knowing in communication In his impressive review of South Asian theories of speech communication, Kogil S. Sitaram (2004) concluded that the overriding purpose of communication from a Hindu perspective is to know our inner self and attain moksha [spiritual liberation] (see also Kumar 2014; Saral 1983). Toward this ultimate goal of life, as Sitaram (2004) detailed, a Hindu classical theory of communication stipulates six ways of knowing especially about the unseen on the basis of the seen: 1. pratyaksha [perception]; 2. anumana [inference]; 3. shabda [the word of a trustworthy source]; 4. upamana [comparison]; 5. arthapatti [postulation]; and 6. anupalabdhi [noncognition]. The first way of knowing is pratyaksha [perception]. Praty signifies being present, while aksha designates the eyes. Thus pratyaksha literally means what is present before the eyes. In the conceptualization of ancient Hindu philosophers, “perception is a process that involves one or more of the five senses of the perceiver, an external object that is perceived, and the mind (manas) of the perceiver" (Sitaram 2004: 94). It is the Hindu belief that sensory perception, which is regarded only as immediate knowledge, is not always correct. Some schools claimed that the only information that reached the inner self is valid knowledge. It is vitally important that knowledge of the self must be pure and should not be tarnished by any external and internal factor. The second way of knowing is anumana [inference]. There are three aspects of the right way of inference. First, the process of inference should be a synthesis of all data into a single whole. Second, inference should take place involuntarily and should not be made for selfish purposes. Third, the communicator should have a positive desire to seek knowledge (prama).

4 The Dogon cultural tradition conceives words as life-creating and thereby scared. The notion of nommo (the creative or generative word), which is central to Asante’s (1998, 2000) theoretical apparatus of African American rhetoric, originated from the creation narrative of Dogon people. Karenga (2014: 215) commented on its conceptual origin and spiritual significance: According to the Dogon sage Ogotommêli, the Creator, Amma, sends nommo, the word (in the collective sense of speech), to complete the spiritual and material reorganization of the world and to assist humans in the forward movement in history and society. It is through the word, Ogotommêli tells us, that weaving, forging, cultivating, building family and community, and making the world good are made possible. Inherent in the concept of nommo are the triple aspects and elements of water, wind, and word, symbolizing, respectively, the life force (animation), life essence (spirit), and life creation (creativity).

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The third way of knowing is shabda [the word of a trustworthy source]. According to Hinduism, the spoken word (shabda) constitutes an independent source of knowledge. The first step is to investigate the credibility of the source of the word in seeking for valid knowledge. The second step is to determine the overall meaning of the word. Classical Hindu linguistics theorized that the perceived word as well as the unperceived symbol present a meaning to the listener. This presentation is called sphota [burst] (see Dissanayake [2009] and Kumar [2014] for the Indian sphota theory of meaning). The sphota theory hypothesized that the meaning can be detected through the “gradual explosion” process from complete ignorance, through partial knowledge, and to complete knowledge. Three levels of meaning are important in this gradual revelation process toward the attainment of the goals of life: 1. jati [the universal], 2. vyakti [the particular], and 3. akruti [the generic shape]. The Vedanta School synthesized the preceding positions of different schools and concluded that jati and vyakti can be known together by the same act of knowledge, arguing that “when one knows the universal meant by a word, then, one knows the particular by implication” (Sitaram 2004: 98). The fourth way of knowing is upamana [comparison]. The Hindu schools of philosophy maintained that comparison is an indispensable source of valid knowledge. New ideas can be appraised and articulated by comparison to similar known ones. The fifth way of knowing is arthapatti [postulation]. The Sanskrit word arthapatti is composed of artha and patti meaning fact-creation. This way is to simply assume what is unseen and unknown (e.g., the existence of the individual soul atman and the universal soul Brahman). Two types of postulation were conceptualized: drustarthapatti (to make the assumption of a fact so that you can explain something based on what you perceived at the given time) and srutarthapatti (to make the assumption of a fact based on what you heard in the form of spoken words). The sixth and last way of knowing is anupalabdhi [non-cognition], which is considered as one of the most difficult ways of knowing because this level of knowing concerns intangible and invisible realities. The Advaita School of Vedanta, which advocated the anupalabdhi way of knowing, postulated that what we see with our own eyes is nothing but the world of maya [illusion], and it is the responsibility of each communicator to discern what is real and what is unreal. According to Shankara, non-dualism is a key to such knowing with the realization that the individual soul jiva [living being] and the supreme universal soul Brahman are one and the same.

4.3 Buddhist consciousness-only theory of intrapersonal communication Satoshi Ishii (2004) endeavored to construct an intrapersonal communication model grounded on the consciousness-only epistemology of Mahanaya Buddhism. Although a number of scholars suggested that the Buddhist ideas of ego-decen-

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teredness, compassion, mindfulness, and non-attachment can enlarge the domains of inquiry into perception, cognition, and communication (see Sitaram 1995), it may not be immodest to say that Ishii’s theoretical endeavor is most synthetic and systematic. He defined consciousness-only epistemology as the doctrine that “all tangible objects, events, and phenomena are nothing more than illusional manifestations of the eight inherent consciousnesses” (Ishii 2004: 65–66). These eight consciousnesses are 1. the five consciousnesses based on five organs, namely, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the skin (indriya-vijnana); 2. the thought consciousness (mano-vijnana); 3. the ego-attached consciousness (manas-vijnana); and 4. the seed-storing consciousness (alaya-vijnana). In Sanskrit, manas and alaya respectively mean self-centered pondering and storing. The consciousness-only school of Mahanaya Buddhism posited that the five sense-organ indriya consciousnesses and the thought mano consciousness are located in the front/surface stage, whereas the self-centered pondering manas consciousness and the seed-storing alaya consciousness function in the back/deep stage. Informed by this mind structure of the six front/surface-stage consciousnesses and the two back/deep-stage consciousnesses, Ishii (2004) presented a visual model of the intrapersonal communication process. In the message-input process, at the physical and physiological levels, the communicator’s five sense-organ indriya consciousnesses, which are the outermost part of her or his mind, selectively perceive stimuli as messages. Then, at the cognitive and affective levels, messages are decoded through her or his thought mano consciousness. The functions of the thought consciousness include thinking, feeling, categorizing, and evaluating. This integrative process of decoding in the thought consciousness is unconsciously influenced by the ego-attached manas consciousness and the seed-storing alaya consciousness. Next, these decoded messages will be polluted by the communicator’s self-centeredness through her or his ego-attached consciousness. Lastly, the meanings of the messages will reach the communicator’s seed-storing consciousness and accumulated there in the form of all-recording seeds. This innermost part of the mind is said to control all the other seven consciousnesses. In the message-output process, the communicator’s seed-storing alaya consciousness, which is always operating at the level of unawareness, motivates her or him to construct meanings. Then, this motivation becomes necessarily self-centric through the ego-attached manas consciousness. Next, the meanings will proceed to the stage of the communicator’s thought acts. In the Buddhist sense, acts are causal deeds. Good acts lead to good effects, and evil acts lead to evil effects. Hence, thought acts judge, reevaluate, and correct the meanings polluted by the ego-attached consciousness. Lastly, the meanings will be encoded into messages and sent out through verbal and nonverbal acts. An important lesson to be learned is that, in the intrapersonal communication process, self-centeredness and egoattachment are inherent causes of perceptual and expressive distortions resulting in mental sufferings and afflictions. Buddhist thinkers, therefore, teach how to

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minimize the impact of the ego-attached manas consciousness on humans communicating.

4.4 Japanese enryo-sasshi theory of interpersonal communication Ishii’s (1984) another theoretical contribution to the epistemological processes of encoding and decoding is the Japanese enryo-sasshi theory of interpersonal communication. His model is one of the first non-Western attempts to explore and explicate the mechanism of how the communicators adjust their messages so as to keep interpersonal and situational harmony. His model captures the mutually adjusting functions of enryo and sasshi as crucial abilities for successful and smooth communication. Enryo refers generally to being modest and reserved, exercising self-restraint, being considerate and thoughtful, and refraining from making requests or asking favors. Enryo functions as a psychological filter and requires control of one’s thoughts and actions so as to avoid carelessly saying and doing things. Sasshi roughly means social sensitivity, empathic guesswork, mind reading, and “putting yourself in another’s shoes.” Sasshi demands that one should be very perceptive and receptive in order to understand what others mean or to sense what others want or need. Ishii asserted that enryo on the part of the speaker and sasshi on the part of the listener constitute the two complementary wheels of Japanese interpersonal communication. The speaker, depending on the listener and the communicative situation, simplifies and economizes messages (enryo) rather than elaborating on them. Messages are then usually “safe” and “vague.” The listener is expected to engage in empathic guesswork so as to expand and develop the messages (sasshi) and get their intended meanings. In order to make this enryo-sasshi communication successful, the extent of enryo on the part of the speaker meshes with that of sasshi on the part of the listener. Too much or too little enryo and sasshi result in miscommunication and misunderstanding. Both enryo and sasshi may be operating when Japanese communicators frequently use silences or “awkward” pauses during the conversation. A person of good sasshi is highly appreciated in Japan partly because the enryo-sasshi communication style is commonly employed in everyday life. Bruneau and Ishii (1988) later characterized the dominant mode of interaction in the United States as “exaggeration-reduction communication” in contrast to Japanese enryo-sasshi communication. The cultural diversity of U.S. society impels its members to actively exchange explicit and elaborated messages. In processing the “exaggerated” messages, U.S. Americans subconsciously “reduce” the overloaded information. For the purpose of clarifying the historical background of Japanese enryo-sasshi communication, Ishii identified five contributing factors: 1. cultural homo-

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geneity; 2. the autonomous rice-growing village lifestyle; 3. the belief in kotodama [language spirit]; 4. Zen Buddhism; and 5. Confucianism. Despite this unique historical background, because other Asian cultures have indigenous concepts very similar to enryo and sasshi, it would be intriguing to see how Japanese enryo-sasshi theory will contribute to the formulation of a more general model of Asian communication (Miike 2010c). For example, Sang Chin Choi and Soo-Hyang Choi (1992) conceptualized the process of Korean saryo-nunchi communication as the dynamics of executing nunchi [eye measurement] and figuring-out nunchi. For another example, Rita H. Mataragnon (1988), Melba Padilla Maggay (1999), and Raj Mansukhani (2005) illuminated pahiwatig as subtlety in constructing and sending messages and pakikiramdam as sensitivity in receiving and understanding messages in Filipino interpersonal interactions.

5 Non-Western communication theories from axiological perspectives Axiology is the philosophical study of values. Ethical and aesthetical questions are also axiological issues. The objectives, motives, forms, and functions of human communication are particularly within the scope of axiological inquiry. This section summarizes Afrocentric and Asiacentric theories of communication guided by African and Asian values, ethics, and aesthetics: 1. the Maatian theory of rhetorical communication; 2. the Buddhist and Confucian theories of language and communication; 3. the Hindu sadharanikaran theory of communication; 4. the Gandhian theory of persuasion and social change; and 5. the Islamic theories of ethical and ecological communication.

5.1 Maatian theory of rhetorical communication Conventional studies of speech communication in the West and the rest are often traced back to the Greco-Roman traditions of thought. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are synonymous with the word rhetoric in the Western sense. It should not be forgotten, however, that older and different forms of rhetoric had existed elsewhere, and there have been non-European thinkers and rhetors (see Blake 2009; Chen 2005; Fox 1983; Kumar 2014; Okabe 1991; Oliver 1976; Shuter 1999). Asante (1986) proclaimed that the origin of rhetoric and oratory, in effect, goes back to Kemet. Egyptians believed that Ra created the world with the two divine powers, that is, hu [authoritative utterance] and sia [exceptional insight]. Maat is the order that Ra established, and all communities have the ethical obligation to preserve, restore,

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and enrich it (Karenga 1990). Egyptians were an oral people who considered the spoken word as the essential means of spiritual transmission and transformation governed by maat. Asante (1986) characterized Egyptian rhetoric as 1. a rhetoric of synthesis and simplicity of heart-mind instead of a rhetoric of analysis and complexity of reason and 2. a harmonizing and unifying force as opposed to a dismantling and destroying force. Knowing oneself is a sine qua non for becoming a transpersonal and phenomenal orator. In the in-depth assessments of Asante (2012, 2015) and Karenga (2004, 2014), Kemetian theories of rhetorical communication center on the spiritual and ethical concept of maat. Maat is, in a word, “rightness” in the divine, natural, and social worlds. More specifically, maat is “an interrelated order of rightness which requires and is the result of right relations with and right behavior towards the divine, nature, and other humans” (Karenga 2004: 10). Its cardinal virtues are 1. truth, 2. justice, 3. propriety, 4. harmony, 5. balance, 6. reciprocity, and 7. order (Karenga 1990). Maat is like nirvana in Buddhism, jen/ren in Confucianism, tao/dao in Taosim, dharma in Hinduism, adl in Islam, tzedek in Judaism, and agape in Christianity (Asante 2012). Karenga (2014) explored the classical African concept of medu nefer (literally, good speech) in the Book of Ptahhotep. Medu nefer is equivalent to the English-language word rhetoric. But this Egyptian notion of eloquent and effective speech is conceptualized as an ethical activity, not as a persuasion technique, in quest of the common good. Medu nefer, therefore, must be always morally good and truly worthy in the maatian sense and cannot be separated from four ethical concerns: 1. the dignity and rights of the human person, 2. the well-being of family and community, 3. the integrity and value of the environment, and 4. the reciprocal solidarity and cooperation for the mutual benefit of humanity.5 Asante (2012: 130) deftly depicted the centrality of ethics and spirituality in the maatian theory and practice of communication: One cannot be a good communicator unless one is a good person. In fact, in the African sense a person is a human being, and one of the defining characteristics of a human being is the ability to be good. If you are not good, then you can be called something other than a human being. In one African language, Twi, there is the expression Oni onipa, which means “she is a

5 Robert T. Oliver (1976) made a similar observation when he excavated classical Asian rhetorics, whose common theme is to unify people, people and nature, and the past and the present. This rhetorical orientation toward harmony and unity accentuates the fact that studies of non-Western rhetorics cannot be divorced from mythology, cosmology, and spirituality. Robert Shuter (1999), for instance, pointed out that truthfulness in Indian rhetoric is not the same as the Western concept of honesty and is closely intertwined to experiencing and understanding the universal soul Brahman. He elaborated further on the meaning of truthfulness in the cultural landscape of Hindu India as follows: “To know about Brahman is insufficient, for one must experience Brahman, which is often achieved through meditative silence. This profound understanding – the key to spiritual fulfillment – is integral to truthfulness. When those who are in touch with Brahman reveal their thoughts, it is the truth that is being revealed” (Shuter 1999: 13).

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person.” The expression Oni onipa paa means “she is a good person.” … The aim in communication is always to overcome isfet, i.e., that which is evil, difficult, disharmonious and troublesome. What we observe with the practice of maat is the inevitability of good overcoming evil, of harmony replacing disharmony, and of order taking the place of disorder. This was an optimistic view of reality where the belief was that justice would always rise to the top and that truth would outlast untruth.

5.2 Buddhist and Confucian theories of language and communication Dissanayake (2008) noted that Buddhism became one of the greatest religions in the world partially because the Buddha was a communicator par excellence. Pragmatic orientations and moral imperatives are of paramount importance in his approach to verbal communication. The Buddha made a number of keen observations about the use of language in human interactions. Among them, the teaching of samma vaca [right speech] stands out as a Buddhist theory of verbal communication that is of practical use. There are four primary guidelines for right speech: 1. to abstain from telling deliberate lies and speaking with deceptive intents (false speech); 2. to abstain from using words that maliciously disunite and separate people into conflict (divisive speech); 3. to abstain from using language that offend or hurt others (harsh speech); 4. to abstain from unproductive idle chatter that lacks any purpose or depth (incessant speech). Positively phrased, right speech means 1. to speak the truth (truthful speech), 2. to speak for harmony (harmonious speech), 3. to speak gently (gentle speech), and 4. to speak only when necessary (purposeful speech). In a nutshell, right speech ruminated on “all such precautions that should be taken for not hurting others by one’s speech. On the other hand, speaking the truth cannot be compromised” (Verma 1997: 31). The Buddhist vision of right speech bears a close resemblance to the teaching of ancient Kemetic rhetoric. Modifying Michael V. Fox’s (1983) cannons of Egyptian rhetoric, Karenga (2014) pronounced 1. self-control, 2. good timing, 3. fluency, and 4. truthfulness as critical standards of medu nefer. Based on her close reading of the Analects, Hui-Ching Chang (2014) outlined four Confucian emphases on the act of speaking. First, words define and reflect moral development. Confucius viewed speech as an indicator of the speaker’s morality and language as a natural product of moral quality. Virtue reveals through words, but eloquence is not proof of virtue. In order to cultivate her or his virtue, one must be cautious about speaking. Second, beautiful words lacking substance are blameworthy. Confucius held that the power of words rests on credibility and sincerity. Without internal refinement and inner genuineness, external expressions are empty and even deceptive. Third, actions are more important than words. Confucius advised us to observe words against deeds because the most important thing is to put words into practice. Boasting and exaggeration should be especially avoid-

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ed from the standpoint of the word-action correspondence. Fourth, appropriate speaking relies on rules of propriety. The propriety and civility of li is the basis of the human-heartedness of jen/ren and arises from humane feelings. Confucius understood that to speak appropriately is to speak flexibly so as to adjust to different situations and attune to emotional concerns in different relationships. Frankness without propriety is an expression of not sincerity but rudeness. Chang’s (2014) theoretical framework contextualized and complemented Yum’s (1988) mostcited article on the impact of Confucianism on Northeast Asian interpersonal relationships and communication.

5.3 Hindu sadharanikaran theory of communication Jaswant S. Yadava (1987, 1998) and I. P. Tewari (1980, 1992), two pioneers in Indian communication research, and Nirmala Mani Adhikary (2014), a premier and prolific Nepali communicologist, are the key architects of the Hindu sadharanikaran theory of communication. Sadharanikaran is a Hindi-language word equivalent to the English-language word communication. The term has its root in Bharat Muni’s monumental work, Natyashastra, which is a classical treatise on drama and dance in ancient India (Adhikary 2014). Yadava (1987, 1998) propounded five tenets of the Hindu sadharanikaran theory of communication: 1. being sahridaya; 2. simplification; 3. rasa utpathi and rasa swadana; 4. sharing; and 5. asymmetrical. In light of these five tenets, Yadava (1998) posed four important questions about human communication in the Hindu Indian milieu: 1. To what extent do the sender and the receiver have the common orientation and to what extent do they identify with each other?; 2. To what extent does the sender succeed in arousing feelings and emotions within the receiver according to the communication objectives?; 3. To what extent is the relationship between the sender and the receiver asymmetrical?; and 4. To what extent has the sender simplified the substance of communication so as to make the receiver’s comprehension easier and her or his appreciation a pleasure? The sadharanikaran theory of communication presupposed the empathic and sympathetic mindset of a communicator (sahridaya), emotional and aesthetic pleasure (rasa) for a consequence of communication, sharing within the context of asymmetrical relationships, and the simplified form of a message as key conditions for interpersonal and intergroup communication (see Adhikary [2014], Dissanayake [2009], and Kumar [2014] for the Indian rasa theory of emotion and communication). Adhikary (2014) built on Yadava’s groundbreaking work, expanded it, and constructed a visual model of sadharanikaran. He also explored the Sanskrit communication concept of sanchar and linked the act of transpersonal communication to the attainment of moksha [spiritual liberation], which is the highest goal of human life in Hinduism.

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5.4 Gandhian theory of persuasion and social change Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) made a famous remark: “Christ gave me the message. Gandhi gave me the method.” His remark is indicative of the East-West connection between Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) and social movements in the United States. King studied Gandhi’s communication strategies for bottom-up social change and applied them in the Civil Rights Movement, which, in turn, inspired the feminist movement in the 1960s (Rogers & Steinfatt 1999). From a communicative point of view, Gandhi truly distinguished himself by his symbolic action as nonverbal persuasion. Symbolic action is, in short, “an attempt to exert public influence nonverbally through purposeful, nonviolent behavior. It represents the visual and physical extension of words, actions which are a means of communicating ideas and of reaching the mind and the conscience of others” (Merriam 1975: 290). His nonverbal and nonviolent styles of communication entailed 1. salt, 2. walking barefoot (padayatra), 3. hand-spinning wheel (charkha), 4. handwoven cotton cloth (khādī), 5. silence (mauna), 6. fasting (upavas), and 7. bonfire (see Kumar 1984; Merriam 1975; Pandikattu 2014; Singhal 2010). Allen H. Merriam (1975) evaluated Gandhi’s communication praxis for successful social change while pinpointing its five salient elements: 1. the unique fusion of high moral values with pragmatic political maneuvers (e.g., transforming religious practices such as fasting, pilgrimage, and fire worship into techniques of struggle); 2. the involvement of large numbers of people in a program of action (e.g., the mass appeal of swadeshi); 3. the formulation of specific goals (e.g., the Salt March), 4. the use of indigenous symbols well-adapted to the audience (e.g., charkha and khādī), and 5. the development of a philosophy of conflict resolution that transcends culture and time (i.e., the philosophy of satyagraha). One more element may be added to Merriam’s evaluation from the communicative profiles of Gandhi by Keval J. Kumar (1984), Arvind Singhal (2010), and Kuruvilla Pandikattu (2014): 6. the identification with, and commitment to, the most dispossessed and disadvantaged (i.e., the principle of “putting the last first”). Gandhi renamed the untouchables as Harijans [children of God] in order to communicate his deep concerns for the sufferings of the most vulnerable and marginalized. In the 1930s and 1940s, he thus fought against not only British colonialism for the independence of India but also religious/caste prejudice and discrimination within India (Rogers & Steinfatt 1999). Singhal (2010: 105) painted a synthetic portrait of Gandhi as an exemplary ethical communicator: Gandhi, the symbol user, knew the value of collective symbolic acts in educating and galvanizing public opinion in support of just causes … Gandhi, the persuader, embodied the Aristotelian attribute of Ethos – a highly credible, saintly, moral authority who influenced others through his daily acts and simple presence. His virtuous acts of self-sacrifice won him millions of admirers and the moniker of Mahatma (“Great Soul”). Gandhi, the mediator and conciliator, believed that conflicts were best resolved not by force, nor even the edicts of heartless law; rather, they were to be resolved through entering peoples’ hearts, and bringing to the fore their common humanity.

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5.5 Islamic theories of ethical and ecological communication Muhammad I. Ayish (2003), Majid Tehranian (1988), and R. S. Zaharna (2009) have invigorated theoretical advances in West Asian communication research. However, Hamid Mowlana’s (1992, 2001, 2014a, 2014b) theories of communication ethics and ecology are particularly of heuristic value for intercultural communication research. Historically, as Mowlana (2001) recounted, the Arab world has contributed significantly to the growth and expansion of global information and communication due to the very broad geographic presence of Islam with a high level of intercultural interactions, the integration of knowledge, data, and technology, an intercontinental economic system with sophisticated currency, transportation, and trade, and the linguistic renaissance of Arabic as an international language. Basic communication rights in Islam included 1. the right to know (ittela’at), 2. the right to read (igra), 3. the right to write (ghalam), 4. the right to speak (khutbah), 5. the right to knowledge (ilm), 6. the right to consult (showra), 7. the right to disseminate (tabligh), and 8. the right to travel (hijrah) (Mowlana 2001). Ibn Khaldun (1332– 1406), the father of sociology and the author of The Muqaddimah [An Introduction of History], was one of the first thinkers who envisioned that ethical communication is the web of a human community, and that its flow shapes the direction and pace of dynamic communal development. He especially underlined the importance of tabligh [truthful propagation] and assabieh [group cohesion] (Mowlana 2014a). Mowlana’s (2014a) theorizing project, therefore, focused on tabligh as the core idea of Islamic communication ethics and its vital links with four cardinal concepts of the Islamic worldview: 1. tawhid [unity, coherence, and harmony of all in the universe], 2. amr bi alma’ruf wa nahy’an al munkar [commanding to the right and prohibiting from the wrong], 3. ummah [community], and 4. taqwa [piety]. Unlike the modern Western notion of propaganda, which can separate the communicator’s belief from the message itself, tabligh as an extension in space and time and the act of branching out alludes to the spread of a belief by natural production and has an ethical boundary. In contrast to the modern Western transmission view of communication with its emphasis on the secular, tabligh is predicated on the inseparability of the religious and the social. Tabligh, with and for assabieh, emphasizes intrapersonal and interpersonal communication over rugged individualism, communal and public communication over atomistic mass societies, and international and intercultural communication over nationalism and ethnocentrism. In Mowlana’s (2014a: 246) view, the challenge of Muslim nations in the globalization era is “how best to devise structural changes and institutional setups that would help to maintain the precious communication and ethical balance which has been traditionally part of the Islamic civilization.” From the perspective of the Islamic community paradigm instead of the Western information paradigm, Mowlana (1992, 2014b) also proposed a theoretical model of communication as cultural ecology and suggested that the concept of ecology serve as a new framework for analyzing the role of communication in en-

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suring the stability and sustainability of culture. He postulated that communication is a cornerstone of cultural environment and a key to ecological balance in a cultural community. Mowlana (1992, 2014b) isolated six interrelated ecological terrains: 1. the ecology of goods and commodities; 2. the ecology of services; 3. the ecology of warfare; 4. the ecology of information; 5. the ecology of habitat; and 6. the ecology of ethics and morality. His model visually demonstrated that both internal and external communication among humans, nature, and the supernatural significantly affects ecological balance among all elements of culture, and that our attitude toward intracultural and intercultural communication and their environments determines the totality and health of culture. Of utmost importance to the well-being of culture and community is balanced interaction and learning across national borders and cultural boundaries. Throughout Islamic history, Mowlana (2014b) stressed, information has been not a commodity but a moral imperative.

6 Conclusion: The future of non-Western theorizing in the post-Western world This chapter has aimed to provide an overview of non-Western theories of communication as they relate to intracultural and intercultural interactions. The present overview cannot possibly do justice to their breadth in coverage and their depth in detail. It is indeed a narrow purview that is very much limited to some, not all, theoretical ideas and insights even within Afrocentric and Asiacentric communication scholarship (see Asante 1999, 2005; Asante & Miike 2013; Blake 2009; Dissanayake 1988; Fáníran 2014; Kincaid 1987; Miike 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2015; Miike & Chen 2006, 2007, 2010). Clearly, there are many more non-Western theories of communication in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Pacific Islands, and indigenous communities all over the world (see Barranquero 2011; Garcia 1996; Gunaratne 2010; Meyer 2013; Rector & Neiva 1996; Williams 1998). Scholars and students of non-Western rhetorics and communication should apprehend and appreciate, for example, the indigenous cumulative wisdom embedded in the budi mindscape in Malaysia, the ho’oponopono method of conflict resolution in Hawai‘i, the kapwa self-other identity in the Philippines, the Maya worldview in Mexico, the musyawarah-mufakat style of discussion in Indonesia, the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, and the ubuntu way of life in South Africa. The limit of coverage of this chapter partially reflects the author’s limit of non-Western cultural and communicative knowledge. By way of conclusion, the chapter addresses two challenges of non-Western theorizing in the post-Western world. The first challenge is to overcome the supremacy of Western philosophy as a key problematic in understanding non-Western cultures and constructing nonWestern theoretical knowledge. From an Afrocentric vantage point, Asante (2011)

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interrogated the anachronistic myth that Western philosophy as the science of reason is the only source of true knowledge, whereas Greco-Roman rhetoric represents the best rationality and civility in human communication. Asante (2011: 26) problematized the Eurocentric masternarrative on the Western origin of philosophy and the Greek invention of rhetoric because he came to the conclusion that “this idea of philosophy [and rhetoric] being the most advanced science and whites being the only ones who have created this ‘best’ science constructed an aura of Western superiority.” From an Islamic perspective, Mowlana (2004: 312) echoed: There are many key questions that can guide our re-reading of the history of communication and culture. The crossroad[s] of our present juncture demands that we carefully examine the border crossing between uniformity and diversity. As mapped by the often-used term of NorthSouth Axis of global communication, the philosophical and epistemological foundations of Western civilization must open the horizons of its thought and unthought to other cultures. To conceive of diversity as the other and specter of Western philosophy as the valid is where the deconstruction must begin. The irrationality seen in one culture (i.e., non-Western) and the rationality observed in Western philosophy and science must be abandoned before meaningful analysis can begin.

The second challenge is to decolonize our methodological worldview and develop non-Western methods that cultivate and utilize non-Western theories of communication. As Smith (2012) enunciated, Eurocentric postpositivist research has seriously disadvantaged alternative indigenous theorizing with their statistical method of empirical verification. Eurocentric critical inquiries have also disallowed theoretical flowers of communication to bloom with their method of deconstructive criticism. In such an academic climate, it behooves us to deploy and employ innovative methods that mobilize myths, proverbs, riddles, ideographs, and etymologies as equally rigorous and relevant resources for theory building and verification. It is also imperative for us to come up with non-Western research methodologies that do not discount spirituality and discard the invisible world (Miike 2008). And, of course, in our pursuit of theoretical construction and methodological refinement, as Barbara T. Christian (1987, 1996) asseverated in a dual sense, we must refuse to become “a race for theory” and refrain from engaging in “a race for theory.” Stephen W. Littlejohn (2002: 336) tersely stated that “[t]heory making has been throughout history and remains today one of the most significant human endeavors.” His statement rings true not only in Western societies but also in non-Western communities. As Asante (2010: 158) averred, therefore, “[i]n our attempt to expand the boundaries of communication theory, particularly the ideas of intercultural communication, we should explore every aspect of culture, in every region of the world, in our effort to become truly human.” By liberating ourselves from the conventional and narrow Western view of theory, we can discover and rediscover a wealth of theoretical ideas and insights about human communication in the nonWestern world. Only then, new doors of understanding of common humanity will be opened for cross-cultural reflections, and new bridges across the rivers of cultural diversity will be built for intercultural interactions.

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5 Issues in intercultural communication: A semantic network analysis Abstract: This chapter describes a number of critical issues facing the field of intercultural communication including, the discipline’s definition, power relations among various ethnic or national groups and nation-states, voice – who speaks for an ethnic group or nation-state, and globalization. But the major portion of the chapter takes a different approach to discussing the issues facing intercultural communication. Rather than focusing on what topics, areas of study, or issues (theoretical and pragmatic) the idealized field of international/intercultural communication should concentrate on, it describes the topics that it has examined in the published articles in those journals devoted to the subject over the last fifteen years. It employs a semantic network analysis of the abstracts of articles to answer the questions, “What nations/cultures have intercultural scholars examined?” and “What topics or issues have intercultural communication scholars investigated?” By doing so, we define the field and the issues it faces in the future. Keywords: power, voice, globalization, semantic network analysis

1 Introduction Past discussions of the issues facing international and intercultural communication have focused on problems including, what constitutes this area of study, by defining culture and differentiating inter-cultural communication from cross-cultural comparisons of phenomena indicative of the process of communication (Barnett & Lee 2002). Intercultural communication involves the exchange of information between two groups of people with significantly different cultures, while international communication focuses on the exchange of messages between nation-states (Barnett 1999). Cross-cultural communication research concentrates on the comparison of cultural groups, how they differ in terms of communication behavior, and their implications for the process of communication (Gudykunst 2002). International media and global communication research is primarily concerned with the mass media, either print (international journalism) or electronic (broadcast and digital telecommunication – telephones and the Internet) (Golan, Johnson & Wanta 2010; Shoemaker & Cohen 2006). It generally compares national media infrastructures, the philosophy of media regulation, and differential patterns of use and effects and their implications for the society in which they are embedded (Hallin & Mancini 2006, 2011; Hudson 1997; van Dijk 2012). DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-005

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The international/intercultural communication literature is full of numerous ideological issues, most prominent of which is the concern with relations of power among various ethnic or national groups and nation-states (Braman 2002; Castells 2004; Shi-xu, 2004), which is often based on the ownership of the media and the infrastructure connecting it as a global network (Barnett, Ruiz & Park 2015; Ruiz & Barnett 2015). The current intercultural communication literature functions partly to perpetuate power relations between the West and non-West (Kim 2010), since scholars frequently use Euro-American cultures and values as standards to measure the behavioral and material layers of non-European cultures, especially the East Asian cultures (Fougere & Moulettes 2007; Miike 2003 & 2009). As a result, intercultural scholars often ignore alternative perspectives. Two prominent theories of international communication are World Systems Theory (Barnett, Jacobson, Choi & Sun Miller 1996; Chase-Dunn & Grimes 1995; Wallerstein 1974) and Galtung’s (1971) Structural Theory of Imperialism. World Systems Theory argues that the global economy is characterized by an unequal exchange of material, capital and labor, as well as information, between the rich powerful nations (North America, Western Europe and certain countries of East Asia) and the poor countries of the globe. It argues that nations are interdependent and that their development (a subject often investigated by intercultural scholars) can only be understood by taking into account the ways in which societies are linked with one another in the context of material, capital and information exchanges. Specifically related to intercultural communication is the production and distribution of messages, which is dominated by the countries in the core. For example, it has only been since the relatively recent economic development of China, which has moved it toward the core, that its role in defeating the Japanese in World War II has been fully acknowledged and widely communicated. These include not only the media – news (Kim & Barnett 1996), film (Chon, Barnett & Choi 2003), music (Moon, Barnett & Lim 2010), patents and trademarks (Nam & Barnett 2011), but also, education (Barnett, et al. 2015) and interpersonal communication (Barnett & Benefield 2015; Barnett & Choi 1995). Further, these relations are politically enforced. The rich countries use their military and other mechanisms to coerce the poorer countries to maintain these inequitable relations. World System Theory has a number of implications for the examination of international/intercultural communication. One, the position of a country in the network of international relations determines its potential for development, and its interaction patterns with the rest of the world. Two, the structural position of a country is a result of its interactions with other countries. And three, the relationships among nations are relatively stable, changing only as the distribution of the modes of production changes; for example, from an agricultural based economy to an industrial one or from a industrial to an information society. Related to World System Theory is Galtung’s (1971) Structural Theory of Imperialism, which proposes four rules defining the structure of international communi-

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cation. 1. International communication is vertical between center (the wealthy) and peripheral (poor) nations. 2. Interaction between peripheral nations is missing. 3. Multilateral interaction involving all three is missing. And, 4. interaction with the outside world is monopolized by the center. In other words, “there is interaction along the spokes, from the periphery to the center hub; but not along the rim, from periphery nation to one another” (p. 97). In other words, international communication is radial, not integrated. These theories explicitly discuss the issue of power as it applies to international and intercultural communication. Intercultural communication scholars have largely ignored these theories. Critical scholars have discussed power relations in international communication (Deibert 2002; McChesney 2001; Mosco 1996), but their research has not greatly influenced the research by intercultural communication scholars, which has primarily focused on how the culture in which the individuals are embedded impacts the process of communication. This is an important issue for the future of intercultural communication scholarship. Still another issue concerns “voice”. Who speaks for an ethnic group or nationstate (Connor 1978; Eriksen 1997; Hall 1997; Kearney 1991)? The marginality of individuals engaged in intercultural communication (who are accessible subjects for studies) raises the issue of the validity of cross-cultural communication research. Because of their inter-group ties, these individuals may not be representative of their own group’s culture. Individuals who occupy the role of bridges between cultures tend to be peripheral (less integrated) in their own groups. The reason is that dense groups regulate intergroup flows and the existence of bridges because its members' resources are used to maintain intragroup ties. As a result, individuals strongly connected within a group tend not to be bridges to other cultural groups. Thus, individuals with links to other groups often are marginal in their own groups and they may not act as the voice of that group (Barnett & Lee 2002). Native people in positions of power (government officials, businessmen, academics or clerics) are typically taken to be the subjects studied by intercultural communication researchers. This is especially true when investigating international media content where their voice is heard above all others. These individuals tend to be wealthier, more highly educated, urban, and importantly, more cosmopolite than the typical member of society. Thus, they may not express values, attitudes and opinions, as well as typical communication behaviors more representative of the society under investigation. Intercultural researchers should strive to listen to alternative voices that may be representative of society at large including different sectors and groups, be they poor, uneducated and be tied to local, often rural settings. Globalization, the process of strengthening social relations (connections) among distant localities has increased the interactions among the people of the world creating networks of interdependence at multi-continental distances. These networks can be flows and influences of capital and goods, cultural information

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and ideas, as well as, environmentally and biologically relevant substances (Keohane & Nye 2000). Due to increased transportation and telecommunications between any two points on the globe, the prospect exists for creating a communication network that links everyone in the world. Globalization has resulted in what Karl Deutsch (1966) called a “Web of Nations”, Marshall McLuhan (1966), the “Global Village”, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) and others the “World System.” Manuel Castells (2000) and Jan van Dijk (2012) simply call it the “Network Society”. One consequence of globalization has been that through the increase in international communication, the differences among cultures have become smaller. The earth’s diverse societies are in the process of converging, homogenizing into one world civilization (Barnett & Kincaid 1983; Barnett & Rosen 2007; Kincaid, Yum, Woelfel & Barnett 1983; Rogers & Kincaid 1981) or at least forming hybrid cultures combining elements of many different groups and nationalities (Straubhaar 2002), for example, the formation of the United World College, the world trade organization, the United Nations, and the McDonaldization of the human society (Ritzer 1996). This chapter takes a different approach to the treatment of the problems facing intercultural communication. Rather than focusing on what topics, areas of study, or issues (theoretical and pragmatic) the idealized field of international/intercultural communication should concentrate its attention on, it provides a comprehensive description of the subjects that intercultural communication research has examined in the published articles in those peer reviewed journals devoted to the field over the last decade and a half. It employs the tools of semantic network analysis to analyze the abstracts of research articles on the topic to answer the question, “What topics or issues have intercultural communication scholars investigated?”, thus defining the field and the issues it faces in the future.

2 A semantic network analysis of intercultural communication 2.1 Theory and methods This section of the chapter describes a computer-assisted semantic network analysis that was conducted to analyze abstracts of articles obtained from the Web of Science (WS), Journal of Intercultural Communication (JIC), Journal of Intercultural Communication Research (JICR), and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC) from 1992 to April 2015. JIC, JICR, and JIIC are added being not included in the database of WS. In WS, the earliest intercultural communication research article with a downloadable abstract in the category of Communication was published in 1992. The earliest article in the online database of JIC was published in 1999; the earliest article in the online database of JICR was published in 2006; and the earliest article in the online database of JIIC was published in

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2008. Using the phrase “intercultural communication” as search string, 155 articles were selected from the category of Communication in WS (1992–April 2015); 241 articles were selected from JIC (1999–Feb 2015); 138 articles were selected from JICR (2006–Feb 2015); 118 articles were selected from JIIC (2008–Feb 2015). In order to determine the topics or issues that intercultural/international communication scholars have examined and therefore deemed important over the last two decades, a total of 652 abstracts of these articles were extracted for semantic network analysis. Abstracts were chosen rather than keywords or entire articles because they provide precise summaries of the research without the unnecessary methodological or ideological details and redundancies of entire articles. Semantic network analysis (SMA) is a form of content analysis that identifies the network of associations between concepts expressed in text (Doerfel 1998; Carley & Palmquist 1992). By conducting a computer-assisted SMA, complex associations between concepts can be found, salient concepts in specified relations can be identified, and the text can be displayed as visible maps, helping researchers to investigate implicit meaning of the text. The ConText software (Diesner et al. 2013) was used to generate semantic networks based on the measurement of concept co-occurrence. Specifically, syntactically functional words such as articles, adverbs and transitive verbs were removed, tense was adjusted and different forms of the same word were combined into the root form of the word (Kwon, Barnett & Chen 2009). For example, communicate/communication/communicative, cultural/ culturally/culture, were regarded as the same concept. Some words were combined together as one concept. For example, Middle East was regarded as one concept and labeled as ME. Two semantic networks were created: One is a geography network, which identified nations that co-occurred in the text, that is, countries that were studied together, either for comparison purposes or whose intercultural relations were examined. Subcultures or ethnic groups within any individual country were not examined. The other is a co-occurrence network of the most frequent concepts, which describes the topics or issues that international/intercultural communication scholars have focused on in published research. For the geography network, 40 geographic locations that occurred at least twice in the 652 abstracts were selected. This included 32 nations, three continents (Africa, Asia, Europe), two regions (The Middle East, Scandinavia), Hawaii, Guam, and Hong Kong (as separate from China). ConText automatically found all location pairs among the 40 geographic locations within an individual abstract. Each location pair was given an equal connection weight regardless of how far apart (the number of words between terms) the political entities were in the abstract (Danowski 1993). For the co-occurrence network of the most frequent concepts, ConText listed the most frequent concepts in 652 abstracts. The 100 most frequent concepts with substantive meaning were chosen for analysis. Concept pairs among the 100 most frequent words that occurred within seven concepts of each other in an individual abstract were considered connected regardless of the number of words separating the terms.

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The two semantic networks were run through UCINET (Borgatti, Everett & Freeman 2002), Gephi (Bastian, Heymann & Jacomy 2009), and R, which are software and a language for network analysis, graphics, and statistical computing. UCINET calculates the centralities of each concept. Although, there are a number of different measures of centrality, including degree, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality, this study used eigenvector centrality as the criterion measure since it indicates a concept’s overall network centrality (Bonacich 1972). UCINET also calculates the share, the proportion of all links attributable to each individual concept. Gephi creates visual maps of semantic networks. In the visual maps (Figure 5.1 & 5.2). The size of the label of each concept depends on its eigenvector centrality, such that the larger the object, the more central a country or concept is to intercultural/ international communication research. Lines in the maps indicate the presence of a relationship between each pair of countries or concepts. Thicker lines represent stronger relationship between two concepts. Also, the shorter distance between two concepts, the stronger relationship there is between them. R calculates the clusters of the networks using the Package igraph (Csardi & Nepusz 2006), which is based on Newman’s modularity clustering algorithm (Newman 2006).

2.2 The geography of intercultural communication research Figure 5.1 illustrates the network of intercultural communication research based on geography. Overall, the United States (c1 = 86.54) is the most central country in the network, with a 19.1 % share, followed by China (c = 65.34, s2 = 7.7 %), Japan (c = 51.75, s = 7.7 %), and South Korea (c = 31.42, s = 4.9 %). This means that almost 20 % of published intercultural/international research considers the United States or one of these three countries. The normalize eigenvector centralities of these four countries are all greater than twice of the mean normalized eigenvector centrality (M = 14, SD = 17.66). Thus, the central focus of intercultural/international research concerns the United States and the East Asian countries of China, Japan and South Korea. The results of the Newman's modularity analysis reveal that this network is composed of four major clusters. On the visual map (Figure 5.1), the cluster number was marked next to the label of the concept. The different clusters are represented by different colors. The first group (in red) is the largest and represents the network core. It is centered about the USA with China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Turkey, Iraq, Taiwan, Sweden, India, Israel, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Chile, Mexico, Hawaii, Malaysia, Romania, and Norway. China had the closest relationship with the USA (n3 = 13), followed by Japan (n = 8), South Korea (n = 5), Iraq

1 “c” represents normalized eigenvector centrality. 2 “s” represents share of the concept. 3 “n” represents number of links between two concepts.

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Fig. 5.1: Geography network of intercultural communication research.

(n = 5), Hong Kong (n = 4), and India (n = 4). In this group, the East Asian countries are closely associated (i.e. China-Taiwan n = 3; China-Japan n = 3; China-Hong Kong n = 2; China-South Korea n = 1; Japan-South Korea n = 2; Japan-Hong Kong n = 1, South Korea-Taiwan n = 1). The second group (in blue) is centered about Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Europe, with Russia, UK, Slovenia, Italy, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Portugal. Asia also has a close association with Japan (n = 4), China (n = 3), South Korea (n = 2), and Taiwan (n = 2) in the first group. The third group (in yellow) is centered about Canada and France, with Guam and Finland; and the fourth (in green), about South Africa, with Spain, Kenya, and Netherlands. Group 3 and 4 are on the periphery of the network. Table 5.1 shows the normalized eigenvector centrality and share for all 40 geographic locations. Eigenvalue centrality was normalized by taking the scaled value and dividing it by the maximum difference possible expressed as a percentage.

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Tab. 5.1: Location centrality in the network of intercultural communication research. Location

nEigen

Share (%)

Location

nEigen

Share (%)

Africa Asia Australia Canada Chile China Europe Finland France Germany Guam Hong Kong Hawaii India Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Japan Kenya

8.99 24.20 11.06 4.75 7.80 65.34 8.39 0.18 4.38 8.69 3.67 24.96 6.24 14.80 18.09 4.929 12.14 5.059 51.75 3.64

0.030 0.052 0.018 0.018 0.013 0.077 0.040 0.003 0.013 0.010 0.008 0.031 0.008 0.013 0.013 0.010 0.021 0.013 0.077 0.005

Middle East Malaysia Mexico Netherlands Norway Portugal Romania Russia South Korea South Africa Scandinavia Singapore Slovenia Spain Sweden Taiwan Thailand Turkey UK USA

9.47 5.40 7.85 2.25 1.09 0.35 3.62 16.57 31.42 0.43 0.39 7.99 8.15 4.36 14.90 17.31 20.75 19.14 12.76 86.54

0.036 0.013 0.008 0.015 0.005 0.003 0.003 0.026 0.049 0.008 0.003 0.010 0.023 0.013 0.018 0.021 0.034 0.018 0.036 0.191

Mean = 14.00, S.D. = 17.66

2.3 The concepts of intercultural communication research In the co-occurrence network of most frequent concepts used in intercultural communication research, communication (c = 69.21, s = 6.5 %), culture (c = 63. 19, s = 6.8 %), and intercultural (c = 53.93, s = 4.1 %) are the most central concepts. The normalize eigenvector centralities of these three concepts were all greater than seven times of the mean normalized eigenvector centrality (M = 6.83, SD = 8.7). A graphic representation of the network is presented in Figure 5.2, illustrating the most central concepts dealing with intercultural communication research. In order to clearly demonstrate the semantic structure of intercultural communication research, the three most common terms, Communication, Culture, and Intercultural were removed from the network, because they distorted the results by linking all the other concepts together into a single group of terms that dealt with intercultural communication, the topic under investigation. The minimum link strength (frequency of co-occurrence) required for a line was 14.19, which was the mean (3.21) plus 2 standard deviations (5.49). The most central concept in the graph is American (c = 57.06, s = 7.6 %), followed by student, relationship, language, difference, group, Chinese, and identity. American has the closest relationship with student (n = 127). Student is also tightly associated with international (n = 95), university (n =

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Fig. 5.2: The co-occurrence network of concepts used in intercultural communication research.

88), Japanese, (n = 62) English (n = 61), and Chinese (n = 44). Relationship, language, and difference are all closely associated with American and student. The results of the Newman's modularity analysis show that the graph is composed of seven major clusters. On the visual map (Figure 5.2), the cluster number was marked next to the label of the concept and differentiated by color. The first group (in red) is centered about American, relationship, and difference. It has a close relationship with the second group (in blue), which is centered about student and language, indicating a great deal of intercultural communication research is related to the comparison between American students and those from other countries. The third group (yellow) is centered about identity, development, and theory, which closely associated with relationship in the second group (n = 50; 50; 33). It demonstrates scholars’ efforts in developing identity theory in the study of the relationship involved in intercultural communication. The fourth group (green) is centered about group and ethnic, which is closely associated with identity in group 3 (n = 44; 64) and American in group 1 (n = 29; 29). This illustrates the prominent position of studying American ethnic identity in intercultural communication research. Group 5, 6, and 7 were on the periphery of the network. Group 5

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(magenta) studies different conflict styles performed by different cultural and ethnic groups. It is composed of conflict, style, management, and preference. Group 6 (light blue) is composed of face, positive, and negative, studying different forms of politeness in different cultural and ethnic context. Group 7 (gray) addresses issues of health communication in different cultures, including physician, patient, and health. Table 5.2 shows the normalized eigenvector centrality and share of the concepts in Figure 5.2.

Tab. 5.2: Centrality of most frequent concepts used in the network of intercultural communication research. Concept

nEigen Share %

Concept

nEigen Share %

Concept

nEigen Share %

American Asian Attitude Behavior Business Chinese Community Competence Concept Conflict Construction Context Datum Development Dialogue Difference Dimension Discourse Education Effect English Ethnic European Experience Face Factor Family Foreign Frame Friendship German

57.06 8.1 3.61 3.48 9.79 25.93 3.61 7.33 3.12 13.31 8.07 11.43 11.5 15.94 1.97 32.26 2.88 11.37 3.2 4.056 22.37 9.79 4.34 15.66 12.88 8.7 1.01 3.91 8.3 3.52 1.74

Globalization Group Health Identity Immigrant Individual Influence Information Interaction International Interview Issue Japanese Language Learning Management Media Member Message Minority Model National Negative Negotiation News Participant Patient Pattern Perception Physician Political

2.83 29.49 0.91 25.20 5.24 3.65 14.98 5.58 11.31 19.58 11.52 3.19 23.57 36.37 10.59 5.15 10.03 2.05 3.10 1.61 10.99 2.73 2.29 4.31 2.24 24.86 0.94 2.53 16.86 2.27 4.11

Positive Practice Preference Problem Process Professional Public Qualitative Question Questionnaire Relationship Satisfaction Significant Social Society Speaker Speech Strategy Student Style Support Survey Teacher Teaching Test Theory Understanding University Value Woman Work

4.49 6.98 4.14 3.60 7.53 1.37 7.09 0.75 3.39 7.40 39.33 2.33 10.51 22.97 1.90 5.57 1.79 16.40 53.89 11.51 9.68 5.44 5.66 4.81 3.40 20.00 10.24 14.79 3.32 5.07 7.29

0.076 0.004 0.002 0.002 0.01 0.027 0.005 0.005 0.002 0.018 0.007 0.012 0.009 0.021 0.002 0.036 0.001 0.01 0.002 0.002 0.02 0.009 0.002 0.014 0.014 0.006 0.002 0.002 0.01 0.002 0.002

Mean = 6.83, S.D. = 8.70

0.007 0.043 0.002 0.036 0.004 0.004 0.013 0.004 0.009 0.014 0.010 0.003 0.017 0.053 0.009 0.006 0.011 0.002 0.002 0.002 0.013 0.003 0.002 0.004 0.003 0.025 0.002 0.002 0.013 0.002 0.004

0.004 0.006 0.007 0.005 0.008 0.002 0.005 0.002 0.003 0.004 0.055 0.002 0.007 0.025 0.002 0.005 0.002 0.014 0.069 0.014 0.007 0.003 0.004 0.004 0.002 0.026 0.012 0.009 0.004 0.004 0.008

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3 Discussion – Implications of the semantic networks for intercultural communication 3.1 The United States centered intercultural communication research In the academic field of intercultural communication, the United States has occupied an unchallenged predominance, not surprising given the beginning of intercultural communication research being at the Foreign Service Institute under the U.S. federal government (Leeds-Hurwitz 1990). The early intercultural communication research typically compared communication processes in the U.S. with a single country that was very often located in East Asia (Kim 2010). In particular, there are more studies of American/Japanese communication than of intercultural communication between any two other cultures since the United States and Japan were the two largest economic powers in the world with a high volume of trade and personnel exchanges between them (Ito 1992, Rogers, Hart & Miike 2002). The geography network of intercultural communication research (Figure 5.1) confirmed some of the findings of the above studies. The USA is at the center of the network closely linked to the Asian countries (i.e. China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and India). However, China is the second most central country in the geography network, and compared to Japan, it has a closer relationship with the USA, indicating that American/Chinese communication has become the central concern of intercultural communication research. This can be explained, in part, from the perspective of economic development. Since 2010, China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy (Hosaka 2010), and the relationship between the USA and China, the current world’s two largest economies, is crucial to the future development of the world economy. Also, from the perspective of international student exchanges, China sends the most number of students abroad, and a majority of international students from China are studying in English-speaking countries, particularly the USA (Barnett, Lee, Jiang & Park 2015). Chinese graduate students studying in the USA tend to examine China’s relations with and differences from the United States. Kim (2010) has argued that more countries need to be involved into the intercultural communication research to reduce the bias of always comparing the USA with a single East Asian country. Indeed, this is an important issue facing the future of intercultural communication when considering the ecological validity and the generalizability of research findings to societies other than the United States and East Asia. The geography network revealed regional clusters of intercultural communication research. The East Asian countries were associated with each other indicating the examination of cultural variability within East Asia, a region that was often treated in the literature as homogeneous, and painted with the same broad brush as collectivistic, the opposite of America’s individualistic culture (Hofstede & Min-

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kov 2010; Kim 2010). Scholars also have explored the intercultural communication among countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Middle East. Besides expanding intercultural communication research on a global scale, it is still very important to study the communication between the USA and individual East Asian countries, which are distinctively different. These difference have lead Huntington4 (1996) to categorize China and Japan as members of different civilizations. With the rapid growth of the economic power of the East Asian countries, the studies of the dialogues between the holistic view (Chen & Starosta 2003) from the wealthy East Asian countries and the individualistic view from the USA are necessary for understanding the process of two different civilizations negotiating the dominant world culture and the future of the world (Jiang, Barnett & Taylor 2014; Jiang, Barnett & Chu 2015). However, a critical question is: can current intercultural communication research truly capture the complex and accurate communication processes between the USA and the East Asian countries? Scholars have argued that previous studies of intercultural communication between the USA and the East Asian countries mainly rely on cross-cultural comparisons, the philosophical foundation of which is to use Western cultures as the standards to measure the East Asian cultures (Bryant & Yang 2004; Fougere & Moulettes 2007; Kim 2010). This Euro-centricism either ignores completely or oversimplifies the complexity of East Asia, and thus seriously hinders the development of intercultural communication research (Chen 2006; Kim 2002). Instead of treating the traditions in East Asia as objects of study, it is imperative for scholars to consider them as sources of concepts and theories in intercultural communication research, since all human cultures are precious resources of humanistic insights and inspiration (Miike 2006). East Asian communication literature provides prominent examples of generating theories from local traditions (Alatas 2006; Chen 2006; Jiang & Barnett 2013; Shim, Kim & Martin 2008). For instance, Jiang and Barnett (2013) re-conceptualized the concept of relationship from a non-western (traditional Chinese) perspective, and argued that it is difficult to truly understand the communication process in China without taking into account the cultural concept of guanxi, which is a Chinese notion that social connections are based on the socially situated reciprocity, and recommended that scholars should add a guanxi perspective to the examination of various theories that comprise the Western structural (network) theory, including social capital theory, social exchange theory, cognitive and contagion theories. In addition to the problem of Euro-centricism, another critical issue facing intercultural communication research is scholars’ over-emphasis on the cross-cultural comparisons between students with different cultural backgrounds. Typically, intercultural researchers have employed opportunistic samples using students

4 According to Huntington (1996), the major civilizations in the world include Western, Orthodox, Islamic, African, Latin American, Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, and Japanese.

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from different countries, generally China, Japan and Korea, studying in the United States to compare with American students. As indicated earlier these individuals are not representative of their native cultures, cultures partly due to the degree of their exposure to the host culture. Intercultural scholars should strive to conduct communication research with representative sample of the societies to which they wish to generalize.

3.2 Student centered cross-cultural comparisons In the co-occurrence network of concepts used in intercultural communication research (Figure 5.2), student has the second largest eigenvector centrality. Scholars focused on comparing the differences of the language, communication strategy and relationship between the American students and international students (i.e. Japanese, Korean and Chinese), and also, from a practical perspective, studying how international students learn English. Although international students are convenient samples for intercultural scholars to study, the above research trend over simplifies intercultural communication research to student-centered cross-cultural comparisons, and cannot truly capture the complexity of intercultural communication in the era of globalization. In today’s world, driven by international trade and rapid development of information technology, the long distance interconnectedness has been enabled, time and space are largely compressed, and individuals are linked at the global level through the global net of mass media and telecommunication (Hannerz 1996; Harvey 1989; Mittelman 1996). Given such circumstances, the intercultural communication becomes a dynamic and complex phenomenon involving the process of cultural convergence (Barnett & Kincaid 1983; Barnett & Rosen 2007; Jiang & Barnett 2014b; Kincaid, Yum, Woelfel & Barnett 1983) to some extent. Intercultural communication research needs to take that into account and help better understand it. At the micro level, when people from different countries and regions have more opportunities to expose themselves to other cultural environments to trade goods and services, watch media programs, and exchange ideas, various modalities of local cultural hybridization has been created, and people are becoming more similar in their needs, tastes, lifestyles, values, and behavior patterns (Barnett & Rosen 2007; Levitt 1983; McLuhan 1964; Sklair 1991). Besides focusing on studying international students, intercultural communication research should pay more attention to various aspects of human life including business, tourism, media consumption (Ang 1990; Crane, Kawashima & Kawasaki 2002; Parker 1998; Reid 2003) and international volunteering. Furthermore, besides difference, similarity also plays an important role in the study of intercultural communication. The observation of both the differences and similarities from a global perspective is crucial for scholars to understand the dynamic essence of the intercultural communication. However, the concept globalization is only located at the periphery of the semantic

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network closely associated with media (n = 22), frames (n = 19), and news (c = 16), and the concept similarity does not emerge in Figure 5.2. At the macro level, the world’s telecommunication and media systems provide a series of arenas in which interactions are being carried out among different nations and cultures with the purpose of negotiating the reality of the world system and the dominant world culture (Barnett 2001; Barnett & Park 2005; Barnett, Ruiz & Park 2015; Park, Barnett & Chung 2011). In the semantic network of intercultural communication research (Figure 5.2), survey and questionnaire are concepts related to methodology, and has the closest association with American and students, indicating scholars mainly used survey methodology to study the intercultural communication between American students and international students at the micro level. New methodologies need to be adopted to examine the macro level of intercultural communication. For example, network analysis has been applied to the study of global telecommunication (Barnett 2001; Barnett, Ruiz, Hammond & Xin 2013), web-citations among the worldwide universities (Barnett, Park, Jiang, Tang & Aguillo 2014), and international student flows (Barnett et al. 2015). Also, content analysis has been applied to examine international news flow (Golan, Johnson & Wanta 2010; Kim & Barnett 1996; Rosengren 1987) and the differences in cultural frames in the world’s media (Jiang & Barnett 2014a; Jiang & Barnett 2014b; Jiang et al. 2014; Jiang et al. 2015).

3.3 Identity centered intercultural communication research Identity is the most central concept in the third largest (yellow) cluster of the concept co-occurrence network (Figure 5.2). It is closely associated with construction (n = 54), theory (n = 43), and development (n = 36), indicating the importance of the identity construction in the process of intercultural communication and the significance of the development of identity theory in intercultural communication research. As Hannerz (1987: 555) claimed, “The openness to foreign cultural influences gives people access to technological and symbolic resources for dealing with their own ideas, managing their own culture, in new ways.” Intercultural communication first provides people with opportunities to reflect on and re-evaluate the preciousness of their original cultural identity. Then, people’s self-reflections on unfamiliar cultural frames working together with their social interactions and freedom to use the power of selection either facilitate or retard the process of cultural convergence. From this perspective, the process of intercultural communication may be considered synonymous with the process of cultural convergence. However, the concept of convergence does not emerge in the semantic structural of intercultural communication research. It is necessary and imperative for scholars to bring the convergence theory into the studies of identity construction in the process of intercultural communication. It is also meaningful to study how socially embedded actors reproduce and, potentially, reinvent their local cultural concepts

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in accordance with their personal ideas, interests and commitments, and how multiple cultural idioms intermingle based on these activities on the individual level (Jiang & Barnett 2013). In addition, Identity also has a close relationship with ethnic (n = 46), which tightly linked to minority (n = 31) and American (n = 29) indicating the USA centered intercultural communication research also focuses on the examination of the ethnic identity of minority groups in America. It is well known that the United States has a unique multiracial and multicultural social environment. As Sowell (1981: 3) said “the peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all of human history.” People speaking every language and representing every nationality, race and religion crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. In order to build connection among people of different races, national origins, religions, and cultures, common values of tolerance and mutual respect should be cultivated. Therefore, it is also meaningful to bring the convergence perspective into the studies of interethnic communication. Acculturation and assimilation are important concepts for scholars to discuss the convergence process of interethnic communication (Kim 2001). Intercultural scholars should examine how acculturation affects ethnic minorities’ identity construction, and how the tension between the maintenance of minority cultures and the progress of cultural assimilation propels the formation of American culture. Acculturation and assimilation do not emerge in the semantic network of most frequent concepts indicating the importance for scholars to make research on acculturation and assimilation more prominent in interethnic communication research.

4 Summary This chapter has discussed the topics that have interested the intercultural/international communication scholar as expressed in the research literature of the field, and thus defined the practice of research for the field of intercultural communication. Specifically, it describes a semantic network analysis of abstracts of the last two decades’ published articles that concern intercultural communication. The results of this analysis revealed a Euro-American centric perspective, where the research has focused primarily on the differences between the American and European cultures, and those of East Asia and how they are reflected in communication processes. Also, it has suggested a number of research issues that have been ignored or under studied by intercultural scholars, while flooding attention on student centered cross-cultural comparisons and identity centered research. In addition, it discussed two major theoretical issues that intercultural research has largely ignored. They are, one, differential power in intercultural relations, and two, the notion of voice, the representativeness of who speaks for a cultural group. Finally, this chapter encouraged the reader to consider these issues and the process of

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globalization and its implications for the study of intercultural and international communication.

Further Readings International Monetary Fund, 2015. IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO). http:// knoema.com/IMFWEO2015Apr/imf-world-economic-outlook-weo-april-2015

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Bradford ‘J’ Hall

6 Cultural communication: Advancing understanding in a multi-cultural world Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate and explain a “Cultural Communication” perspective to understanding human interaction. The perspective is focused on helping us understand how we develop shared meaning and is grounded in a symbiotic understanding of etic and emic approaches to communication. A descriptive framework that builds on key issues found in this approach is developed. This framework, referred to as FAIR, encourages both the reader and researcher to pay special attention to questions related to the appropriate and effective feelings, actions, identities, and relationships within a given community. The chapter illustrates this framework and identifies three key paradoxical principles that help consumers and producers of this research to better navigate a multi-cultural world. These three principles are: Small is big; Seeing the invisible; and Connection in the face of disconnection. Keywords: Cultural Communication; Emic/Etic perspectives; Interpretive Frameworks; Community; Meaning; Arabic; Asian Indian; Blackfeet; Colombian; Danish; Finnish; French; Israeli; Japanese; Mexican; U.S. American; Western Apache.

1 Introduction This chapter seeks to illustrate a cultural approach to understanding communication. This approach provides important resources in our efforts to make sense of and interact with members of culturally distinct communities. There are many viable goals associated with the study of culture. Some studies aim to improve the effectiveness of intercultural interaction by identifying predictable differences on certain etic (universal) behavioral points (Oetzel, Ting-Toomy, Masumoto, Yokochi, Pan, Takai & Wilcox 2001). Other studies focus on critiquing and transforming cultural practices that are seen as oppressive or as damaging to human agency or dignity (Halualani 1998; Nelson 2015). The approach and findings discussed in this chapter are focused on a form of translation work where the goal is to increase our understanding of communicative practices that are particularly meaningful in a specific cultural community (Carbaugh, Berry & Nurmikari-Berry 2006; Witteborn 2007) for those people who do not share the same cultural way of speaking. Each of the approaches I have noted has its place within the broader goal of increasing knowledge in a way that makes a difference in the world. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate and explain a “Cultural Communication” perspective; it is not to advocate that this or any other perspective is better DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-006

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than the others or to argue that other approaches are lacking in some way. Within the context of increasing our knowledge base, each approach has value. This chapter will briefly define the notion of culture as it is used in the approach and then situate the Cultural Communication approach in relationship to the concepts of etic and emic communication. Stemming out of this discussion, a review of findings as they relate to fundamental features addressed in this work will be provided. Finally, potential individual benefits associated with approaching social communities from this particular perspective will be reviewed. There are hundreds of definitions of culture and even within a subfield like Cultural Communication differences exist. However, within the Cultural Communication field culture is typically equated to the means whereby we socially construct our world (Carbaugh 2013: 74–75). Carroll (1988: 6) describes culture as a “system of communication by which meaning is produced and received within a group.” Culture is thus a system of sense making. It is an open system, a symbolic system, a system that crosses time and allows us to identify with others and to coordinate our actions in reasonable ways. For each member of a community, Cultural Communication is simply common sense. The challenge is that what is common sense in one community is not necessarily common sense in another.

2 The etic/emic connection to the study of cultural communication Research designed to illuminate and illustrate Cultural Communication is generally considered emic in nature, rather than etic. Pike’s original description of the emic/ etic divide was oriented toward explaining linguistic features, such that features that cut across many cultures in a potentially universal way were referred to as etic and distinctions in sound that were particularly meaningful within a specific community, but not necessarily other communities, were deemed emic (Pike, 1966). Because Cultural Communication research is oriented toward exploring the subtle nuances of communicative patterns within specific communities it is easy to think of it as an emic approach to communication. I believe this framing of the Cultural Communication approach to be the result of treating the etic/emic distinction as an “either/or” distinction; however, this framing can be misleading. In Cultural Communication research and most other approaches to work related to culture there is a concern, at least in part, for both emic and etic features. Certainly in terms of Cultural Communication research both etic and emic factors play an important role. An important part of Cultural Communication is the symbiotic relationship between etic frameworks and emic understandings of the ways community members produce and perceive communication. The development of etic frameworks relies on an understanding of emic particulars across many communities and in turn

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these frameworks help guide the discovery, analysis, and presentation of the emic particulars that are the hallmark of this form of research. Perhaps the most wellknown of these etic frameworks is the SPEAKING framework developed by Dell Hymes (1972). This framework originated out of extensive emic observations, yet in turn has been used to help illuminate additional emic findings in a wide variety of communities. Other examples of etic frameworks that have this relationship with emic particulars can be found in work by, Carbaugh (1989), Koven (2002), Ortner (1973), and Philipsen (1997). Cultural Communication is interested in both etic and emic findings because both help us move toward accomplishing the larger goal of understanding the distinct ways communities make sense of the world. Some intercultural and cross-cultural studies are focused on predicting behavior, opinions, and so forth. These studies tend to prioritize what are believed to be etic factors that may potentially be found in any culture. They are interested in cultural particulars mainly in terms of the “amount” of the etic features under examination. Therefore, a researcher may focus on a feature they perceive to be etic (or universal), such as uncertainty, self-disclosure or emotional expressiveness (see for example, Gudykunst & Nishida, 2001; Hammer 2005). Studies are then conducted to see how often, or when, where, and so forth, this etic feature is found within recognized cultural communities. Understanding the amount that something shows up or the frequency of occurrence allows researchers and consumers of the research to better predict what will happen in various situations. Another important research agenda is focused more on correction or improvement (Collier 2001). From this perspective the important etic features are ones that may be seen as tied to universal standards of good or bad, such as freedom of expression or oppression of ideas. The emic or cultural particulars, then, are important as they reveal community practices that need to be corrected or improved in some way. The interest is not so much in the amount of a particular emic feature, as it is in the social consequences those emic features have given the important etic standards. If the consequences of certain specific ways of talk are the oppression of ideas and the limiting of certain people’s “voice,” then it is important to reveal this. The hope is that the research helps to correct this problem and potentially empower others by allowing those that may be marginalized a greater voice in the public arena (see for example, LaFever 2008). In contrast, Cultural Communication is primarily focused on the production and interpretation of shared meaning. The etic frameworks serve the dual role of helping to identify and translate particular emic meanings so that those engaging with the research can make sense of practices and beliefs that are different from their own in a way that resonates with understanding of the members of that community. These latter etic features tend to be much more abstract than the etic features used by those interested in counting the amounts of a particular feature. The more abstract a concept, the more flexible it is in terms of allowing for different interpretations. Part of the challenge in Cultural Communication research is find-

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ing the right level of abstraction so that a framework serves as a useful comparison point at the same time that it allows for a wide range of emic meanings. The Cultural Communication approach accepts that there are different ways of making sense of the world and when particular ways of producing and understanding meaning are noticed, the etic frameworks provide a way to bring them to light. So the primary goal behind etic and emic knowledge within the field of Cultural Communication is one of understanding and connection, rather than correction and empowerment or control and prediction. Carbaugh (2013) identifies five interrelated domains that constitute this system of shared meaning or common sense: being, relating, acting, feeling, and dwelling. With the exception of “dwelling,” it is difficult to find research from a Cultural Communication perspective that does not deal with the interplay of these remaining four domains. For this reason, this review is going to place the idea of dwelling, which Carbaugh suggests is focused on people’s relationship to nature or place, into the domain of relationships, including both relationships with other people and with nature. So in essence, four primary domains, Feelings, Actions, Identities, and Relationships (FAIR), have evolved over time as essential points of consideration in exploring Cultural Communication. Research has shown over the years that efforts to understand the common sense practices of producing and interpreting meaningful action are enhanced when close attention is paid to these four domains. In various ways these domains serve as both discovery and translation tools as we seek to understand Cultural Communication and to connect with members of various communities. These four areas constitute an etic framework that is designed to discover and convey emic understandings for a given community. The framework helps us understand what we communicate and how we communicate. None of us understands the world in a vacuum. Rather, our understanding is always in relationship to other factors. The relationships between the factors identified in the FAIR framework have demonstrated usefulness for helping people understand communication in a multi-cultural world.

3 FAIR a framework for understanding To help the reader get a picture of this framework, two potential questions associated with each domain will be asked and a brief suggestive answer provided. These are merely representative questions and the answers will serve only a suggestive purpose pointing toward issues that have been highlighted in past research which are relevant to these types of questions.

3.1 Feelings What feelings should be communicated to others in particular situations? An example of Cultural Communication work focused on the feelings that should be com-

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municated is Kataw’s (2014) work on the Arabic concept of “khajal.” Kataw explains that the term khajal is used in many Arabic-language communities in reference to emotions that are similar to shame, embarrassment, and bashfulness. She notes that shame in the West is typically seen as a negative emotion, but when experienced in various Middle Eastern communities it is also a positive emotion that demonstrates a correct understanding of relational roles and appropriate behavior. For example, Kataw relates that in her university experience in Jordan girls were meant to feel khajal if they smoked in public on campus. The khajal that they were supposed to feel, involved both shame and pleasure. One of the difficulties of translating khajal into English is that in most Western communities shame and pleasure are not seen as potentially harmoniously co-existing emotions. The shame comes in the recognition that others see the person doing something bad, the pleasure comes in the recognition that they feel appropriately about this situation. Thus, the shame becomes a type of “badge of honor” that verifies that the person is actually a good person. It is pleasing to feel such shame. Without this understanding a person from outside of the culture may try to alleviate this sense of shame (khajal) thinking that the person will be happier (imagining that you cannot feel pleased and shamed at the same time). Another example provided by Kataw is related to settings where guests who are about to leave are invited multiple times to stay longer (and expected to stay). Khajal is appropriate in these settings as a type of embarrassment/shame that they are staying longer, requiring the host to accommodate them, and a sense of pleasure that they are invited to do so, demonstrating a particular relationship with the host. There are, of course, many more meanings and nuances associated with khajal. However, the examples provided demonstrate how understanding the emotions people use to make sense of the world impacts their communication and their standing within a given cultural community. What should be felt in order to be an appropriate member of a community? An excellent example of a feeling that should be felt by a member of a particular community can be found in the work of Rudnick (2002) on the Danish concept of hyyge. Rudnick explains that hyyge is a feeling that is hard to translate into English, but it is a good feeling that is associated with the concepts of coziness and connection that can happen when people are primarily together just for the sake of being together and sharing something (food, drink, music, etc.). Danes explicitly come together to experience hyyge and it is an important aspect of being Danish. Rudnick identifies three kinds of precipitating conditions that encourage the experience of hyyge. One condition is that people approach the time together in a positive frame of mind with no sense of pressure, stress or obligation. If people are focused on other tasks that need to be done or are interacting out of a sense of social obligation, it is virtually impossible to experience hyyge. A second condition is a good feeling about the others with whom you are interacting. If there is a lack of trust or sense of discomfort with the other, hyyge is not experienced. For this reason

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controversial topics or debates are avoided. A third condition is associated with the surroundings. A small, cozy, warm setting is ideal (though not required) for hyyge. In addition, whatever is happening, eating, drinking, talking, watching a movie, should be shared together. Rudnick identifies gathering for kaffe (coffee) as a ritualized time to experience hyyge. It is not that hyyge is tied to a particular activity, but the time spent just in the moment for the moment and sharing something together lends itself inherently to hyyge. Obviously, there is much more to hyyge than I have covered; but hopefully the reader gets a feel for this emotion associated with experiencing hyyge, an experience and feeling that are part of the essence of being Danish. If one has never experienced the feeling of hyyge, one could hardly be considered Danish.

3.2 Actions What communicative actions should be taken by members of a community? An example of a communicative action that is part of a distinctive pattern of Cultural Communication can be found in Katriel’s (1986) work on “speaking dugri.” Dugri is a meaningful communicative act within the Sabra community of Israel. She explains that to speak dugri is to directly tell others in a position of power over you that you disagree with them. It is delivered in a simple, blunt way, which Katriel refers to as “anti-style.” A person may speak dugri to a manager at work or to a teacher in an educational setting. Although not essential, the actual act may be prefaced with a comment such as, “I will tell you dugri.” In framing what is to come as dugri those listening know that the content will be a blunt expression of disagreement. If it was not, it would not have actually been speaking dugri. In addition, the person confronted with dugri speech is not expected to try to solve the issue brought up at that time or ask clarifying questions. It is not an invitation to debate or an effort to resolve a conflict. It is an effort to convey clearly and publically a disagreement. Understanding the speech of a person as dugri creates an expectation that the listener will simply listen and then move on. In doing so, a superior acknowledges the right and value of speaking up when one disagrees with what is done. Katriel notes that dugri is an action that simultaneously creates both tension and communal bonding. Dugri plays an important social role; therefore, it is much better to speak up and tell someone dugri, what the problem is, than to keep silent and just passively go along with what is happening. Katriel dedicated an entire book to this communicative act, so there is much more that could be said, but this quick review suggests how a distinctive communicative act can be expected and accepted as part of a community’s sense-making process. What actions are understood to have taken place based on the communicative behaviors engaged in? An example of a communicative action that is part of a distinctive pattern of Cultural Communication can be found in Bruscella’s (2015) work on holiday greeting rituals around Christmas time in parts of the United States.

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She discovered four distinct approaches to producing and interpreting these greetings that suggest different Cultural Communication systems or ways of making sense of the world. Two of these will be noted here. For one group, the act of saying, “Merry Christmas,” is a way to stand up against what they see as the secularization of Christmas. A phrase such as “Happy Holidays,” is seen as a challenge to the religious background of the Christmas season. As one person Bruscella quotes says, “It flat out, and pardon me, it pisses me off to see or hear ‘Happy Holidays’” (124). In this community the greeting of Merry Christmas is an extension of a personal belief and not using that greeting is seen as an attack on that belief. For another community, the term “Happy Holidays” has become associated with the idea that there are many different holiday celebrations going on during that time period and that social change is inevitable and good. As one of Bruscella’s respondents said, “It has become politically incorrect to say ‘Merry Christmas’ because we have to be all-inclusive” (125). For this group, the “Happy Holiday” greeting is simply an acceptance of changing times. Bruscella describes two other distinct approaches to these seasonal greetings, but the two noted above are enough to illustrate that even though the same words may be in play, the common sense actions taking place in these greetings are potentially very different.

3.3 Identities What identities are important within a community and how do they impact ongoing communication? Bloch’s (2003) exploration of the term freier in the Israeli community provides an example of how identity is tied to social expectations. She reports that the term freier has evolved into an idea focused on naiveté or a failure to look after one’s needs and self-interests and the self-interests of those who one may represent. Bloch notes how the term is often used in political settings, such as when Prime Minister Netanyahu stated that, “We are not freiers. We won’t agree to give without receiving anything” (125). To have the identity of a freier means that someone is an easy mark, someone easily taken advantage of. The term is commonly translated as referring to a “sucker.” The desire to avoid being labeled a freier is so pervasive in Israeli society that it has been adopted into advertising slogans and promotions encouraging people to not be a freier and pay for more than what they can get through a given establishment. Bloch’s discussion of freier further illustrated the complexity of communication that invokes freier by noting that this identity label is best seen on a continuum. She discusses a scale of meaning ranging from being an ultimate freier to just being a freier on one hand to not being a freier or even being anti-freier. The difference between an ultimate freier and just a freier is based in part on the amount of control one is perceived to have in a situation. If one has a lot of control and still chooses to act in altruistic ways, one is more of an ultimate freier. On the other hand, the other side of the scale depends upon the conscious use of the freier lens in interpreting the situation. The

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more one consciously uses this mindset, and manipulates things strategically to benefit one’s “self,” while taking advantage of others, the more one may be seen as anti-freier. Therefore, to use this identity in everyday talk creates a frame or expectation that it is important to look after oneself and avoid being a pushover. Understanding the nature of this identity and how it is used in everyday talk provides a basis for making sense of interactions and understanding social expectations in play when this identity is relevant. How is a social identity impacted by the actions and interactions we engage in? One example of how communication is closely associated with one’s standing in a community and how identity is directly related to our actions can be found in Hastings (2001) work with an Asian Indian community at a university in the United States. Hastings addresses how a particular social drama (public acknowledgement and management of social rule violations), negotiates the social identities associated with being Asian Indian in a setting where they could be said to be strangers. The social drama in question took place during an “India Night” organized by the Indian Student Association. The students enacted a parody entitled Massachusetts Masala in which a student violates a number of cultural codes to which the audience responds strongly. The two major violations were associated with two basic codes expected of Asian Indians living as “strangers” in another country. First, one should “be who you are.” In other words, Indian strangers or sojourners in the United States should not deny their own heritage by trying to become “American.” The second code was the importance and need of “interdependence” within the Indian stranger community, so that those who want to go it alone and act independently are acting in ways that convey an inappropriate identity for this community. The skit referenced some recent public violations of these codes for enacting identity and the audience responded with laughter and comments that clearly supported the importance of these norms. The enactment of inappropriate Cultural Communication reinforced a certain way of being and the importance of Indian identity in a “strange” setting. Identities and the expected actions associated with those identities are interwoven into all Cultural Communication.

3.4 Relationships How are community-relevant relationships established, maintained, and transformed? One example of these factors can be found when considering Fitch’s (1990) description of an informal ritual in Colombia she calls salsipuede or “leave if you can.” Salsipuede is a leave taking ritual that is normal and expected within Colombian communities when one has been invited to a public gathering, such as a wedding reception. In this ritual, a guest does not simply announce that they need to leave and then leave with the host simply thanking them for coming. Instead, the hosts have the responsibility to convince the guests to stay. Typically, this is done by discovering why the guest is leaving and then coming up with reasons that

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discount that need to leave. Fitch provides a detailed explanation of an incident where a guest had stayed past the announced time for the reception, but was still persuaded to stay. In the example she provided, the effort to convince the guest to stay was not unique to that guest, nor was it because of a particular desire to interact directly with that guest. Indeed, the hosts after convincing the guest to stay quickly became engaged with others and had only limited interaction with the guest the rest of the evening. These behaviors could be seen as rude and annoying in one cultural community, whereas in the Colombian community they serve as a marker for how valuable the relationship is and to validate people’s standing within the community. Fitch explains that salsipuede is a subtle way of highlighting the vinculos or interpersonal connections that play an important role in Colombian society. In finding ways to have the guests stay longer the host celebrates the larger connections or relationships that exist in the community, not simply the specific relationship or moment of interaction. For the host to fail to try to get the guest to stay or for the guest to refuse to stay would send a relationship message of disconnection and division. Thus this ritual not only helps to establish a relationship and then maintain it, but if it is not performed correctly, it has the potential of damaging the relationship. How does our relationship with the setting impact our communication? Carbaugh (2005: 100–119) recounts time spent with the Blackfeet in northern Montana and the importance of place in understanding Cultural Communication. One informant explained to him, “You can come out here and sit down. Just sit down and listen. In time, you might hear a raven and realize the raven is saying something to you. Or you might talk to a tree. But you have to listen. Be quiet. Be patient. The answer will come to you … We are realists” (104). Not all communities would acknowledge listening to trees and ravens as realistic. Carbaugh’s research with the Blackfeet suggested that a wide variety of places could be tied to this listening, but three qualities of a place were particularly important. These included a place marked by natural beauty, aural tranquility, and a history of sacred or important community activity. These places are particularly useful for those with problems or those in need of answers (and we all fit this description). Carbaugh notes that such a place “invites a cultural form of action, listening” (107). The place then was seen to invoke a form of listening where others could not hear for you, rather each person needed to hear and understand for her or himself what a tree or raven had to say about their situation. The answers may not come quickly, but as the person “dwells” in that place and recognizes that it is animated with “actors that are human and nonhuman” it will come (114). Understanding the settings or places called upon in these listening practices is essential if one is to understand the Cultural Communication taking place. As with all of my examples, there are many more nuances to be considered, but the example provided suggests the importance of setting in understanding a particular system of common sense. Clearly, as one reviews each of the four domains in the FAIR framework, it is obvious that none of these domains stands in isolation from the others. They are

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interconnected with each other and to fully understand one it is important to fully understand the others as well. Our relationships with each other and the place we dwell in at that time impact our identities and our identities create expectations for how to act and feel; just as how we act and feel interact to avow certain identities and transform our relationships with others. A greater understanding of these domains helps to attune a researcher and a reader to communicative particularities across cultures that make a difference in terms of producing and interpreting meaning messages. As noted before, the etic framework of interpretive domains allows for both the discovery of community specific common sense and serves as a means for translating those emic meanings so that others understand how what may otherwise seem confusing is reasonable.

4 Benefits of cultural communication work In many ways the work of Cultural Communication simultaneously simplifies the complex and complicates the simple. It provides the needed layers of understanding that allow those unfamiliar with a community to make sense of what is going on in that community, at the same time recognizing that the work is always opentextured and ongoing. One of the purposes of a review such as this is to help us understand the value of a particular line of work. That has, in part, been accomplished by illustrating how key etic domains are tied to emic features within a cultural community. Understanding these specific emic features provides knowledge that empowers an individual to communicate competently in specific scenes or situations within a community where the emic features discussed are salient. However, as useful as this is, it is also worth taking some time to reflect on other broader outcomes that can be beneficial in general for dwelling in the multi-cultural world in which we live. Below, three potentially paradoxical principles are outlined and illustrated through particular examples of Cultural Communication research. These benefits are framed as paradoxes because paradoxes may create strikingly simple insights at the same time that they resist simple characterizations of what they describe. In addition, Cultural Communication work inherently has a certain paradoxical nature to it. It seeks to produce emic understanding using etic filters that have relied on emic features for their creation. In addition, the emic understanding generated leads to outcomes and/or etic principles that I believe are promoted in the act of doing and studying this research. The three principles to be reviewed in this chapter (not intended as an exhaustive list) are: Small is big; Seeing the invisible; and Connection in the face of disconnection. The idea behind and the potential benefit of each of these principles will be discussed, followed by a review of Cultural Communication work that helps to illustrate the principle.

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4.1 Small is big One of the first things you learn in both researching and reading about Cultural Communication is that very small distinctions can make a very big difference in meaning. These small differences are often taken for granted. Fitch (2002) discusses this point by examining a subtle cultural difference in the way parents, one from Colombia and one from the United States, interacted with a child seeking to increase his allowance. The mother (from the United States) managed the conversation by proposing choices and setting expectations that sought to put responsibility on the child and to build self-reliance and self-discipline. Later in the conversation, the father (who is Colombian) proposed one specific, joint solution in which he would take care of the problem by holding the money in question. His proposal of help subtly teaches that it is acceptable and good to rely on others and that individual choice and self-control is not always feasible or even desirable. The example, which Fitch develops in detail, was not intended to provide for widespread generalizations, but it does provide an excellent example of how two cultural codes within the same setting can, by very small and implicit means, create different ways of seeing the world. The mother in the example eventually assents to the father’s plan, however, it is obvious from a close examination of what is said and not said that it is not because she agrees with the plan. It does not take a lot to change the meaning of a phrase or comment. Changes can occur through the use of one particular word compared to another, a moment of silence, or the emphasis placed on a question. These apparently small differences make a huge difference in terms of the relationships developed, the identities espoused, the act engaged in, the feeling conveyed, and the psychological setting invoked. One example of how small things can make big differences is found in Covarrubias’ (2002) detailed exploration of use of personal pronouns in everyday talk within a large construction company in Mexico. Covarrubias examines how the use of the second-person pronominal forms of tú and usted (often glossed over in English as “you”) are deeply intertwined with work and personal relationships. One of the examples she provides is an exchange between two former coworkers who had previously had a close relationship. José: Quiubo como estas? [Hey, how are you? (tú verb conjugation] Antonio: Hola, Contador, como esta usted [Hello, accountant, how are you? (using usted) (21) Covarrubias notes that José “gasps” at this response and that it triggered some conversation related to the nature of their relationship and differences in work place expectations since Antonio had moved to his new job. To someone unfamiliar with the distinction made through the use of second-person pronouns in this cultural community, the variations in how “you” was stated may seem a very small thing; however, within this community this small difference in word choice (both

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words grammatically correct and referring accurately to the other person) makes a very big difference in terms of the meanings conveyed related to their relationship, the tone of the exchange, the communicative actions that occurred afterwards, and the identity each person avowed and ascribed. Covarrubias (2002) elaborated on eleven different factors that impacted the meaning associated with the choice of tú or usted, including such things as relative age, organizational rank, gender, educational or economic status, and the level of acquaintance or familiarity with the other person. The familiar term tú was typically associated with the notion of confianza (a concept that involves a high level of trust or confidentiality). It is often associated with more informal joking around or casual conversations among friends. However, the strategic use of tú could also convey hostility. In contrast the more formal usted is generally associated with respeto (or respect and deference), but when used in appropriate ways it could convey a special closeness. For example, Covarrubias gives an example where one person used usted to tease a friend after the person had purchased a new car. Understanding how and when to use the different pronouns, so that it does not create the upset described above between José and Antonio, is part of understanding the Cultural Communication that is occurring. Switching between tú and usted has a wide variety of relational implications. Covarrubias describes in detail at least seven different relational realignments that occur when this is done. An example of one of these shifts in relationship, where a person who is typically in a lower status is momentarily in a higher status, that Covarrubias provides is a conversation she had with a tile mason. The mason used usted in talking with her as a sign of respect, except for a brief moment when he used tú and shifted into the expert and “taught” her some specific aspects of his craft. Immediately after these instructional comments he returned to using usted. Making these various choices is not always easy even within the cultural community, as one worker described to Covarrubias why she refused to make a change in her pronoun use after being invited by an older organizational superior to use tú with him, “No, because, ‘You (using usted) are the boss and I am the employee.’ … I can’t get used to it … I felt that if I used tú, I would be showing disrespect … This person is older” (48). Using tú implies a type of equality that is not always appropriate or desirable. Although the choice of how one refers to another person happens quickly and the terms themselves are uttered within a second, the impact is large. Covarrubias notes that one’s ability to use these pronouns correctly and make appropriate shifts both in producing and interpreting talk is closely tied to the perception of a person’s social competence. Each term is associated with a larger cultural code (the codes of confianza or respeto) that members of the cultural community are expected to be able to use and understand as part of the common sense involved in daily interactions. Researching and reading about Cultural Communication helps a person recognize that even small and subtle parts of a conversation are important

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to pay attention to because of the profound impact they can have on the meaning of an interaction. This recognition can help a person to become a better, more sensitive listener in intercultural interactions.

4.2 Seeing the invisible Culture, as it has been defined in this chapter, functions in a way that is often not noticeable within a particular cultural community. As Carbaugh (2005: xxii) notes, it becomes invisible. When we are interacting with someone using the same cultural lens, it just seems like common sense that any normal human would understand. Carroll (1988) notes in her excellent discussion of French and U.S. American cultures that many of the things she accepted as just the way it was did not become visible until she experienced the other perspective. It was common sense in France that the amount of talk was a reflection of a relationship and that one did not talk with strangers who happened to be in close proximity, whereas the better you knew those in close proximity, the more you would chatter, even about trivial topics. In contrast in coming to the United States she found that space said more about the relationship than talk and that it was not unusual for strangers to visit about a variety of trivial topics and actually the better someone knew the others, the easier it was to be comfortable with silence. Much of the research reviewed in this chapter comes from cultural communities that are not one’s own culture and clearly functions as a window that allows a glimpse of the world from a different perspective. Cultural Communication research also serves to uncover a mirror to one’s own cultural practices. It can do this through juxtaposing between what is familiar and unfamiliar, regardless of whether the research is primarily focused on a community in which a person is a member or through research on communities that are unfamiliar to the researcher/reader. Indeed, a close look at one’s own culture can be particularly enlightening. This will be illustrated by looking at a study of a segment of U.S. American culture that is very familiar to me. Hall and Valde (1995) discuss the U.S. American concept of “brown-nosing” as a meaningful category in everyday communication in organizational life. They explore how brown-nosing functions and impacts the way communication is both produced and interpreted in many organization settings in the United States. Specifically, they look at its relationship with communication, personhood, and sociality. Although there are many ways one can communicate to be perceived as brownnosing, there are two consistent elements associated with brown-nosing. First, it is perceived as excessive in some negative way. Whatever communicative actions were involved, such as, compliments, promises, offers to help, and others were seen as excessive for what was needed. Second, these communicative acts were viewed as counterfeit work. Those engaging in brown-nosing were understood to be pretending to work, but not really doing anything of value.

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Brown-nosing was also associated with certain perceptions of personhood or identity. Hall and Valde (1995) identify two attributions associated with those performing this communicative act, “brown-nosers.” One is that the person is artificial or “two-faced.” The actions taken by such people are done purely to impress someone in power. Emotions expressed are not seen as genuine, rather they are a façade designed to gain favor. A second attribution is that those brown-nosing are seen as only having selfish motives. The worst or most reprehensible brown-nosing was tied to people who were just concerned with self-aggrandizement and advancing in the organization so they intentionally worked to deceive and “butter-up” those who had something they wanted. There were also those who were portrayed as pitiful brown-nosers, who were trapped in an organizational setting where because of a supervisor’s ego or organizational practices they had to act in artificial ways simply to survive. The sociality or nature of human relationships invoked by these practices, were seen as competitive in nature. To call someone a brown-noser brings to mind the idea that the person is trying to get ahead of all those who hear the label by acting in artificial and selfish ways without even doing real work. This kind of attribution does not create a cooperative working environment. Hall and Valde note that legitimate organizational members are perceived to be those who are genuine in expressing what they feel inside. This research can be juxtaposed to research on the Japanese concepts of tatemae and honne (Yokuchi & Hall 2001). Tatemae is a concern for what is visible on the outside or what shows on the surface, compared to honne which is primarily focused on the internal feelings of a person. Yokuchi and Hall point out that many social situations require a focus on tatemae. Expressions of internal feelings can disturb a feeling of unity and cooperation that allows work to be effectively accomplished. Thus the implication created by the concept of brown-nosing, that one should always be genuine to one’s personal internal feelings, is revealed to be a cultural lens. It is equally possible for attention to surface displays of relational respect to be valorized and helpful within an organizational setting. The value of expressing one’s internal feelings, then, is not simply a matter of common sense, but more a matter of culturally competent communication. This research provides a contextualization that helps a reader or researcher see assumptions they may not have seen before by exposing the cultural assumptions and practices we so often take for granted.

4.3 Connection in the face of disconnection Work in Cultural Communication allows researchers and readers to connect with communities from which they would otherwise be disconnected. One of the abilities prized in intercultural relations is being able to feel empathy (Hall, 2005: 350). Empathy is generally recognized as feeling with someone else, as opposed to feel-

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ing sympathy for someone else. To experience empathy requires a person to connect something from their life to the life of the other, so that the person can feel emotions and insights in ways that resonate with what the other person is experiencing. It is easier to feel this empathy with those for whom we are familiar or to whom we are connected. Their experiences are familiar and so feeling with them is a relatively smaller step. However, those who are strangers, both individually and culturally, are more difficult to connect with in this way. In essence, the cultural disconnect creates a gap in experience that is harder to overcome. The learning encouraged by studying Cultural Communication provides a connection between those who may otherwise be disconnected. For example, it is very easy to feel disconnected when a community’s nonverbal displays are different than those displayed in one’s own community. Wilkins (2005) discusses the Finnish practice of asiallinen, which is appropriate in a variety of public settings. Asiallinen involves presenting a very matter-of-the-fact or serious demeanor nonverbally. Wilkins notes that asiallinen involves an expectation that a person should be appropriately constrained and controlled in the way one deals with others and situations. He provides contrasting examples from the political sphere where one person practiced asiallinen and another did not. The success of a former Finnish prime minister was attributed by one interviewee to the fact that he showed “no emotions or feelings” and that “Politicians need to be this way.” On the other hand, a different politician was seen by commentators to have lost his bid for a presidential race in part because he did not practice asiallinen and instead allowed his feelings to easily show on his face. Asiallinen is a sign of deep respect for others and a demonstration of one’s own communication competence in public. This nonverbal practice is quite different than the friendly, smiling faces that are often encouraged in public settings in parts of the United States and other communities. Such a difference in communicating nonverbally could lead to a greater feeling of disconnection, but an understanding of this practice and its role frees us from potentially negative misunderstandings and provides a way to relate to the other community, connecting at a different level (the value of respecting others) even though the initial outward displays are very different. One way that studying Cultural Communication bridges differences, is that it helps to provide a context of sense for what otherwise would be unexpected or confusing. For example, Keith Basso (1990) recoded a series of comments among the Western Apache that could potentially be quite confusing to an outsider. Comments such as, “The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right,” “Stories go to work on you like arrows. Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself,” and “Our children are losing the land. It doesn’t go to work on them anymore. They don’t know the stories about what happened at these places. That’s why some get into trouble.” These comments make sense when one understands the communicative practices within the Western Apache community, but could easily be confusing for someone outside of the community.

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Basso (1990) goes into great detail in providing this context by explaining how the lands upon which the Western Apache live are named after stories or events that have a message in them about how one should live. For example, one place name he mentions is “horse fell down into water.” This would be an unusual place name in many communities. However, for the Western Apache the connection between specific locations and specific stories is crucial and serves as an ongoing reminder of how to live appropriately. The very fact that the places one sees on a daily basis have names that evoke stories serves to keep a person connected to the land and the history of their community. In the example given above, the story is told about a young Apache woman who, when returning home, allowed her horse to walk too close to a rocky ledge above the creek and the horse lost its balance and fell, resulting in the death of the young woman. The life lesson about not getting too close to an “edge” goes well beyond that specific location or even a physical ledge. These stories bring to mind both positive and negative ways that we can conduct our lives and the consequences for these choices. Basso reflects on the comments of an Apache man who had moved to the city and how he started to forget the names of places and the stories embedded in them, so that he forgot how to live right. The names of the places he moved to did not have stories embedded in them that served as a reminder for how to live and they were not a constant part of his life. It is certainly possible to find individuals that have not had many dealings with Native Americans nor had any experience with place names explicitly referencing past experiences. In many ways such a person is disconnected from the Western Apache community and statements about the land stalking people to make them live right could seem very strange indeed. However, as a person reads Basso’s (1990) work, it becomes clear how the stories tied to place names serve as constant reminders about practices that are wise and unwise. When I first read this work, I could relate to stories from my own family that had messages about what it meant to live a good life. Some of these stories were not brought to mind so much by a place, but by a certain holiday or other occasion. In this way I felt connected with the Western Apache and felt a greater sense of empathy for how the land functioned to help people act appropriately and played an essential role in the community. I could also avoid the disconnecting negative attributions that can easily come to mind when faced with difference. We may not see or feel that the land is stalking us, but that does not mean that we have to stay disconnected from a community that does. Shared human experiences, such as the desire to pass life lessons on to future generations and the importance of stories in our lives, allow us to connect with others in ways that make sense of the otherwise nonsensical. Shared meaning is an important connection and Cultural Communication expands the number of communities with which we can share meaning.

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5 Conclusion Cultural Communication research as described in this chapter is only one of many valuable approaches to studying the impact of culture in our daily lives. It is not a panacea, nor does it claim to be. Indeed, it would be narrow and misleading to suggest that any one approach to studying culture is somehow the ultimate approach. However, for the last 50 plus years, since Dell Hymes laid out the initial ideas that have evolved into this approach, Cultural Communication has played a valuable role in helping us appreciate and understand how communities of people make sense in a variety of ways. It has done that by facilitating work that incorporates a dynamic tension between emic and etic findings. This work has created a legacy of layered understandings that align with the feelings, actions, identities and relationships members of different communities experience as they give meaning to their lives. The outcome of this body of work goes beyond specific emic details of communal communication, allowing us to connect with those we would otherwise be disconnected from, to see the invisible in our daily lives, to develop an ability to make nonjudgmental judgments and to recognize that small aspects of interactions have huge consequences in terms of social relations.

Further readings Scollo, Michelle. 2011. Cultural approaches to discourse analysis: A theoretical and methodological conversation with special focus on Donal Carbaugh’s cultural discourse theory. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 6(1). 1–32. Philipsen, Gerry. 2010. Researching culture in contexts of social interaction: An ethnographic approach, a network of scholars, illustrative moves. In Donal Carbaugh & Patrice M. Buzzanell (eds.), Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research, 87–105. New York: Routledge.

6 References Basso, Keith. 1990. 'Stalking with stories': Names, places, and moral narratives among the Western Apache. In Keith Basso (ed.), Western Apache language and culture, 99–137. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Bloch, Linda-Renée. 2003. Who’s afraid of being a freier? The analysis of communication through a key cultural frame. Communication Theory 13(2). 125–159. Bruscella, Jacqueline. 2015. Holiday greeting rituals as expressions of ambivalence and indifference toward social change. Western Journal of Communication 79(1). 116–132. Carbaugh, Donal. 1989. Fifty terms for talk: A cross-cultural study. In Stella Ting-Toomey & Felipe Korzenny (eds.), Language, communication, and culture, 93–120. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Carbaugh, Donal. 2005. Cultures in conversation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Carbaugh, Donal. 2013. A communication theory of culture. In Anastacia Kurylo (ed.), Inter/ cultural communication: Representation and construction of culture, 69–88. Los Angeles: Sage. Carbaugh, Donal, Michael Berry & Marjatta Nurmikari-Berry. 2006. Coding personhood through cultural terms and practices: Silence and quietude as a Finnish "natural way of being." Journal of Language and Social Psychology 25(3). 203–220. Carroll, Raymonde. 1988. Cultural misunderstandings: The French-American experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collier, Mary Jane. 2001. Constituting cultural difference through discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Covarrubias, Patricia. 2002. Culture, communication, and cooperation: Interpersonal relations and pronominal address in a Mexican organization. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, Inc. Fitch, Kristine. 1990. A ritual for attempting leave-taking in Colombia. Research on Language and Social Interaction 24(1–4). 209–224. Fitch, Kristine. 2002. Taken-for-granteds in (an) intercultural communication. In Phillip Glenn & Jenny Mandelbaum (eds.), Studies in language and social interaction, 91–102. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gudykunst, William & Tsukasa Nishida. 2001. Anxiety, uncertainty, and perceived effectiveness of communication across relationships and cultures. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 25(1). 55–72. Hall, Bradford ‘J’. 2005. Among cultures: The challenge of communication. Belmont CA: Cengage Learning. Hall, Bradford ‘J’ & Kathleen Valde. 1995. Brown-nosing as a cultural category in American organizational life. Research on Language and Social Interaction 28(4). 391–419. Halualani, Rona. 1998. Seeing through the screen: A struggle of ‘culture.’ In Judith Martin, Thomas Nakayama & Lisa Flores (eds.), Readings in cultural contexts, 264–275. Mountain View CA: Mayfield. Hammer, Mitchell. 2005. The intercultural conflict style inventory: A conceptual framework and measure of intercultural conflict resolution approaches. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 29(6). 675–695. Hastings, Sally O. 2001. Social drama as a site for the communal construction and management of Asian Indian “stranger” identity. Research on language and Social Interaction 34(3). 309– 335. Hymes, Dell. 1972. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In John J. Gumperz & Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication, 35–71. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Kataw, Yasmine. 2014. Internalizing the cultural concept of “khajal” through concept based instruction with Arabic learners. Paper presented at the John Lackstrom Linguistics Symposium, Utah State University, 18 September. Katriel, Tamar. 1986. Talking straight: 'Dugri' speech in Israeli Sabra culture. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Koven, Michèle. 2002. An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience. Journal of Pragmatics 34(2). 167–217. LaFever, Marcella. 2008. Communication for public decision-making in a negative historical context: Building intercultural relationships in the British Columbia treaty process. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 1(2). 158- 180. Nelson, Chad. 2015. Resisting whiteness: Mexican American studies and rhetorical struggles for visibility. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8(1). 63–80. Oetzel, John, Stella Ting-Toomy, Tomoko Masumoto, Yumiko Yokochi, Xiaohui Pan, Jiro Takai and Richard Wilcox. 2001. Face and facework in conflict: A cross-cultural comparison of China, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Communication Monographs 68(3). 235–258.

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Part II. Cross cultural comparison

Stella Ting-Toomey and Tenzin Dorjee

7 Multifaceted identity approaches and cross-cultural communication styles: Selective overview and future directions Abstract: Multiple identity facets are intimately related to the study of cross-cultural communication styles because the preferred use of verbal and nonverbal communication styles are tied distinctively to situated sociocultural membership and personal identity issues. While past cross-cultural communication style research studies have focused primarily on the culture-level analysis of identity value contents and communication style issues, other salient intergroup membership identity issues have been largely minimized or bypassed in them. This chapter advocates for an integrative intercultural and intergroup communication approach to the study of verbal and nonverbal communication style patterns. Selective research topics in linking various identity-based facets to investigating general communication style variations, cross-cultural nonverbal emotional expression and decoding, cross-cultural self-disclosure, and cross-cultural facework, conflict styles, and forgiveness are reviewed. Specific topical critique and a general summary critique are offered and directions for future research are proffered in the domain of sociocultural identity complexity and communication style orientations. Keywords: facework, conflict styles, intergroup communication, low/high context communication, nonverbal emotional expression, personal identity, self-construal, self-disclosure, situational framing, sociocultural identity

1 Introduction Intercultural and intergroup communication scholars have been intrigued by the interdependent nature of identity and communication for the last 30 years. The question of – “Who am I and who are you?” – embodies self-other’s values, attitudes, motivations, affective reactions, and behavioral tendency implications. The term identity in this chapter is defined as a multifaceted set of group-level membership identity features and individual-level dispositions. According to the social identity complexity theory (Brewer 1991, 2010; Tajfel 1978, 1981; Tajfel & Turner 1979) and the identity negotiation theory (Ting-Toomey 2005a, 2014), an individual can have both identity types: sociocultural identity and personal identity. On the individual level of analysis, sociocultural identities can include cultural, ethnic, spiritual/religious, social class, gender, age, sexual orientation, professional, family and relational role conceptions, to name a few examples. Personal identiDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-007

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ties can include any unique attributes that we associate with our individuated self in comparison to those of others. Both identity images rely heavily on mutual meaning negotiation and mutual meaning coordination levels, and are highly relational and situational-bound. Individuals acquire their composite identity through socio-cultural conditioning process, individual lived experiences, and relational and situational frames. Multiple identity facets are closely tied to the study of cross-cultural communication styles because the preferential use of language/verbal and nonverbal communication styles reflect, enact, and project an impression of an individual’s sense of in situ sociocultural and personal identities on both the conscious and unconscious levels. We size each other up and form quick impressions based on our scanning of the verbal and nonverbal cues that the other person displays in a situational context. Communication style is conceptualized as the patterned verbal and nonverbal responses with cultural and dispositional tendencies and also adaptive to different situational contingencies. It can be encoded and decoded via concepts such as everyday conversations, nonverbal relatedness, self-disclosure processes, and/or facework and conflict styles. For the purpose of this chapter, our research review is based on three criteria: 1. Illustrative research studies with a strong crosscultural comparative angle that happened to fall primarily under the broad functional paradigm lens (but there are some exceptions; for the interpretive/critical paradigm studies, see Chapter 2 and 3; see also Oetzel & Ting-Toomey 2011); 2. Studies that have linked some particular value identity dimensions or personality dispositions with cross-cultural communication style topical issues; and 3. Selective communication-centered exemplars (due to space limitation) that represent cross-cultural variations on a defined set of four communication topics: general cross-cultural communication style issues, general cross-cultural nonverbal emotional expression and decoding, cross-cultural self-disclosure, and cross-cultural facework/conflict styles and forgiveness. It should be noted here that the vast body of excellent research work in inter-cultural/international adjustment, immigrants’ adaptation, intergroup biases and prejudice, and inter-cultural/inter-group communication competence will not be covered in this chapter (see also Dorjee, Baig & Ting-Toomey 2013; Hotta & Ting-Toomey 2013; Ting-Toomey & Dorjee 2014, 2015). This chapter is organized in three sections: First, the different approaches that have been used to theorize about “identity” or “self” will be identified. Second, selective research studies that have connected macro-identity values or micro-identity facets and communication style variations will be reviewed. Third, a critical status report of the relationship between identity facets and cross-cultural communication style issues will be presented and directions for future research will be proposed.

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2 Culture-level analysis and individual-level identity analysis issues: Multiple approaches Due to extensive cross-cultural research studies using the individualism-collectivism as a guiding conceptual framework, a discussion of identity has to start with the mega-dimension of individualism-collectivism as a base (Triandis 1995, 2002). However, while cultural dimension has spawn many cross-cultural communication studies in the field, it has also sparked many vociferous, anti-dimensional voices (e.g., Lim & Ahn 2015; Oyerman, Coon & Kemmelmeier 2002; Tamis-LeMonda et al. 2008; Thomas & Peterson 2014). Nevertheless, as long as novice and seasoned researchers do not subscribe rigidly to a be-all end-all mentality in using the individualism-collectivism dimension, this particular value dimension can serve as a useful starting point to conceptualize some of the possible cross-cultural communication style variations and similarities. This section has three parts: Culture-level group membership identity approach, individual-level identity analysis approach, and situational and relational framing approach.

2.1 Culture-level group membership identity approach The cultural socialization of “I” versus “we” identity patterns can include the study of the value patterns of individualism-collectivism and small-large power distance (Hofstede 2001). Indeed, the GLOBE research project (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman & Gupta 2004) provided additional evidence that the foundational constructs of individualism-collectivism and small/large power distance permeate 62 countries (a sample of 17,370 middle managers from three industries) at the societal, organizational, and individual levels of analysis. Basically, individualism refers to the broad value tendencies of a culture in emphasizing the importance of the “I” identity over the “we” identity, individual rights over group interests, and individuated-focused emotions over social-focused emotions. In comparison, collectivism refers to the broad value tendencies of a culture in emphasizing the importance of the “we” identity over the “I” identity, ingroup interests over individual wants, and other-face concerns over self-face concerns. Both Hofstede’s (2001) and House et al.’s (2004) international research studies have been critiqued as using overgeneralized value dimensions to superimpose on an entire national group and treating national culture as a homogeneous entity (Thomas & Peterson 2014; Ting-Toomey 2010). For example, cross-cultural family researchers Tamis-LeMonda et al. (2008) challenged the bifurcation of individualism and collectivism into two contrastive camps. They advanced the position of a dynamic coexistence of individualism and collectivism on both the culture-level and individual-level of analysis. By viewing individualism and collectivism as existing on a dynamic continuum with conflicting elements, complementary features,

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and multiple layers, cultural and ethnic identity differentiations can be probed along with other salient group membership identity facets in a more nuanced and discerning manner (Ting-Toomey 2010; Ting-Toomey et al. 2000). Another important value dimension is critical in understanding everyday workplace communication: the dimension of power distance (Carl, Gupta & Javidan 2004). Power distance, from the workplace values' analysis standpoint, refers to the way in which a corporate culture approaches and deals with status differences and social hierarchies. People in small power distance corporate cultures tend to value equal power distributions, symmetrical relations, a mixture of positive and negative messages in feedback sessions, and equitable reward and cost distributions based on individual merits. People in large power distance corporate cultures tend to accept unequal power distribution, asymmetrical relations, authoritative feedback from the experts or high-status individuals, and rewards and sanctions based on rank, role, status, age, and perhaps even gender identity. In combining both individualism-collectivism and small/large power distance value patterns, four predominant corporate value dimension approaches along the two grids of individualism-collectivism continuum and small-large power distance continuum have been identified: impartial, status-achievement, communal, and benevolent (Ting-Toomey & Oetzel 2001, 2013). The impartial approach reflects a combination of an individualistic and small power distance value orientation; the status-achievement approach consists of a combination of an individualistic and large power distance value orientation; the communal approach consists of a combination of collectivistic and small power distance value orientation, and the benevolent approach reflects a combination of a collectivistic and large power distance value orientation. Thus, a culture-level analysis, while deepening the conceptualization of identity patterns along the four quadrants, produces four identity types: the horizontal individualistic self-type represents the impartial approach, the vertical individualistic self-type represents the status achievement approach; while the horizontal collectivistic self-type denotes the communal approach, and the vertical collectivistic self-type epitomizes the benevolent approach in a workplace system (Triandis 1995). Despite the theorizing and research work of Triandis’ 20 years ago in discussing the intersectional nature of individualism-collectivism and small/large power distance, unfortunately, most of the existing cross-cultural comparative research focuses exclusively on the use of individualism-collectivism as the mega-dimension to explain a multitude of communication style topics. Additionally, while past research studies have focused primarily on the culturelevel analysis of identity value contents, other salient intergroup membership identity issues have been largely minimized or bypassed in cross-cultural communication style studies. In reality, in everyday workplace encounters or intergroup-interpersonal encounters, there are other multifaceted identities at work (e.g., age, intergenerational identity, or spiritual/religious identity) that set the intercultural-

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intergroup identity negotiation process in motion. Arguably, according to Giles (2012), more than 70 % of interpersonal interactions in everyday life are highly intergroup in nature, determined by social group membership dynamics and the surrounding situations. For over 35 years, intergroup communication scholars have published on the influence of social identities on communicative behaviors in different settings, including interpersonal and social context. Recently, Howard Giles’ (2012) Handbook on Intergroup Communication has provided insights into the dynamics of intergroup communication taking into account diverse intergroup communication processes, settings, and theoretical-practical implications. The overall theme highlights that social identity matters and social identity markers (e.g., language, accents, gender, disability, age, religion, health, and media representation) are pervasive and influential in everyday encounters. Sociocultural membership identities are communicatively constructed, decoded, reacted to, and negotiated in particular communication settings. Surprisingly, both intercultural and intergroup communication scholars, though having much in common (i.e., sociocultural group-based identity and communication style differences), tend to emphasize different facets of group membership and their influence on communication rather than draw insights from each other’s perspectives and engage in an integrative theorizing effort. At a minimum, for example, more 2 by 2 (or even 3 X 3) interaction effect studies should integrate macro-level value dimensions such as small/large power distance value dimension and connecting that with age identity or professional role identity expectancy on communication style patterns. The findings can yield a more complex picture of the relationship between culture-level influence with intergroup identity issues and how the combined effect influence communication style variations. Unfortunately, past and current studies revealed that while intercultural communication scholars mainly attend to cultural group membership factors such as individualism and collectivism, intergroup communication scholars mainly attend to social interactions influenced by social group membership factors such as social-historical context, multiple social identities, group vitality and group relations (Dorjee, Giles & Barker 2011; Giles 2012; Giles, Reid & Harwood 2010; Giles & Watson 2008; Harwood & Giles 2005). Giles and Watson (2008) noted that intercultural communication scholars rarely address intergroup dynamics in interactions and intergroup communication scholars rarely address “cultural parameters involved” (p. 8) with bona fide groups in their analyses. However, some intergroup communication researchers have started to explore cross-cultural contexts with a focus on sociolinguistic identity (Bourhis, Sioufi & Sachdev 2012; Stubbe 2012), and also age-identity (Hummert 2012; McCann, Ota, Giles & Caraker 2003). It is contended that fruitful integrative intercultural and intergroup frameworks can explore intersections between cultural and intergroup dimensions to further the research domains of both intercultural

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and intergroup communication research (e.g., Dorjee, Giles & Barker 2011, Fortman & Giles 2006; Giles, Bourhis & Taylor 1977; McCann et al. 2003; Shearman & Dumlao 2008; Ting-Toomey & Dorjee 2015). Closely aligned with the macro-level individualism-collectivism value dimension studies is the focus on individualbased identity analysis: independent and interdependent self-construal approach.

2.2 Individual-level identity analysis approach The individual socialization patterns include the study of the personality tendencies of independent self and interdependent self. Self-construal is one of the major individual factors focusing on individual variation within and between cultures. Self-construal is one’s self-image and is composed of an independent construal and an interdependent construal of self (Markus & Kitayama 1991, 1998). The independent construal of self involves the view that an individual is a unique entity with an individuated repertoire of feelings, cognitions, and motivations. In comparison, the interdependent construal of self involves an emphasis on the importance of relational or ingroup connectedness. Self-construal is the individual-level equivalent of the cultural variability dimension of individualism-collectivism. Both dimensions of self exist within each individual, regardless of cultural membership identity. The manner in which individuals conceive of their selfimages – independent versus interdependent selves or both – should have a profound influence on the expectancies of what constitute appropriate or inappropriate communication style responses in a wide variety of situations and across a diverse range of cultures. Self-construal has been examined in various contexts. For example, Hara and Kim (2004) found that independent self-construal is negatively associated with indirect verbal messages and that interdependent selfconstrual is positively associated with indirect verbal style. This means that individuals with higher degree of independent self-construals tend to use less indirect verbal responses, and those with interdependent self-construals tend to use more indirect communication responses. Kapoor, Hughes, Baldwin, and Blue (2003) discovered that most Asian Indians exhibit interdependent self-construals preferring silence and indirect communication more than U.S. Americans (see also, Croucher 2013a, 2013b). These findings are consistent with Gudykunst et al.’s (1996) earlier finding that people with independent self-construals prefer to use direct messages, while people with interdependent self-construals prefer to use indirect messages due to their social harmony sensitivity. Additionally, some empirical evidence revealed the utility of a tripartite model of self-construal (Kashima, Foddy & Platow 2002) in explaining people’s behaviors in intimate relations. While collective interdependence focuses on the “general connection that one has with one’s group, entailing networks of obligation and face saving and maintenance” (Bresnahan, Chiu & Levine 2004: 185), relational interdependence emphasizes a stronger “personal connection with significant

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others or romantic partners and the deeper involvement and commitment that such relationship entails” (Bresnahan, Chiu & Levine 2004: 187). When dealing with intimate relationship problems, the latter individuals would be expectedly more committed and exclusively connected to the relationship than the former. Thus, cross-cultural researchers have made moderate progress in differentiating general in-group-reliance collectivism and particular relational dependence and connection; two types of “interdependent” personalities emerge: the in-groupreliance personality type and the relational-dependence personality type. Cross, Bacon, and Morris (2000; see also, Cross, Morris & Gore 2002) conducted a validation study for their Relational-Interdependent Construal of Self Scale (RICS) and found that people who scored high on relational-interdependent self-construal (hereafter labeled as “relational self-construal” in this chapter) tended to take into account the needs and wishes of intimate others when making important decisions. Past research studies revealed that the Asian samples primarily and culturally defined themselves in terms of close intimate relationships when making important decisions. All these studies also echo the call for attention concerning the importance of “relationalism” from the indigenous Asian cultural perspective (Wang & Liu 2010; Yeh 2010).

2.3 Situational and relational framing approach The “self” is defined in the web of relational and situational frames – especially from the collectivistic value outlook. The culture-sensitive situational model as developed by Ting-Toomey and Oetzel (2013) emphasizes the importance of understanding the expectancy features of each communication domain such as school/ university, organizational/business, community or neighborhood, park versus library setting, church/temple setting, health setting, and family or intimate partnership setting. For example, three of the possible factors that moderate the activation of an independent versus an interdependent/relational self in an everyday communication episode include: a situational appraisal process, a relationship appraisal process, and a situated interactional appraisal analysis. A situational appraisal process includes an assessment of the degree of formality of the communication setting, the perceived mood/climate of the situation, the arrangement of seating, and spatial/architectural layout design issues. It also emphasizes the cultural setting in which the intercultural/intergroup encounter takes place. A relationship appraisal process includes an assessment of the role expectancies and appropriate interactions between the participants, ingroup-outgroup meaning features, salient cultural/ethnic to spiritual identity activation issues, age/sex and other personal identity emphases, and degrees of familiarity, intimacy, verticality, and trust issues (Ting-Toomey & Takai 2006). A situated interactional appraisal analysis includes anticipated rewards/costs and anticipated future interaction options, language/verbal and nonverbal code usage, the interactive commu-

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nication channel (social media, facebook, etc.), and the interpretation of negotiated goals from all involved parties in the setting (Kim, Guan & Park 2012). In sum, the intersections and alignment (or misalignment) of identity and situational settings, the perceived need for social activity coordination, the perceived need for relational role coordination, and the perceived meaning expectancy coordination of the encounter can either facilitate productive intergroup communication or create further hurdles and roadblocks. Complex situational and relational parameters provide the backdrop to interpret the communication styles that are being used in a variety of contexts. In order to be competent intercultural-intergroup communicators, individuals need to be sensitive to the identities that are being enacted and the associated communication styles that are being exchanged in a particular socio-cultural milieu and the larger social ecological stage (Dorjee, Baig & Ting-Toomey 2013; Ting-Toomey & Dorjee 2015; Ting-Toomey & Oetzel 2013).

3 Connecting identity facets with cross-cultural communication styles The review of literature demonstrates that the vast majority of cross-cultural comparative research studies have been conducted from the social scientific perspective. In order to develop a general understanding of the research studies on crosscultural communication style, we have organized this section via four major subsections with some research exemplars to illustrate the various topics: general cross-cultural communication style issues, cross-cultural nonverbal emotional expression/decoding styles, and cross-cultural facework, conflict styles, and forgiveness. After each topical discussion, we provide a summary critique of the research status of each content topic.

3.1 General cross-cultural communication style issues Communicating across cultures consists of both verbal and nonverbal exchanges among individuals from different identity backgrounds. Hall (1976) recognized the importance of both verbal and nonverbal communication styles across cultures in terms of low-context and high-context communication systems. Low-context communication can be defined as explicitly conveying the intended meaning via to-thepoint direct verbal communication style. In general, low-context communication refers to the communication patterns of direct verbal mode – straight talk, nonverbal immediacy, and sender-oriented values (i.e., the sender assumes the responsibility to communicate clearly). In comparison, high-context communication can be defined as implicitly conveying the intended meaning or message through the multilayered contexts (e.g., sociocultural roles or professional status) and the nonver-

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bal channels (e.g., pauses, silence, tone of voice). Overall, high-context communication can be defined as the communication patterns of indirect verbal mode – selfeffacing talk, nonverbal subtleties, and interpreter-sensitive values (i.e., the receiver or interpreter of the message assumes the responsibility to infer the hidden or contextual meanings of the message) (Ting-Toomey 1999). In high-context communication, the decoder of the message is expected to “read between the lines,” to accurately infer the implicit intent of the verbal message, and to observe the nonverbal nuances and situational cues that accompany the verbal message. Notably, some recent studies have focused on culturally linked linguistic practices (Kashima, Kashima & Kidd 2014) and analytic and holistic cognitive processing styles (Nisbett, Peng, Choi & Norenzayan 2001) that are related to Hall’s (1976) low-context and high-context communication. Linguistic practices, the ways in which people use their language, transmit people’s cultural mindset in two different ways: decontextualizing and contextualizing. In decontextualizing frame, listeners’ attention is directed to “the focal object at the expense of the context in which it is embedded.” In contextualizing frame, listeners’ attention is directed to “the context in which the object is the figure against the contextual ground” (Kashima, Kashima & Kidd 2014: 47) by certain linguistic practices. These practices are related to geographical locations and overlap with that of analytical and holistic cognitive processing styles (Nisbett 2003; Nisbett et al. 2001). Analytical processing is dissecting, decontextualizing, and field-independent style whereas holistic processing is embedded in contextualism and field-dependent style. Kashima et al. (2014) and Nisbett et al. (2001) showed that geographically decontextualizing linguistic practices and analytical cognitive processing style are often found in Western European countries with low-context communication tendencies. Comparatively, contextualizing linguistic practices and holistic cognitive processing style are often uncovered in East Asian cultural region with high-context communication tendencies. However, more communication-centered studies are needed to investigate the relationships among contexts of communication, linguistic practices, verbal/nonverbal interaction styles, and cognitive processing patterns across countries, cultures, contexts, and multiple identity membership issues. Kashima, Kashima, and Kidd (2014) also commented that linguistic practices are related to but different from low-and high-context communication. More specifically, the surface form of linguistic practice/s may emphasize or de-emphasize the subject (i.e., the speaker) in the utterances and/or the situational context of a focal object. For example, in languages such as English, German, and French, the subject/or the speaker is often explicitly stated or emphasized and the situational setting is deemphasized. In comparison, in many Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan, while the subject as a speaker is often de-emphasized, the situational context is explicitly contextualized in utterances such as “Staged a graceful performance in the job interview” and “Talked eloquently in the board meeting.” In this case the subject-pronoun “he” or “she” is de-contextualized but

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the situational context is emphasized via the two exemplar utterances. While the two utterances are considered as grammatically correct from multiple Asian language standpoints, they may appear to lack a clear pronoun-subject indicator from the English or German language practice. Related to different linguistic practices, interpreting whether an utterance reflects a low-context straight talk mode (i.e., “say what you mean, and mean what you say”, stop right there, also known as the Grice’s conversational clarity “maxim of manner,” 1975) or an understated, highcontext verbal mode with implied contextual meanings, will need deep-level intercultural value-based knowledge, situational-based pragmatic linguistic knowledge, and interpersonal-based competence knowledge. More specifically, in the intercultural communication research field, research studies have revealed a positive relationship among culture, self-construals, and low- and high-context communication styles. Gudykunst et al. (1996) found that while independent self-construal positively mediated the relationship between individualism and low-context communication style, interdependent self-construal positively mediated the relationship between collectivism and high-context communication style. Other studies (Kittler, Rygl & Mackinnon 2011; Oetzel et al. 2001) have mostly compared communication differences between members of low- and high- contexts at the macro level of nations. Obviously, from a functional paradigm angle, the dichotomous idea of dividing clusters of cultures into low-context (e.g., the Western European and Nordic countries) and high-context (e.g., East Asian countries) cultural systems can lead to the ease of explanation and predictability on the relationship between the set of independent and dependent variables. Unfortunately, the drawbacks of using binary conceptualization such as individualism versus collectivism or low-context versus high-context system render the study of culture as a static entity and the cultural members under the broad binary labels as immobile units incapable of reflexivity or adaptive dynamic changes. To illustrate, in a social media study, Richardson and Smith (2007) concluded that to view Japan as a high-context culture and the U.S. as a low-context culture in many previous studies may be an overrated research phenomenon. Consistent with Hall’s (1976) original conceptualization of high- and low-context culture, they developed and implemented a unidimensional scale in their study. They found small size effect of high-context communication on Japanese students’ choice of FtF (face-toface) over email as compared to the low-context of U.S. American students’ choice of email over FtF interaction. In their view the notion of high- and low-context culture should be used relatively to describe one situational dimension of cultures rather than dichotomizing Japanese and U.S. cultures as being high- or low-context cultures on an overgeneralized level as done in previous studies (Kim, Pan & Park 1998). In terms of broad-based cross-cultural communication styles, intercultural scholars have also explored constraints on communicative behavior. Grounded in theories such as theory of politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987) and face negotiation

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theory (Ting-Toomey 2005b; Ting-Toomey & Kurogi 1998), effectiveness concern and face concern have been acknowledged to constrain intercultural and crosscultural communication. Others have labeled these concerns differently, for example, “concern for clarity” (related to effectiveness), and “concern for face support” (face concern) (Kim 1993, 1994; Kim, Hunter, Miyahara, Horvath, Bresnahan & Yoon 1996; Lapinski & Levine 2000; Miyahara, Kim, Shin & Yoon 1998). Kim (2005) proposed five conversational constraints across cultures dividing them into relational constraints: concern for avoiding hurting the hearer’s feelings, concern for minimizing imposition, and concern for avoiding negative evaluation by the hearer; plus instrumental constraints: concern for clarity and concern for effectiveness. Investigating the perceived importance of these constraints across cultures, Kim (2005) and Kim, Guan, and Park (2012) found that the perceived importance of clarity was higher in individualistic cultures whereas the perceived importance of the first two relational concerns (i.e., avoiding hurting the other’s feelings and avoiding imposing on the other person) higher in collectivistic cultures. However, the perceived importance of concern for avoiding negative evaluation by the others and also perceived communicative effectiveness did not differ significantly across the cultural groups. The concern for clarity and concern for face support have also shown up in cross-cultural differences in apology strategies. For example, in a politeness apology study, Park and Guan (2009) examined cross-cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal apology strategies. Study 1, an open-ended survey, found that a greater proportion of U.S. students preferred the use of explicit verbal apologies in mildly-offensive situations (i.e., “an individual steps on the foot of another passenger on the bus” vignette) while Chinese students preferred a combination of both explicit verbal apologies and nonverbal apologies. However, no significant differences were found in stranger versus friend apology condition for either group. Study 2, a close-ended survey, revealed that U.S. American participants preferred the use of explicit verbal apologies and with declared unintentionality (“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to step on your foot.”), while Chinese respondents preferred the use of explicit verbal apologies with declaration of concerns (“I’m sorry, are you okay?”), especially in outgroup stranger condition more so than ingroup friend condition. The researchers emphasized the importance of collectivistic value tendencies along the situational and relational role features in interpreting an apology situation. Other results in Study 2 indicated more similarities than differences on U.S. and Chinese apology pattern. Thus, in many crosscultural studies on broad-based cross-cultural communication or conversational styles, both differences and similarities have been uncovered between and within cultures (Lee & Park 2011). In terms of self-presentation, some studies have investigated self-enhancement and self-effacement verbal styles related to individualism/independent self-construal and collectivism/interdependent self-construal (Heine 2003; Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto & Norasakkunkit 1997; Suzuki, Davis & Greenfield 2008). There

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is some evidence that self-enhancement verbal style is prevalent and preferred in individualistic cultures and by individuals with independent self-construals. Comparatively, self-effacement verbal style is prevalent and preferred in collectivistic cultures and by individuals with interdependent self-construals. It should, however, be noted that the pattern of verbal self-effacement cannot be generalized to all collectivistic cultures (e.g., in diverse and multiple Arab or African cultural regions). According to Sedikides, Gaertner, and Vevea (2005), self-enhancement motivation is universal, but its communication manifestation differs in cultural context. Westerners use self-enhancement strategically based on individualistic cultural attributes and situational demands whereas Asian Easterners do the same based on collectivistic cultural attributes and situational normative tightness or looseness. While the above findings are informative, a more multi-layered systems study design (e.g., integrating both dispositional and situational-induced approaches) may capture an in-depth understanding of how these styles are used in Western/ U.S. and Eastern/Asian contexts (e.g., Kim 2011; Uskul, Oyserman & Schwarz 2010). For example, some studies (e.g., Cai, Sedikides, Gaertner, Wang, Carvello, Xu, O’Mara & Jackson 2010) have examined the relationship between modesty interaction and self-enhancement in the U.S. and Chinese cultures. The researchers found no relationship between modesty interaction norm and self-esteem enhancement in the U.S. sample. However, in the Chinese sample, while they uncovered a negative relationship between modesty interaction preference and explicit self-esteem enhancement, a positive relationship was found between modesty norm adherence and implicit self-esteem enhancement. Thus, the paradoxical nature of adhering to a cultural norm induces a positivity sense of self-esteem in intrinsic self-assessment process in the Chinese group. Overall, verbal modesty or self-effacement style involves downplaying one’s qualities, modest talk, restrain, verbal hesitation, and giving face to others (Ting-Toomey & Chung 2012). In East Asian cultural context, verbal self-effacement pattern is also related to forms of address and pronouns used for self and others in social interactions. Unlike English, there are multiple pronoun forms to refer to “I,” “you,” and “he/she/ they.” Honorific pronouns are used for others, but not for self. Facework sensitivity guides what pronoun forms are used and how they are expressed in relational communication to convey respect and deference. For example, in English a translator can say “He said …” referring to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, one cannot say the same thing in Tibetan for it would be highly disrespectful. Therefore, a facesensitive Tibetan English translator may use forms of address such as “Gong Sa Chog” (His Holiness) and “Kundun” (His Presence) referring to His Holiness in Tibetan language. In this situation a Tibetan translator will use self-effacement pronoun for himself or herself but other-enhancement pronoun to address His Holiness. The discussion in this section clearly indicates that functional paradigm has primarily guided studies on verbal communication styles across cultures. For ex-

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ample, cross-cultural communication style research field tends to either employ individualism-collectivism as an explanatory framework and then equate the value dimension framework with country-to-country level comparative analysis, or use the personality traits of independent/interdependent self-construal framework and connect that with verbal style variation predictions. On the communication style conceptualization, researchers often tend to dichotomize communication contexts into high and low (Hall 1976), verbal styles into self-effacement and self-enhancement (Suzuki, Davis & Greenfield 2008), linguistic practices into contextualizing and decontextualizing (Kashima, Kashima & Kidd 2014), cognitive processes into holistic style and analytical style (Nisbett 2003; Nisbett et al. 2001), and communication constraints into relational and instrumental constraints (Kim 2005). To further investigation in these domains, we suggest two things: First, engage in more richly-textured cross-cultural comparative interpretive studies to understand the sense-making accounts, metaphors, and stories that prompted these cross-cultural communication variations and similarities; and secondly, investigating the hybrid co-existence of these dichotomies within a wide variety of cultures and understand how cultural insiders negotiate these mixed hybrid styles in particular sociocultural contexts and relationship groups. Holistically, verbal communication style and nonverbal communication contexting come together; we now turn our attention to a discussion on nonverbal emotional encoding and decoding patterns across cultures.

3.2 Cross-cultural nonverbal emotional expression/decoding styles Communication is not only about what is being said (content), but it is also about how something is actually said (rapport). Importantly, relational or identity meaning is often expressed via multiple nonverbal communication channels. Nonverbal communication is defined as the nonlinguistic behaviors (or attributes) that are consciously or unconsciously encoded and decoded via multiple communication channels including facial expressions, gestures, paralinguistics, haptics, and proxemics. In face-to-face interactions, individuals tend to believe more in the credibility of nonverbal cues when there is a disparity between verbal and nonverbal messages such as facial emotional expression. Emotions are the stuff of interpersonal relationships. Human emotional expressions are encoded and decoded primarily via nonverbal cues and channels such as kinesics and vocalics. According to Birdwhistell (1970), the face is capable of producing some 250,000 expressions. Cultural universalists and cultural relativists differ in their approaches to understanding emotional facial expressions (Burgoon, Guerrero & Floyd 2010; Ekman & Friesen 1975). Cultural universalists contend that facial expressions are innate and emotional expressions are universal across cultures. In contrast, cultural relativists contend

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that cultural display rules differ with regard to facial and emotional expressions. Among multiple perspectives, bio-evolutionary perspective and socio-cultural perspective support each of these contentions well (Burgoon, Guerrero & Floyd 2010). Bio-evolutionary perspective provides strong evidence for facial expression consistency of core facial emotional expressions, namely sadness, anger, disgust, fear, interest, surprise, and happiness (SADFISH) found across cultural contexts (Floyd, 2004; Floyd & Riforgiate 2008). Emotions such as fear and love are associated with hormonal and neural activities and these are enacted in facial expressions – fight or flee and also their haptic behaviors. For example, fear activates pupil dilation that increases visual acuity to assess threat in dangerous situation and also increased heart beat and respiration activate muscles to fight or flee. In the case of love, oxytocin is activated that induces pleasure and happiness and possibly leading to kissing and hugging and procreation. Some early studies (e.g., Galati, Scherer & Ricci-Bitti 1997) found that adults who have been blind from birth were able to facially express the same basic emotions just like adults with sight. Thus, these emotional experiences and expressions are product of bio-evolutionary processes. Socio-cultural perspective on nonverbal communication, on the other hand, asserts that different socialization patterns and cultural practices can explain why people enact similar or different nonverbal behaviors. Cultural display rules shape when, how, what, and with whom certain nonverbal expressions should be displayed or suppressed within a specific cultural context. Cultural values influence the latitude of emotional expressions under particular situational conditions in different cultures. For example, in the mainstream cultural patterns of the United States and the United Kingdom (i.e., individualistic cultures) people show respect standing upright and/or giving firm hand shake. However, in the mainstream or traditional cultural patterns of Japan and Korea (collectivistic cultures) people show respect by different degrees of nodding or bowing pending on relational roles, hierarchical statuses, and situations. In the further probing of the role of emotion decoding across cultures, researchers (Elfenbein & Ambady 2002; Kitayama & Markus 1994; Masumoto 2006) found some interesting cross-cultural differences. While U.S. college students perceive the generic “feel good” nonverbal emotions as associated with socially disengaged emotions (such as feelings of individual pride and superiority), Japanese college students equate the “feel good” nonverbal emotions with socially engaged emotions (such as friendly feelings and feelings of respect for others). It appears that while the decoding of the core facial emotional types can be pancultural, the meaning, the circumstances, and the associated tasks that are related to generate such emotions are culture-specific. Individualists generally feel good focusing on personal achievement and recognition. In comparison, collectivists generally feel good focusing on collective achievement and ingroup recognition. Perhaps nonverbal human emotional expressions can best be understood from the neuroculture theory perspective that integrates theoretical assumptions of bio-

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evolutionary perspective and socio-cultural perspective (Ekman & Friesen 1975; Kupperbusch, Matsumoto, Kooken, Lowenger, Uchida, Wilson-Cohn & Yrizarry 1999). According to this theory, while human beings are predisposed to make the connection between certain emotional states and facial muscles, it is through the continuous socialization, reward–sanction process within their culture that human beings acquire nonverbal display rules. For example, intercultural/intergroup nonverbal power display (e.g., on the emotions of anger and fear or affection) can be explained based on bio-evolutionary processes and also socio-cultural factors such as vertical and horizontal individualism and vertical and horizontal collectivism norms (Triandis 1995). While reasonable evidence suggests a relationship between emotion and facial expression, the data is perhaps not as tight as the neurocultural theory contended (Baumeister & Finkel 2010). It is advocated that the socio-cultural perspective provides a better explanatory calculus than the bio-evolutionary perspective to understand facial emotional expressions both within and across cultures. Additionally, an integrative framework of a situational-based neuroculture lens may also help to advance the theorizing and research work in the area of cross-cultural nonverbal emotional expression and decoding styles. Cross-cultural nonverbal researchers will do well to map out the situational dynamics that trigger different emotional expression or suppression across a wide range of situations, perceived ingroup-outgroup dynamics, and interactional topical discussions. Finally, Spencer-Oatey’s (2005) rapport facework theory and discourse work may help to integrate both the verbal and nonverbal aspects of intercultural relatedness. According to Spencer-Oatey and Franklin (2009) and VanMeurs and Spencer-Oatey (2010), the study of human interaction can be understood via four relational interaction categories: a rapport-enhancement orientation (a desire to strengthen or enhance harmonious relations between interlocutors), a rapport maintenance orientation (a desire to maintain or protect harmonious relations), a rapport-neglect orientation (a lack of concern for the quality of interpersonal relations perhaps because of a focus on the self), and a rapport-challenge orientation (a desire to challenge or impair harmonious relations between the interlocutors). In conjunction with an instrumental approach in studying verbal discourse and nonverbal interactional goals, a rapport-centered process developmental lens may move our understanding of cross-cultural verbal and nonverbal style variations in a meaningful theoretical direction. Moving beyond general discussion of communication style issues, we now turn to a discussion of a specific crosscultural comparative communication topic: self-disclosure

3.3 Cross-cultural self-disclosure One of the key factors in sustaining and developing close friendship ties is selfdisclosure. Most of the studies utilized the baseline value dimension of individualism-collectivism to theorize and explain their research findings. For example, in

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examining the self-disclosure patterns of East Asian international students (with a small sample size of 74) from four different countries (China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), Chen (2006) found that the East Asian students self-disclosed slightly more in intracultural friendships than intercultural friendships. In addition, they perceived the disclosure of attitudes and opinions, tastes and interests, studies or work, and personality as “superficial topics,” while they considered the sharing of information on money and financial matters, and body and appearances as “intimate topics.” However, there was no clear distinction concerning the amount of self-disclosure and the revealing of positive-negative content or valence of selfdisclosure in those two friendship types. In a follow-up study, Chen and Nakazawa (2010) investigated the self-disclosure patterns of U.S. American students in intercultural and interracial friendship types. Altogether 252 U.S. American college students participated in the study, with one sample group reported on an intercultural friendship between a US citizen and a non-US citizen, and another sample group reported on an interracial domestic friendship. Based on self-report survey data, the research findings indicated that the level of relational intimacy played a strong role in both intercultural and interracial friendship’s self-disclosure patterns: as relational intimacy level increased, friends would have greater intent to disclose, they disclosed in great amount and depth, and they also engaged in more honest/accurate self-disclosure. Furthermore, individualism was found to correlate positively with self-disclosure intention, depth, and honesty-accuracy, while collectivism was discovered to correlate positively with self-disclosure intention and honesty-accuracy only, but not depth. In both intercultural and interracial friendship situations, respondents reported the equivalent levels of reciprocal self-disclosure in all six topical areas. In a rare cross-cultural comparative interpretive study, Ohashi, Wooffitt, Jackson, and Nixon (2014) examined the discourse and account-giving processes of Japanese and U.K. interviewees in their disclosure of paranormal phenomenon. They found that while U.K. English-speaking individuals offered a fuller account of their extraordinary experiences and also their own detailed remunerations and reactions of others, the Japanese speakers offered a very economical or understated account of their paranormal experiences. However, the Japanese did provide an extensive description of the setting leading up to the event and, upon prompting, they also provided more fine-tuned details after the paranormal event description closure. Interested in interracial friendship, Shelton, Trail, West and Bergsieker (2010) studied the relationship between self-disclosure and perceived partner responsiveness in African American and European American college students. They asked the participants to select a black and white potential friend whom they did not know very well then but wanted to befriend over time. Every two weeks since, in 10 weeks, participants completed a questionnaire about the nature of self-disclosure and interactions in the intra-racial friendship context and in the interracial friend-

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ship context. Results indicated that among African American respondents, distinctive differences were found in self-disclosure, perceived friend disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness between the two friendship types. The African American students reported more own self-disclosure, perceived partner’s self-disclosure, and perceived partner’s responsiveness with their fellow African American friends more so than with their European American friends. It appears that African American students at a “predominantly white university particularly appreciate having a potential in-group friend with whom to socialize and become friends. That is, because Black students are scarce at such universities, a Black student encountering a potential Black friend may be more likely to self-disclose extensively and feel connected to this person on the basis of their shared ethnic group membership” (Shelton et al. 2010: 84). In comparison, results did not reveal any significant self-disclosure pattern difference among European American respondents with their fellow European American friends or with their African American friends. Possibly, this might be due to social desirability effect that White students might want to avoid expressing any self-disclosure pattern distinction in regard to the two friendship groups. However, the same White students reported lower levels of intimacy (i.e., less closeness and liking) with Black friends than White friends. Thus, an alternative interpretation of the result could be that European American students might actually believe that they treated both Black and White friends similarly in overt self-disclosure output level. However, psychologically speaking, an intimacy emotional gap continues to exist among the interracial friendship pairs (Shelton et al. 2010). Interestingly, for both African American and European American groups, perceived partner’s responsiveness (i.e., perceived acceptance, validation, and caring) served as an important mediating factor that boosts their perceptions of self and partner disclosure and intimacy level in both the interracial and interracial friendship contexts. It appears that believing that partners are concerned and receptive of one’s self-disclosure process is essential to reduce anxiety and uncertainty in intergroupinterracial contact encounters (Gudykunst 2005). In taking a close look at emotional intimacy in European Canadian and Chinese Canadian dating partners (31 couples each), Marshall (2010) designed two studies exploring individualism-collectivism and gender-role ideology in self-disclosure and responsiveness. She found both groups conceptualized intimacy via self-disclosure and partner responsiveness. In Study 1, using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model analysis, Chinese Canadian immigrants and their partners scored lower in the intimacy/expressing emotional support dimension than their European Canadian counterparts. More importantly, Chinese Canadians’ lower intimacy rating was mediated by their more traditional gender-role ideology, but not by their collectivism. The lower intimacy score also mediated their lower relationship satisfaction score and higher risk of relationship termination. In Study 2, Marshall (2010) further uncovered that the Chinese Canadian males’ traditionalism and

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associated lower self-disclosure contributed to their partners’ lower intimacy. In contrast, there were no mean cultural differences in responsiveness. In both studies, the role of intimacy appeared to be the key link to relational satisfaction or relational termination in both Chinese Canadian and European Canadian samples. The author attributed the effect to acculturation (an average of 8 years of Canadian residence in the Chinese Canadian sample) and some of the deep-rooted Confucian values that might influence the gender-role traditionalism in the Chinese Canadian male sample. Kline, Horton, and Zhang (2008) examined cultural differences in communicating love among 143 young adults from the U.S. and East Asian countries of China, Japan, and South Korea. Through open-ended and close-ended questionnaire format, the U.S. American and East Asian international students answered questions along the dimensions of attitudes/beliefs, activities, and expressions of love concerning friendship and love concerning marriage. The narrative thought units were coded. The East Asian respondents were found to more likely to believe that marriage is about trust, caring, respect, and that it takes hard work; U.S. American respondents were more likely to believe that love in marriage is essential and unconditional. East Asian students also tended to express love and affection in close friendships in particular “talking” activities such as having dinner together and when drinking together, whereas U.S. American students tended to express love and affection in close friendships during sport and exercise, going to movies or concerts, shopping, and having dinner and drinking together. In expressing love and affection in marriage, both sample groups considered the same activities as important, talking, having dinner together, doing things together, and physical intimacy, as vehicles for love expressions. Both groups also subscribed to the importance of belief similarity, faithfulness, and commitment in marital relationships more so than in close friendships (see Chang & Chen 2015; Feng 2015). From self-disclosure to the social support research domain, Feng and Wilson (2012), in developing their Avoidance-Support Belief Scale, found that the Chinese college students endorsed three reasons for an avoidance approach – protecting the other person from harm and further distress, attempting to maintain a positive mood, and spiritual/philosophical reasons – substantially more so than U.S. American college students. Both sample groups also endorsed the importance of maintaining a positive mood via avoidance distraction strategy as the top-ranked other-face support option in a friendship distressed situation. In a detailed metaanalysis review of the cross-cultural social support research studies, Feng (2015) indicated that there existed some cross-cultural communication differences in the social support literature concerning individualistic and collectivistic members’ support-seeking tendencies – for example, individualists tended to seek support in times of need, and also seeking both emotional and instrumental support more so than collectivists. Comparatively, collectivists might cognitively evaluate seeking emotional support highly but behaviorally reluctant to seek help especially when

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negative emotions were involved and also in the expectancy context of ingroup harmony maintenance. The author further argued that these differences should be framed as nested within the larger pattern of cultural similarity. Feng (2015: 35) concluded: “There are also important similarities in why and how European Americans, Asians, and Asian Americans provide support to others, and seek and receive support from others. Amidst the diversity of cultural values and beliefs, there are universal human needs, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors”. In summary, research studies on cross-cultural or cross-ethnic self-disclosure patterns and social support studies found some similar and also different patterns and trends (Oetzel & Ting-Toomey 2011). More importantly, researchers continue to use either the individualism-collectivism framework to theorize or explain their findings, or use the static categories of “race” (e.g., comparing black and white self-disclosure pattern) and “sex” to compare and contrast the different communication styles. Future research will do well to use a more dynamic identity approach such as cultural membership identity salience issue or situational ethnic identity or gender identity affiliation issue to connect with the self-disclosure pattern or other intimacy expectancy pattern. For example, in a rare interpretive study, Toomey, Dorjee, and Ting-Toomey (2013) investigated the meaning construction of “bicultural identity” of Asian-Caucasian individuals and their intergroup communication strategies. The study conceptualized the formation of their bicultural identity as a multilayered, complex lived experience. Both self-perceptions and perceptions by salient others (especially in intercultural dating relationships) have a pronounced impact on the participants’ construction of bicultural identity meaning. Eight thematic patterns were identified: the bicultural construction of integrated identity, the “I–We” sense of selfhood, distinctive communication practice, feelings of being misunderstood in intergroup relationships, intergroup distance attitude/racist jokes, expectancy violations and the use of identity buffering strategies, the use of strategic identity segmentation strategies, and the use of age-related self-identity affirmation strategies. These thematic meaning patterns culminated in the proposed idea of a situated “double-swing bicultural identity” model. Overall, the interviewees viewed themselves as having a complementary “fluid-double” Asian-Caucasian bicultural identity rather than a static percentage or an oppositional “percentage-based” identity. At the same time as this double identity has unique identity aspects with distinctive collectivistic-individualistic value patterns and communication attributes, they are also intertwined and flowing in nature. These bicultural individuals are at once secure yet vulnerable, and they are also constantly mindful of the situational cues that prompt their identity codeswitching and frame-switching. Understanding the dialectical nature of intergroup identity negotiation and change process is a complex research enterprise. Earlier research studies employed primarily the social scientific research paradigm. However, recent researchers ap-

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pear to gravitate toward the use of a narrative paradigm approach in researching the dynamic nature or the situational nature of the immigrants’ or minorities’ bicultural/biracial identity maintenance and transformation process in multiple relationship situations.

3.4 Cross-cultural facework, conflict styles, and forgiveness According to the Face Negotiation Theory (FNT; Ting-Toomey 1988, 2005b), the meaning of “face” is generally conceptualized as how we want others to see us and treat us and how we actually treat others in association with their social selfconception expectations. Face is a multilayered phenomenon: on the surface level, it connotes politeness rituals to conflict repair issues; on the deep level, it connotes pride-shame, honor-disgrace, to identity respect-disrespect issues (Baig, TingToomey & Dorjee 2014; Dorjee, Baig & Ting-Toomey 2013; Dorjee & Ting-Toomey 2015; Ting-Toomey et al. 1991). In everyday communication, individuals are constantly making conscious or semi-conscious choices concerning face-saving, face maintenance, and face-honoring matters across interpersonal, workplace, and international contexts (Arundale 2010). While the concept of face is about an assessment of the “worthiness” and “approval” of social image identity issues, facework is about verbal and nonverbal behaviors that protect/save self-face, other-face, mutual-face, or communal face within a sociocultural situation and, simultaneously, at the larger world stage identity projection and impression formation assessment perspective. The struggles for face respect or face deference in a conflict episode consists of three facets: a) locus of face – concern for self, other or both, plus communal face; b) face valence – whether face is being defended, maintained, or honored; and c) temporality – whether face is being restored or proactively protected. Locus of face is the primary dimension of face that has been tested extensively and also this face facet shapes the direction of the subsequent conflict messages. Self-face is the protective concern for one’s own image when one’s own face is threatened in the conflict situation. Other-face, on the other hand, is the concern for accommodating the other conflict party’s image in the conflict situation. Mutual-face is the concern for both parties’ images or the “expectancy relational identity image” of the interpersonal pairing. Communal-face is the concern to uphold ingroup membership face in assessment of ingroup/outgroup face expectancies and estimated net worth. Facework is the communication strategies used to defend, challenge, support, or even upgrade self-face and other-face identity issues in an emotionallyvulnerable encounter. The overall findings in testing the conflict FNT revealed that individualistic cultural members and independent types have more self-face concern and less other-face and mutual-face concerns than collectivists and interdependent types. In comparison, collectivistic cultural members and interdependent types have

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more other-face emphasis in managing conflicts with others than individualists and independent types (Oetzel, Garcia & Ting-Toomey 2008; Oetzel & Ting-Toomey 2003; Ting-Toomey, Oetzel & Yee-Jung 2001). Moreover, the major results of Oetzel and Ting-Toomey’s (2003) four-culture study revealed that: First, cultural individualism-collectivism had direct effects on conflict styles, as well as mediated effects through self-construal and face concerns. Second, self-face concern was associated positively with dominating style and other-face concern was associated positively with avoiding and integrating styles. Third, German respondents reported the frequent use of direct-confrontational facework strategies; Japanese reported the use of different pretending and accommodating strategies and minimized the severity of the conflict situation; Chinese engaged in a variety of avoiding, accommodating, passive aggressive, and third-party appeals’ tactics; and U.S. Americans reported the use of upfront expression of feelings and remaining calm as conflict facework tactics. In testing the FNT within the pluralistic US culture, multiethnic conflict research has uncovered distinctive conflict interaction styles in relationship to particular cultural/ethnic identity salience issues (Ting-Toomey, Oetzel & Yee-Jung 2001). Recent research testing the conflict FNT includes the following themes: facesensitive conflict emotions, interpersonal transgressions and forgiveness, and intergenerational face. For example, Zhang, Ting-Toomey, and Oetzel (2014) studied the role of emotion in FNT and probed the functions of anger, compassion, and guilt connecting with self-construal, face concerns, and conflict styles in the U.S. and Chinese cultures. Results revealed that in both U.S. and Chinese cultures anger was associated positively with independent self-construal, self-face concern, and the competing style, and compassion was associated positively with interdependent self-construal, other-face concern, and the integrating, compromising, and obliging styles. In the U.S., the independent self-construal personality type acts as a strong stand-alone trait in shaping a strong self-face concern in dealing with conflict issues. However, for Chinese independent personality types, the emotion of anger (i.e., feeling irritated, angry, annoyed, and aggravated) fully mediates selfface concern and competitive conflict style. When aggravated anger was triggered in a conflict cycle, the Chinese respondents displayed a strong tendency to protect self-face from hurt or embarrassment, and this emotion of anger also primed the use of a dominant/competitive outlook. In another cross-cultural study linking the emotion of anger with negotiation tactics in a videotaped simulated discussion study, Liu (2009) uncovered that the emotion of anger reinforced a complementary pattern of negotiation in the Chinese and the U.S. cultures: Overall, anger increased negotiators’ own use of distributive negotiation tactics but decreased their counterpart’s use of distributive tactics, actually resulted in gaining more concessions in the zero-sum bargaining situations. Moreover, Chinese negotiators used more persuasive distributive negotiation tactics and fewer bargaining integrative tactics than U.S. American negotiators. Chinese participants spent longer time

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blocks to reach a final outcome decision than their U.S. counterparts. Overall, the feeling of anger seems to drive individuals to be more competitive and dominating in their response style in stranger employer-employee negotiation situations across the two cultures. In another recent study, the researchers probed the dynamic nature of emotions and the perceived face threat in the forgiveness and reconciliation processes in China and the U.S. (Zhang, Oetzel, Ting-Toomey & Zhang 2015). The results were as follows: a) Chinese participants reported more relationship-oriented forgiveness than U.S. participants; b) anger was negatively correlated, and compassion was positively correlated, with reconciliation, in both cultures; and c) the hypothesized Structural Equation Model (SEM) had a good fit to the data in both cultures. Thus, perceived face threat evokes initial emotions (i.e., anger and compassion), which influences forgiveness and, in turn, reinforces the expressed emotions of anger and compassion, which then affects reconciliation. In a nutshell, in order to reconcile, forgiveness is an essential step to reconciliation in both individualistic and communal-based cultures. Zhang, Ting-Toomey, Dorjee, and Lee (2012) explored how U.S. American college students and Chinese college students differ when they respond to their dating partners’ internet relational transgressions. They also assessed how different selfconstrual personality types influence relational response strategies. Overall, they found that U.S. respondents tend to prefer exit and anger voice responses more so than Chinese respondents in reacting to an emotional infidelity episode. Comparatively, Chinese respondents tend to prefer loyalty, passive neglect, and third-party help responses. It seems for them, loyalty is a passive-active strategy: a patient, self-discipline reaction moderates upfront confrontation and it would not aggravate the conflict situation further. Furthermore, while seeking help from family and close friends might seem to be passive in the U.S. Americans’ mindset, it is an active strategy for the Chinese participants because it shows that the individual is caring and committed in the intimate relationship and that he/she is actually doing something to salvage the relationship by seeking third-party advice. Both culture groups, however, also preferred the use of a high degree of integrative, problemsolving voice response which contradicted the previous U.S.-Japan interpersonal research study. Furthermore, the researchers (Zhang et al. 2012) also uncovered that, in dating partners’ relational transgression context, high independent selfconstrual participants prefered exit and anger voice responses, whereas high relational self-construal participants prefered the use of integrative voice and thirdparty help seeking responses. While previous research studies have focused on testing the relationship between the value orientations of culture-based individualism-collectivism or independent/interdependent-relational self-construal to conflict styles and facework strategies, with some exceptions scant research effort has focused on unpacking the value spectrums of small and large power distance value dimensions in an

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effort to relate these value dimensions to facework expectancies and actual social practices. For example, Merkin (2006; Merkin & Ramadan 2010) integrated the small-large power distance value dimension to the individualism-collectivism value dimension in explaining face-threatening response messages and conflict styles in multiple cultures. She found that high-status individuals from large power distance cultures used both direct and indirect facework strategies to deal with face-threatening situations – depending on whether they were delivering positive or negative messages. Furthermore, Kaushal and Kwantes (2006) uncovered that the dominating conflict style of “high concern for self/low concern for others” was positively associated with both vertical individualism and vertical collectivism. Drawing from this line of research, the interpretation of “positive or negative messages” or the interpretation of the “dominating/controlling” conflict style (i.e., as reflective of “high concern for self/low concern for others”) carries strong crosscultural connotative meanings. While some cultural participants view the dominating style as a culture-based constructive motivational strategy or even positive coaching tactic, others view it as an oppressive one-up/one-down de-motivational conflict strategy. Likewise, according to the Western models, avoidance has been consistently viewed as an indifferent or passive “flee the scene” conflict strategy that reflects the “low concern for self/low concern for others” phenomenon. This individualistic-oriented conceptualization of “avoidance” has been continuously challenged by cross-cultural conflict-style researchers (Cai & Fink 2002; Kim & Leung 2000; Ting-Toomey 1988, 1999; Ting-Toomey & Kurogi 1998). According to the Asian collectivistic lens, for example, the conflict style of avoidance can be regarded as an intentional “high concern for self/high concern for others” tactic pending on situational and relational factors. Also, while Western conflict research studies continue to define compromising conflict style (as “moderate concern for self and other’s interest”) from an instrumental concession/counter-concession or expedient closure conflict lens, Asian-based research studies have re-casted “compromising conflict style” as relational give-and-take negotiation process and longterm holistic outcome. Recent research effort has started to examine the changing nature of culture and the individuals embedded in the intercultural and intergroup membership struggles in making sense of a traditional concept called face or izzat. From a rare intergroup facework interpretive paradigm lens, Baig, Ting-Toomey, and Dorjee (2014) used FNT as a guiding framework in exploring how the South Asian Indian (SAI) term izzat relates to the meaning construction of face in intergenerational contexts in the U.S. According to the thematic findings, participants viewed izzat primarily as related to family respect and embarrassment situations. They also used active concealment and diversion facework strategies to ward off potential izzat face-threatening encounters. Overall, differences in izzat were contextualized in terms of ethnic family socialization process and the identity change process between the older generation and the younger SAI generation in the multiethnic U.S. society. While the older generation folks have a deeper grasp and emo-

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tional sensibility of the traditional concept of izzat, they did not expect the younger generation who grew up in the U.S. to resonate with the phenomenon of izzat with compliance. Overall, the cross-cultural research studies and findings on facework, conflict styles, and forgiveness have progressed to a robust theoretical-testing and theoretical-expansion direction. Methodologically, pluralistic methods – drawing from the functional paradigm to the interpretive/critical paradigm – have also been used to expand the understanding of cross-cultural facework and conflict styles (see, e.g., Baig, Ting-Toomey & Dorjee 2014; Dorjee, Baig & Ting-Toomey 2013; Dorjee & TingToomey 2015; Zhang, Ting-Toomey & Oetzel 2014). Adding on identity complexity issues such as bicultural/biracial identity facets, intergenerational identity change issues, and/or age identity issues and connecting these factors with diverse facework or forgiveness orientations, the “big picture” image of the relationship between multiple identity facets and communication style variations becomes more nuanced and intricate.

4 Identity complexity and communication styles: A summary critique and future directions This section first offers a general summary critique, then proffers directions for theorizing and researching on the topic of identity facets and communication style variations of cross-cultural self-disclosure and facework and conflict styles.

4.1 General summary critique Five conclusions can be drawn from the foregoing review of the selective research studies on the general topics of multiple identity facets and their relationship to broad-based communication styles. The first summary critique concerns the superimposition of a country’s individualism-collectivism value orientation and grafting the dimension to explain culture-level value complexity and individual behavior. In reviewing the current research trends on the interrelationship on identity facets and communication styles, the predominant trend indicates a strong focus on comparing various communication topics from a binary system perspective (e.g., comparing individualism-collectivism). Clearly, the frameworks of individualism/collectivism and power distance (Hofstede 2001; House et al. 2004) have saturated cross-cultural communication studies and this resulted in some harsh critiques (e.g., Tamis-LeMonda et al. 2008; Thomas & Peterson 2014). Invoking these frameworks, studies have treated cultural dimensions more or less as static boxes for cross-cultural binary categories. There appears an urgent need to go beyond this binary approach in cross-cultural studies and also explore the deeper intersection

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of various cultural dimensions with insights gleaned from intergroup identity complexity perspective. Given that culture is a dynamic-evolving system, scholars should consider these cultural value dimensions on a continuum and the possibility of cultural group members identifying from low to moderate to high degrees with individualism and/or collectivism in each culture. For example, in the pluralistic U.S. cultural milieu, members of many co-cultural groups including Asian Americans and Latino Americans can hold bicultural or marginal value orientation – pending on their family socialization processes, immigration generations, and lived experiences. Similarly, younger generation members of China, Japan, and Korea can be individualistic-based value leaning more so than collectivistic value tendency. As Triandis (1995) pointed out early on, intercultural communication scholars must explore variations within individualism (horizontal and vertical individualism) and collectivism (horizontal and vertical collectivism) and also the intersections of these cultural dimensions. Additionally, Gelfand, Nishii, and Raver’s (2006) emphasis on the overlaying of “tight” (a system with many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior) versus “loose” (a system with weak norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior) normative pattern within a cultural system may yield an enriching multidimensional value matrix of understanding cultural-level identity and situational strength and complexity issues (see also, Bond 2013; Gelfand & Lun 2013). The second summary critique concerns the correlates of individualism and collectivism at the individual level – i.e., self-construals of independence and interdependence (Markus & Kitayama 1991, 1998). An individual, however, is also not a static pole or constantly act as a “prototypical” individual as the culture or the personality dictates. She or he is capable of self-reflexivity, code-switching flow, and differential situational scanning. Thus, focusing our theorizing effort on an integrative culture-sensitive and situational-based approach may yield higher research investment returns, especially in terms of under what conditions individuals would activate independent versus interdependent motivation, affective arousal, and behavior situationally, than mapping individuals on the generalized traits of “independent type” versus “interdependent type.” Going beyond the independent versus interdependent self-construal dichotomy, emerging evidence has indicated the utility of a tripartite model of self-construal (Kashima, Foddy & Platow 2002) in explaining people’s behaviors in intimate relations. Arguably, relational interdependence (Bresnahan et al. 2004) may be a better predictor and mediator than the binary self-construals for both within and across identity negotiation and communicative practice. The concept “relational interdependence” may transcend cultural differences and, oftentimes, relational conflict goal acts as a catalyst and an effective tool to resolve intercultural and interpersonal miscommunication. More wellconceptualized and well-designed cross-cultural individual-level studies are needed to verify this contention.

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The third summary critique concerns general communication style research studies. In terms of communication styles, Hall’s (1976) high-context and low-context communication framework has heavily been invoked in cross-cultural communication style studies. Going beyond these two contrastive categories, studies should explore moderate context communication and bi-context communication (engaging in both high-and low-context hybrid communication style) – possibly via studying bicultural and multicultural “global nomad” individuals. As noted before, bicultural individuals tend to flexibly negotiate cultural dimensions in intercultural interaction and possibly do the same with navigating diverse communication contexts (Toomey et al. 2013). Moreover, both interdependent self and independent self types are very likely to find themselves in situational contexts where they need to be verbally explicit or implicit in expressing their messages regardless of their high-low-context orientation. Some individuals can act more strategically to perform and adapt to the evolving situation more so than others. These avenues of research must be explored. Possibly, the culturally linked linguistic practices of contextualizing and decontextualizing (Kashima, Kashima & Kidd 2014) and holistic and analytic cognitive processing styles (Nisbett, Peng, Choi & Norenzayan 2001) can further cross-cultural comparative studies on high- and low-context communication modes. The fourth summary critique concerns the general study of cross-cultural nonverbal expressions. Much of the nonverbal communication research has focused primarily on cross-cultural facial emotional expressions but the research focus has been largely singular-channel static-based expression mode and devoid of contextframing background. There is a need to investigate a variety of combined nonverbal cues such as paralinguistic cues, kinesics, and haptics in a richly-layered sociocultural interactional episode and also from an integrative dispositional-and-situational systems perspective. Furthermore, while we recite the mantra that nonverbal message is a powerful form of communication system, there continues a lack of well-theorized and well-designed cross-cultural comparative interaction studies to capture the subtleties and nuances of culture-level (e.g., comparative small/large power distance low-status/high-status job interviewing communication styles) and individual-level (e.g., pairing professional interaction roles with horizontal personality and vertical personality tendency types) explanation of nonverbal expressiveness or restraint/masking communicative styles. The last and fifth summary critique concerns the compartmentalization of the cross-cultural communication style research field and the intergroup communication research field. The conceptual critique offered here is the need to integrate or draw from intergroup perspective to further cross-cultural communication style research. As of now, intercultural communication scholars have more or less explored what Giles and Watson (2008) calls “cultural parameters” such as cultural dimensions and related communication contexts. However, cross-cultural communication is also affected by socio-historical context, religious/spiritual identity, pro-

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fessional role identity, gender identity, age identity, and intergroup relations (to name a few examples) informed richly by intergroup communication research. For example, Ting-Toomey and Dorjee (2014) explored multiple perspectives on understanding language, identity, and culture based on intercultural and intergroup theorizing and research. They indicated how identity negotiation is complex and is affected by both cultural and intergroup dynamic factors including individualism and collectivism, language and verbal/nonverbal style issues, perceived ingroup vitality, and the larger historical socio-cultural setting.

4.2 Cross-cultural self-disclosure and facework: Future directions In reviewing the research studies in cross-cultural friendship and dating relationship, here are five common threads: 1. cross-cultural relationship studies tend to draw from the theoretical base of individualism-collectivism value dimension as their primary theoretical framework (see summary critique above); 2. such studies have focused their research investigations moderately on self-disclosure patterns and perceived partner responsiveness across different cultures; 3. such studies have also emphasized the theme of cross-cultural comparisons of love and intimacy emotional expressions across different cultures; 4. cross-cultural research studies tend to compare U.S. American sample with some Asian samples (in particular, China, Japan, and Korea) as their data sets; and 5. such studies have focused on investigating U.S. college adolescents’ friendship patterns and dating relationship patterns more so than any other age groups or generation groups. As scholars and researchers in the area of cross-cultural and intercultural-interpersonal relationship development, we need to pay more close attention to the theories and research perspectives within the tripartite domains of intercultural, intergroup, and interpersonal communication, respectively. For example, theories in intercultural and intergroup communication (e.g., identity negotiation theory by Ting-Toomey 2005a; communication accommodation theory by Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005) can inform interpersonal scholars concerning the importance of sociocultural membership identity issues in conjunction with emerging interpersonal relationship development constructs (e.g., online intercultural/interracial dating and self-disclosure issues, facebook friendship maintenance, and text-message abbreviated communication). On the other hand, interpersonal communication theories (e.g., expectancy violations theory by Burgoon & Ebesu Hubbard 2005; relational dialectics theory by Baxter & Montgomery 1996; and communication privacy management theory by Petronio 2002) can help to explain particular relational and situational features that are salient to the escalation, oscillation, and de-escalation of interculturalinterracial friendship and romantic relationship. A mindful, cross-fertilization approach may help both domains to develop richer intercultural-interpersonal theo-

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ries or personal relationship development models across a wide variety of situated cultural and ethnic settings. In addition, intercultural/intergroup and interpersonal scholars have barely scratched the surface of how, for example, bicultural identity individuals (i.e., via immigrant socialization experience), multicultural global nomads or “third culture kids” (i.e., via a lifetime of fluid boundary crossing), or multiethnic/mixed-race hybrid individuals (i.e., via dual or triple parental ethnic socialization heritages) engage in competent (or incompetent) identity negotiation and relationship development formation with other kindred spirits or monocultural individuals. In today’s dynamic and mobile society, ethnic and racial category is no longer a singular checkmark category. More and more individuals in the global world have mosaic oppositional or compatible cultural identities (Benet-Martiniz, Lee & Leu 2006; Benet-Martiniz, Leu, Lee & Morris 2002; Chen, Benet-Martinez & Bond 2008). The more intercultural-intergroup and interpersonal researchers attune to the dynamic interplay of multiple sociocultural identity and personal identity issues within the hybrid individuals (and in conjunction with situational dynamic issues), the more likely we can catch up to the cultural frame-switching cognition and emotion that drive such individuals to form and shape their close relationships. Since majority of the cross-cultural facework, conflict styles, and forgiveness studies have been guided by the conflict face negotiation theory (FNT; Ting-Toomey 2005b), five future directions in relationship to the advancement of FNT are suggested here: First, the advancement of the FNT can only be made by instilling a strong sense of situational complexity and socioculturall identity complexity in its further theorizing development. Second, the progress of the FNT is dependent highly on rigorous and also creative cross-cultural comparative testing, intercultural and intergroup facework encounters’ testing, and developmental-longitudinal co-orientation testing methodologies. Third, the researching of multiple identity complexity, facework mixed emotions, forgiveness, and reconciliation will help to paint a fuller picture of the FNT. In an intercultural-integroup conflict situation, for example, face negotiation involves not only self-face concern, other-face concern, and mutual-face concern, but also ingroup membership face concern, outgroup membership face concern, intergroup membership face concern, and community membership face concern (Ting-Toomey & Dorjee 2015). While cross-cultural studies have shown the influence of the cross-cultural face concerns on conflict communication styles, more well-designed research studies are needed to probe the polyphonic identity features, intergroup face concerns, and their influence on various in situ facework facets. Fourth, the role of perceived power resources or power imbalance can be built into the FNT to grapple with the use of functional versus dysfunctional power onedown or one-up moves in cross-cultural or intergroup facework negotiation processes. Investigating different types of power such as designated power, distributive power, and integrative power, and also power currencies – resource control,

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interpersonal linkage, communication skills, and expertise (Hocker & Wilmot 2012; see also, Canary & Lakey 2013) along with face concerns can yield further fruitful cross-cultural conflict negotiation styles and tactics. Fifth, more multi-methods studies on the linguistic/nonverbal and affective aspects of multiple face-related practices of respect, trust, dignity, honor, shame, and forgiveness need to be addressed more systematically – especially via interpretive methods such as semistructured interview method, discourse analysis method, and intensive micro-ethnographic observational method. Overall, methodologically, as indicated earlier, functional paradigm and quantitative methods have dominated general cross-cultural communication styles, and also cross-cultural self-disclosure and facework research studies. Certainly, these studies have provided insight into the predictor-predicted relationships among cultural factors and communication variables and also moderating and mediating factors. However, as some recent studies have revealed more well-designed qualitative studies on the various cross-cultural communication style topics can provide rich and in-depth understandings of how people construct, process, and negotiate their identity, relationship, communication, context within and across cultures. Finally, there is also a need to diversify data collection from neglected regions of the world and moving beyond the comparative analysis studies between U.S. and selective East Asian countries. More comparative studies within cultural regions or comparing culture-level and individual-level analysis from the Eastern European zone, the African continent zone, and the Central and South America cultural zones (to name a few examples) are sorely needed to expand our understanding of the situational nature of cross-cultural communication style differences and similarities. Furthermore, within culture diversity – whether relating to ethnic identity diversity or intergenerational identity diversity and its associated change patterns need to be further probed and scrutinized. Likewise, sample populations from the general public rather than convenient samples of undergraduates at various universities will enhance the relevance and practical application of research findings to particular topics such as self-disclosure and facework/conflict management styles. To conclude, this chapter covered a discussion on the three identity approaches in the cross-cultural communication style literature: culture-level value dimension approach, individual-level personality disposition approach, and situational and relational framing approach. It then addressed general cross-cultural communication style variations and nonverbal emotional encoding/decoding issues. It is suggested that a rapport discourse theorizing lens and an integrative framework of a situational-based neuroculture approach may help advance the theorizing work in the general area of cross-cultural verbal and nonverbal style variations. The discussion also reviewed selective studies on cross-cultural self-disclosure and facework/conflict style issues and uncovered both differences and similarities in those past studies. It is encouraged that a strong socio-cultural situational strength framework may also expand our understanding of the adaptive code-switching pro-

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cesses of multicultural individuals in navigating the ups and downs of intergroupinterpersonal relationship development efforts and also diverse identity conflict concerns. Lastly, directions for future research concerning the various specific communication style topics have been addressed. The chapter advocates a strong collaborative effort between intercultural communication and intergroup communication researchers to join hands to explore the multifaceted and intersectional nature of sociocultural membership identity issues with cross-cultural communication style matters. Issues such as under what conditions individuals perceive each other as ingroup versus outgroup members, under what situational conditions individuals interpret the need for low-context/ high-context communication convergence and divergence, and under what facework conditions they interpret the problematic encounter as needing face-repairs or face-defense await further probing and investigation. At this juncture of theorizing and researching the topic of identity facets and cross-cultural communication style variations, the authors believe in a pluralistic and interdisciplinary theorizing effort in moving the leitmotif forward. The adoption of a multi-method or mixedmethod approach will help to add explanatory power and interpretive depth to understand these two interdependent phenomena of identity facets and communication styles in particular situational niches and embedded social ecological realms.

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Tae-Seop Lim

8 Verbal communication across cultures Abstract: This chapter reviews the development of research on cultural differences in verbal communication. Progressing from a philosophical stage to a theoretical stage, then to a practical stage, the research efforts have generated a great number of important findings. This chapter discusses Boasian linguistic philosophy along with Whorf-Sapir hypotheses, cross-cultural studies done by anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s, sociolinguistic research on address terms, and language and relationship, Austin and Searle’s speech act theory and conversation analysis research on the use of a variety of speech acts, face and politeness, and different cultural values on speech and expressiveness. The research findings clearly show that people across cultures use different linguistic practices and communication styles. However, these differences are not distinct and pervasive enough to support rigid cultural dichotomies or so-called cultural divides. Thus, neither the extreme relativism nor the extreme universalism seems to be tenable. Researchers also have to pay attention to the active nature of language users and the dynamic nature of culture. People do not simply submit themselves to the cultural mandates, but pursue their interactional goals. Since people choose the style that brings about the best result, as the culturally preferred goal changes. People’s communication styles change. Keywords: communication styles, language and culture, cross-cultural linguistics, language and society, politeness, code-choice

1 Introduction The study of cultural differences in verbal communication has undergone three stages of development. The first stage was the birth of linguistic relativism (Sapir 1921, 1929; Whorf 1940) and its challenge to absolutism or linguistic universalism. There was no denying that verbal communication behaviors were different across cultures. The debate was over the nature and scope of the differences. Universalists (Goddard & Wierzbicka 1994; Greenberg 1963, 1978) would argue the differences are not fundamental, and the similarities are more striking, whereas relativists would claim the differences are essential since they are based upon different worldviews and thought patterns. Universalism or absolutism is rooted in the modernistic tradition and a strong faith in the Western culture as a model culture. Relativism, inspired by Boas (1911) and peaked in Whorf-Sapir or Whorfian hypotheses, rejects the possibility of universal theories of communication. Even a mild version of Whorfian Hypotheses, linguistic relativism requires fundamentally different theoDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-008

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ries for cultures with structurally different languages. The controversy has not been resolved after a century of debate. The second stage was as theoretical as, but much less philosophical or ideological than the previous stage. As sociolinguistic research developed, researchers began to show strong interests in comparing linguistic behaviors or rules of communication across different groups such as gender and social classes. In Britain, Bernstein (1971, 1972) compared linguistic codes used by children from the working class families with those used by children from the middle class. He attributed the differences to the structural differences in the family communication system between the two classes. In the U.S., Lakoff (1975) compared languages used by males and females, attributing the differences to the different social expectations stemming from power disparity between two sexes. The development in sociolinguistics inspired Hall (1976), a cultural anthropologist, to extend the findings, particularly Bernstein’s work on linguistic code, to the study of culture. Both Bernstein and Hall were less interested in the absolutist-relativist debate than finding different rules operating in different speech communities. The third stage has been much more practical and business-oriented. As the Western researchers realized that the rest of the world is operating on a fundamentally different system, they began to put cultural divides between them and the rest, putting the two worlds at the opposite extremes. A variety of dichotomies have been developed including Hofstede’s (1980) cultural dimensions, which prompted researchers to explore how these opposite cultural dimensions influence individuals’ verbal communication behaviors. At this stage, researchers are not concerned with the absolutism-relativism debate or any other ideological issue of language. However, knowingly or unknowingly, researchers display their subscription to the relativist position. In fact, they sometimes tend to exaggerate the cultural differences more than their data support. In this chapter, I will discuss major findings generated through these three stages of research. As the first stage was devoted mostly to establishing linguistic relativism, my discussion will begin with the main researchers in the second stage.

2 Cultural differences in verbal communication 2.1 Edward T. Hall and high/low-context communication Hall is one of the first researchers who systematically studied cultural differences in communication style. In verbal as well as written communication, following him, people inevitably utilize the context to communicate properly in the given situation. He distinguishes between high-context and low-context communication or message, according to the degree to which the information is subject to the context for meaningful understanding. In a high-context communication, most information is either

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in the physical context or internalized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message. In a low-context communication, the mass of the information is vested in the explicit code (Hall, 1976). Many Western cultures including North America are located toward the lower end of contextual communication, whereas most Eastern cultures belong to the higher end. However, Japan is known to have double sides: High-contextual private communication and lowcontextual public communication (Nishimura, Nevgi & Tella 2008). In the low context culture, communicators do not mind their partner’s verbalization of already shared assumptions or context. Communication often requires reviewing the context to make sure that both parties are on the same page. In the high-context culture, on the contrary, reiterating shared or even assumed-to-be-shared contexts makes the other feel ignored, belittled, or pushed away. Hall’s high-low context communication is comparable to Bernstein’s theory of code. Bernstein (1971), while studying the linguistic proficiency of the children from working class families, found that they used a linguistic code that is different from (or inferior to) the well-formed code used by the children raised in middle class families. The working class children spoke fast and fluently, taking not much time to think about what to say. However, they used a limited range of syntactic alternatives, simple and repetitive structural organization, and small vocabulary. They often used incomplete, short, and discontinuous sentences. Speaker’s intention was not elaborated and left implicit. All in all, their communication was context-bound, and requires a lot of shared assumptions. The middle class children, in contrast, used a context-free language style that required no shared assumptions, taking very little for granted. Speaker’s intention was explicit and well elaborated. A wide range of syntactic alternatives, flexible structural organizations, large vocabulary, and continuous, lengthy, and often complex sentences were used. They maintained proper pace, often taking time to think about what to say. Bernstein (1971) named the language style used by the middle class children the elaborate code, and the one used by the working class children the restricted code. Bernstein attributed the difference in code to the different family communication systems between the middle and working classes. Working class families were mostly positional families where the members were regarded as the occupants of certain family roles. This type of families therefore used a closed-communication system, in which what and how one could say were predetermined by their relative positions. The middle class families were mostly person-oriented families in which the members were regarded as unique persons. Thus, the family communication system was open, allowing anyone to say whatever and in whichever way they wanted to say. Bernstein’s work underwent a heavy criticism since it implied the working class language was inferior to the middle class language. Facing the charge of being a classist, Bernstein reoriented his theoretical focus from the desirability of the family communication system to the identity management of speech communities. Working

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class children used the restricted code not because their family communication system was inferior, but because their community was communal that emphasizes commonness, shared experiences and assumptions, high solidarity, and we-ness. In a closely-knit community, elaboration is not only unnecessary but also useless. To them, meanings are particular so that no matter how well you elaborate, the other may not understand you unless he/she shares the assumptions and experiences. The middle class lives in a community that values independence and individuality. Since this type of community subscribes to the principle of universal meaning, the belief that a meaning can be shared with anyone if it is well elaborated, speakers are expected to practice a context-free language style. Bernstein has never tried to apply his theory to differences across geographical cultures. However, his theory of code has conceptual affinity to one of the most frequently applied dichotomies in intercultural communication, high/low-context communication. In addition, his renewed theory, the identity management of a speech community by means of code-choice, influenced several generations of intercultural communication researchers, which I will discuss in the later part of this chapter.

2.2 Address terms, power, and intimacy Different societies have different systems of structuring a relationship. Egalitarian societies precede the horizontal relationship (or intimacy or solidarity) to the vertical relationship (or power disparity). Brown and Gilman’s work (1960) is one of the earlier efforts to explain systematically how address terms and pronoun uses reflect the relational ideology of the given society. They differentiate between V-type and T-type pronouns. T-type pronouns are the descendants of Latin TU, which was a singular second person pronoun used to refer to addressees who are equal to or lower than the speaker. V-type pronouns are varieties of Latin VOS, which was originally a plural second person pronoun, but widely used to address a single person who was superior to the speaker. Brown and Gilman (1960) identify two different relational semantics: the power semantic of the traditional society and the solidarity semantic of the modern egalitarian society. The power semantic dictates the powerless to use V towards the powerful, who in turn use T to the powerless. It also encourages the equals among the upper class (nobles) to use V reciprocally and those of the lower class (commons) to reciprocate T. The egalitarian movement after the Great Enlightenment broke the class barrier and brought about the solidarity semantic, under which a mutual use of T signals a close relationship while a mutual use of V manifests a distant relationship. Brown and Gilman (1960) observe that the solidarity semantic varies across cultures. German T is used more frequently within the family including more powerful and more remote members. French T is used to express the camaraderie of co-workers or fellow students. Italians combined French and German uses of T.

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Ervin-Tripp (1972) extends Brown and Gilman (1960) to propose flow-chart models of selecting appropriate address terms of several languages. In the U.S., individuals consider relational distance, power difference, kinship, gender, and age to reach a final decision. The Bisayan (Philippines) emphasizes relative rank, age difference, and friendship. To Koreans, relative rank precedes age and solidarity. In Yiddish, older ones receive deference despite familiarity. Irvin-Tripp’s comparative study of the rules of selecting address terms shows that outsides Western Europe and North America, the power semantic still overpowers the solidarity semantic. Japanese culture has a rich system of marking status difference (Goldstein & Tamura 1975). Ishikawa et al.’s flow chart analysis of Japanese address system (1981) identifies six different categories of address terms: kin terms, names, professional titles, post-designating terms (job title), pronouns, and fictives (symbolically used kin terms). Age, sex, and role relationships, which are hierarchical in nature, function as the key determinants of address terms. The complexity of the address terms and the hierarchical nature of selection reflect that the power semantic is overpowering the solidarity semantic in this culture. Chinese address system is also dominated by the power semantic. Kinship terms, age, and seniority play important roles. The use of professional or job titles is preferred over using names (Chen 2010). Bates and Benigni (1975) report that age and social class play important roles in selecting address terms in Italian. Particularly, age differences bring about differences in status, which trigger non-reciprocal power semantic.

2.3 Language and connectedness Studies in sociolinguistics, language, and business communication have consistently reported individuals’ group-identity influences their use of language. Goldstein and Tamura (1975) find that, compared to Americans, Japanese are much more group-oriented. Japanese children gradually learn that family members are so interconnected that a family eventually forms a single linguistic unit. A child is not separated from their parents or siblings. To make oneself humble, they need to make their family members humble, too. Therefore, Japanese parents often refer to their children as “this humble child,” which is an act of politeness towards outsiders. Koreans are not much different in this respect. They prefer to use “we,” “our,” and “us” instead of “I,” “my,” and “me” when they actually refer to oneself. Koreans use “our house” and “our wife” when they actually mean “my house” and “my wife.” Since a wife cannot be shared even if a house can be, “our wife” does not make much sense as it is. However, considering it is only used to those outside of the marriage (not to brothers or parents) and often replaced by “the woman of our house,” it must also have been invented to emphasize the unity of a nuclear family.

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Some Western researchers, who use collectivism and holism interchangeably (e.g., Hofstede 1980), might argue that the group-orientedness displayed in Asian languages signals their emphasis on the collective identity. However, the “we-ness” in these languages reflects the holistic worldview rather than the collective identity. A collective identity is a sense of belonging to a collective, which comes and goes even if it can be strong at times. The holistic worldview that posters holistic cognition is a culture’s fundamental understanding that the universe is composed of layers of organic wholes that are semi-permanent. The highest end of the whole is the universe itself and the lowest end is one’s self. A family is a not a collection of separate selves, but an organic whole where individual selves are dissolved into. Thus, as a self is one unit, the family is a unit of a different order. Members of the holistic culture tend to avoid separating others from themselves. Consequently, they have developed the speech habit not to use explicitly such identity markers as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, and ‘they’. The Korean and Japanese languages have developed into extreme sub-drop (or subject-drop) languages, which drop not only I or you, but any subject of a sentence. The Chinese, Persian, and Slavic languages also drop more often than not the pronouns when they are the subject of the sentence. Subject drop languages sometimes cause misunderstandings due to the lack of clarity. However, the users seem to be willing to lose efficiency in exchange for being appropriate.

2.4 Speech acts and conversational analysis The research in pragmatics, particularly the study on speech acts and conversational analysis, has produced a number of significant findings of cultural differences. A speech act is designed to accomplish a certain action goal of the speaker through its illocutionary and perlocutionary forces (Austin 1962). For example, a request or order is intended to make the listener help accomplish what the speaker wants. An apology carries the speaker’s regret so that the listener may know that speaker wishes to take responsibility for the possible offense. In a conversation, there are rules of preferred sequence (Goffman 1967), interaction order (Goffman 1983), or adjacency pair (Schegloff & Sacks 1973), which constraint the type of speech act to follow (as a response to) a given speech act. For an instance, a request or order is usually followed by an acceptance or rejection, while an apology is paired with acceptance-forgiveness or further accusation. Different cultures approach speech acts differently in several respects. First of all, holistic cultures such as Asian, African, and Latin American cultures care more about a higher level of goals, while individualistic cultures focus more on a lower level of goals. Individuals engage themselves in a conversation with multiple goals (Berger 2000, 2007; Craig 1990; Dillard 2004; Kellermann 2004). The lower level goal includes specific speech act goals comprising both illocutionary and perlocutionary forces. If one gains compliance from the other

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through a request, the other’s initial acceptance of the request makes up the acceptance of the illocutionary force, and the other’s follow-up actions to complete the compliance constitutes the acceptance of the perlocutionary force. The speech act goal of request comprises both the initial acceptance and the follow-up completion. The higher level of goal is not necessarily related to the specific speech act performed, but concerned with enduring needs and priorities such as maintaining one’s own image or relationship with the other. When individuals attempt to gain compliance through a request, they need to select an appropriate strategy within the constraint of the higher level of goal. The tension between the lower and higher levels of goal is well-addressed by Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) model of politeness strategies. The lower level of goal is referred to as a local goal or action goal, and the higher level of goal as a global or relational goal. In the holistic society, the relationship takes priority over the contract. Therefore, holistic people care more about the relational or global goal over the specific speech act goal or local goal. In any cultures, greetings and partings are not simply acts of acknowledging the other’s presence or bidding a farewell; rather, they function to reinforce or strengthen the current relationship. However, the greeting and parting rituals are much more important in the relationship-oriented cultures than the deal-oriented culture. In the U.S., people tend to greet each other once for a given day, and when they are engaged in a conversation with another person, they tend not to greet a person who passes by. However, people in the holistic culture tend to greet each other every time they run into the other although the length and intensity of greeting might vary. They usually break a conversation with another person to greet a third person whom one or both of them know. Between friends, the greeting does not simply end as greeting but develops into a lengthy conversation full of questions asking each other’s personal life. Expression of warmth and concern for the other is essential to the speech of greeting. Chinese greeting expresses one’s concern for the other’s welfare by asking ‘Have you eaten?’ or ‘What are you doing’ or ‘Where are you going?’ (Li 2009a). Partings are similar. Holistic people invest much more time and effort in parting. They may take a short walk together while parting, and asking each other to give their warmest regards to each other’s family. In these cultures, a parting often includes a plan for a future get-together. Most holistic cultures are sensitive to the status differences. Greeting and partings, therefore, need to reinforce the existing power relationships. Nonverbal behaviors such as bowing play important role in Japan and Korea. But verbal elements are also involved. Nonreciprocal use of T-type and V-type address terms reinforce the status difference. It is also common in these cultures that the subordinate ask about the health and general wellbeing of the superior, who in turn ask about the specific events or changes that happened to the subordinate recently. Qian (1996) relates Chinese greetings and partings to politeness, which reinforces the Confucian values on the relationships that are holistic and complementary.

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Thus, attending to the other’s status is essential in Chinese greetings and partings (Li 2009b). In individualistic societies, people are always ready to say “thank you” to anyone doing a favor to them. Thanking is almost a routine behavior expected whenever a certain social exchange occurs in Northern America. In the holistic society, the ‘nominal’ thanking does not occur as frequently. Sometimes, the person who is thanked resents the thanking because it effectively drives the person out of the whole where the thank-giver belongs. If both belong to the same whole, then there is no necessity to offer a routine thanking since both are one. Japanese often issues an apology when the other person does a favor (Lee et al. 2008). A routine apology can acknowledge the trouble the other person has gone through, not driving him or her away from the beneficiary. Lee and Park (2011) report that Koreans also prefer apologies to thanking as a proper response when they do a favor to others. This does not mean that holists do not thank each other. They actually thank their neighbors, friends, parents, and teachers. When they express their thanks, they really mean it. Therefore, thanking does not end with a simple verbal expression. It usually accompanies special facial or bodily expressions of happiness, sincerity, affection, and so on. Often times thanking comes with a present. These show that thanking in the holistic society is not a routine and habitual reaction to the favor or service one has received. It is expression of their feeling of indebtedness. Ohashi (2008, 2010) analyzes Japanese ritual of o-rei, through which the beneficiary and the giver cooperatively achieve a symbolic settlement of a state of debtcredit equilibrium after a considerable favor or gift has been offered outside a family circle. The beneficiary bows with an utterance acknowledging his or her debt, and the giver reciprocates a bow with ‘no, no’, which plays down his or her credit. O-rei does not free the beneficiary from debt, but is a symbolic settlement that is necessary to care for each other’s debt-sensitive face. Whereas holists take thanking seriously, they tend to take apologizing much less seriously than individualists. Westerners are hesitant to admit that they are at fault because, under the contractual individualism, admitting one’s wrongdoing may incur some legal or practical responsibilities. Americans rarely say, “I am sorry” or “I apologize.” A vast majority of inconveniences they cause is dealt with by an “Excuse me.” Politicians developed such an evasive expression as “it was unfortunate” or the term, ‘regretful acknowledgement’ to evade the situation that requires an apology. In the East, apology is perceived much more positively and personally, not legally. The holistic atmosphere calls for forgiveness when an apology has been issued, and healing follows. Thus, the consequence of apologizing in the holistic society is not incurring responsibility, but improving the relationship as well as one’s own image. Under the Taoist and Confucian tradition, people are believed to be incomplete, and individuals’ effort to improve themselves through self-critical reflection is commended (Kim 2003; Lee & Park 2008). Thus, a person who admits

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his or her fault is thought to be mature and reflective. Mutual apologizing and both parties’ claiming for their own fault can be frequently observed in these cultures, because an apology in this cultures is a sign of care and concern for the other person (Sugimoto 1997). Compliments are also understood and performed differently across cultures. In English, a compliment is understood as a polite expression promoting solidarity rather than a real positive evaluation or praise. Some cultures have this type of positive politeness devices, but some other cultures do not. Japanese use oseji to refer to a polite act of praise, but the Korean language does not have any word for ritualized or polite form of praise. Koreans, therefore, do not distinguish compliments from a favorable judgment or an overt expression of approval (Baek 1998). As different cultures have different values, compliments target different aspects of a person. While a person’s appearance is one of the most frequently complimented targets in America, one’s ability and accomplishments are more frequently complimented in Japan (Barnlund & Araki 1985; Daikuhara 1986). In responding to a compliment, Americans tend to agree with it although they do not simply accept it (Herbert 1986). Asians including Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese and Indians tend to disagree or reject the compliment much more frequently to present themselves more to be moderate and humble (Fujimura-Wilson 2014). Tang and Zhang (2009) find that Chinese students, compared to Australian counterpart, use fewer accepting and more evading or rejecting responses. Compared to Asians, Europeans such as Germans, Briton, and Spaniards tend to accept the compliment more readily. In Asia, particularly in Korea, compliments are given mostly to equals. No matter how positive they may be, compliments still carry one’s evaluation of the other’s desirability. In cultures where status overpowers intimacy, the subordinate is not supposed to judge their superior. Thus, offering a compliment to or making an overt positive judgment of a superior is much more face-threatening than doing the same act to equals. The superior might take it as a flattery which is considered very negative in these societies or a bold action taken by an ill-advised youth. Requests have been studied in relation to politeness and indirectness. Since direct requests or orders may offend the other by limiting his or her freedom, people often use indirect requests. For example, people may say, “Can I borrow a cup of flour?” instead of saying, “Give me a cup of flour, please.” “Do you have a cup of flour I can borrow?” or “I ran out of flour!” can also be used. These utterances do not look like a request on the surface, but they are considered requests through the conventions (Searle 1979). Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) work on politeness strategies offers a systematic theory on selecting a proper speech act when a speaker needs to threaten the other’s desire for self-determination. All cultures use conventional indirectness. However, few specific forms are equivalent across cultures. The degrees of indirectness (or social meanings) carried by similar (or somewhat equivalent) category are different from culture to culture,

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and relative frequencies of using (or preference for) different strategies vary across cultures. An English politeness marker, ‘please,’ does not find its cross cultural match easily. French s’il vous plait is a close match, but German bitte has much more complex usage. Chinese qing and Japanese kudasai do not have such implication as ‘if you please’. They simply carry the meaning that the speaker is asking for a favor. When making requests, English speakers are known to be more indirect than most other language speakers (Ogiermann 2009). This indirectness should not be confused with indirectness in expressing one’s own opinion or decision. Asians are much more indirect when they express their own feelings or preferences. However, in making requests, Britons and Americans are much more indirect. The reason is not that they are politer than others, but that the English language lacks the grammatical features to compensate for threats to face other than indirectness. Most Asian and African languages have honorific system built in the grammar. Most other European languages have at least V-type pronouns that can carry a certain degree of respect. However, English has no such grammatical scheme. Thus, politeness in English is heavily dependent upon indirectness devises such as conventional indirectness and off-record strategies. This nature of English politeness leads Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), two British scholars, to propose a model of politeness strategies revolving around the degree of indirectness. Koreans and Japanese can go bald-on-record without any effort to mitigate face-threat if they choose a proper level of honorifics. Indirectness plays much more important roles between equals or towards subordinates, since honorifics are not applicable to them. Therefore, when translated to English, Asian requests may sound impolite because they are not indirect enough. Asians who are used to making direct requests in their honorifics-rich languages often make mistakes issuing the same kind of requests in English when they are traveling abroad. Native English-speaking sojourners in the Far East Asia often make the opposite mistakes. The holistic people, as a recipient of a request, sometimes prefer a direct one to an indirect one. Individualists expect people to take care of themselves, so they do not want to be dependent upon others or bothered by others. However, holists believe that helping each other is a necessity. Thus, they are ready to help others and equally ready to owe. A direct request has two positive implications in the holistic society. First, the speaker is optimistic that the other will help, which implies that the speaker includes the other in the whole that he or she belongs to. Second, through a direct request, speakers signal they will ‘owe one’ to the other, which means that they see the relationship as a Kwan-xi or a relationship in which parties are mutually obliged to help one another. Chinese use the term Kwan-xi to refer to a network of people one can call upon when a substantial assistance is needed. The use of direct requests signaling relational closeness and willingness to incur debt is not limited to the Eastern culture. Félix-Brasdefer (2005) report that

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contrary to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) and Leech’s (1983) predictions, in Mexico, direct requests are situation-dependent and expected behavior in a solidarity politeness system. Also in German and Polish cultures, directness is not necessarily considered impolite, but is often seen as a way of expressing closeness and affiliation (Félix-Brasdefer 2005; Pavlidou 2000; Wierzbicka 2003). Rejecting the other’s request is face-threatening in any culture. Particularly, in the holistic society where Kwan-xi relationships are abundant, outright rejection is unimaginable unless the relationship is rock solid like family or “bosom buddy” relationships. Holists, therefore, attempt avoid saying ‘no’ as much as possible. Japanese often use ‘it’s hard’ to mean ‘I can’t help you’. Koreans might nod or say unenthusiastic ‘yes’ to mean ‘I know I have to help you. But, I may not be able to do so.’ Nonverbal cues in these cases transmit much more information than verbal messages.

2.5 Values of speech, silence and argumentativeness The Western society has a stronger faith in verbal communication. From early on, rhetoric and oratory have been studied and practiced. Articulation and eloquence have been believed to reflect the knowledgeability of the speaker, which is closely related to the credibility. The Greco-Roman philosophy and the Christian faith in words have contributed greatly to this tradition. The rest of the world does not put as much faith in speech. The Eastern society, influenced heavily by Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, does not give much credit to speech. Lao-tze teaches, “No amount of words can fathom it: Better look for it within you (Wu 1990; Tao Teh Ching 5)” and “To talk little is natural. High winds do not last all morning (Wu 1990; Tao Teh Ching 23).” Although Confucius himself was an articulate and eloquent communicator, he had a strong faith in simplicity in manners and slowness of speech. He taught, “Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue (Legge 2015, Book 1, ch. 3),” which is directly opposite to the Greco-Roman tradition. Zen Buddhism goes even further to diminish the value of speech with the episode of “the flower sermon.” In one occasion, Buddha had no words but held a lotus flower silently before his disciples, which confused greatly all of them except one who smiled at the flower. Then, Buddha gave the flower to this disciple, and said, “What can be said I have said to you, and what cannot be said, I have given to him.” To Buddhists, the deepest truth cannot be communicated verbally. The Eastern culture takes a holistic approach to communication. The words are only part of, and are inseparable from, the total communication. The total communication is more than Hall’s (1976) concept of context, which basically limited to shared information stemming from the generic cultural knowledge and the specific interaction history. Total communication includes the behavioral elements that co-

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occur with verbalization on the part of the speaker, and the unique abilities or experiences on the part of the hearer. For speakers, whether their words are being fulfilled by their actions is crucial. If their behavior betrays their words, then the words carry no meaning other than they should not be taken seriously. Koreans call such a person ‘flighty’. For hearers, the ability to figure out the meaning, incorporating all available information and knowledge, is crucial. The burden of successful communication is not on the speaker but on the hearer. Those who are often slow to get the meaning of others are called ‘slow’. The reliance on total communication stems from the particularistic culture, or one with the belief in relativity. The holistic worldview in the East gave birth to the belief that one’s situation varies based upon the position or role he or she is taking in the system of a whole. Zhuangzi (Zalta 2015), an ancient Taoist scholar, expounds it well. The universe is a whole without division. However, the development of human language that is fundamentally categorical has led people to cut up the world. When humans invent a category, the thing categorized stands apart from all other categories. Dependent upon what category one belongs to in the holistic network, one tends to see things differently, which subscribe to the principle of particularity of meaning. Faith in relativism and particularistic nature of communication discourages Asians from making excessive efforts to make themselves understood against all the differences – Unless others are in my shoes, they would not understand me; or if they are like me, they will know what I want to say even if I do not say anything. This belief in particular meanings lead Asians to keep silence whenever they feel uncomfortable to verbalize. In the East, silence then is not absence of communication, but a legitimate speech act. Silence carries a variety of meanings: agreement, disagreement, obedience, challenge, avoidance, space-giving, and so on. Westerners become uneasy when silence prolongs between two acquaintances closely at presence to each other. In the East, two friends can sit side-by-side for hours not talking to each other. To Japanese, silence is a marker of close relationships, so that they become quieter as they become closer (Wong 2010). Silence is understood as an eloquent speech act in many other cultures than the Eastern culture, including Akan, Igbo, Western Apache, Hebrew, and Greek (Agyekum 2002). Particularly among Akan of Ghana, silence serves to regulate the social relationships among individuals according to position, status, gender, and age. Its major function is to show reverence, love, or awe (Maltz 1985). Among Akan people, like in the East, silence may signal agreement, a lack of interest, or a manifestation of injured feelings or contempt. In contrast, argumentativeness, the willingness to engage in constructive persuasive debate, and assertiveness, the tendency to claim one’s own rights without hampering others’ rights, are higher in the European and North American cultures (Guirdham 2005). The rhetorical sensitivity and individualistic tendency encourage

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Westerners to express their position clearly and eloquently. Readers who are interested in having a further reading on silence may want to read the chapter 11 (on nonverbal communication) in this volume.

2.6 Expressiveness and emotion The colorfulness of speech is another aspect that varies across cultures. Volubility and rich language are characteristic for everyday discussions in the cultures of Middle East (Gudykunst & Ting-Tommey 1988). For the Arab culture, emphasis is on form over function, affect over accuracy, and image over meaning (Zaharna 1995). While most cultures view language as a means for transferring meanings, Arabs see the role of their language as an art form and religious phenomenon, and tool of expressing their identity. Zaharna (1995) attributes the Arabic expressiveness partly to its oral dominant culture. The literate dominant society tends to rely on the factual accuracy of a message than its emotional resonance (Ong 1980), and favor analytic reasoning over intuitive judgment (Denny 1991). This contrasts to the logic of oral cultures, where a single anecdote can constitute adequate evidence for a conclusion and a specific person or act can embody the beliefs and ideals of the entire community (Gold 1988). Speakers in oral cultures depend heavily on the involvement of their audience, which leads them to invent devices that can enhance audience rapport: repetition, formulaic expression, humor, exaggeration, parallelism, phonological elaboration, special vocabulary, puns, metaphor, and hedge. (Feldman 1991; Gold 1988). Within the American society, African Americans are known to be much more colorful, intense, expressive, and emotional (Kochman 1981). European Americans have faith in individualism that guarantees others’ respect for one’s own opinion. Since these people just look for others’ affirmation of their essential worth and dignity, they do not attempt to force others to agree with them (Carbaugh 1988; Ray 2009). In African American culture, one’s sense of selfhood is rooted in one’s community. African American, therefore, does not seek individual dignity or respect, but desire the community’s confirmation of one’s authentic self, that is, audience involvement and rapport (Rawls 2000). In this respect, African Americans share a similar motivation with Arabs. The mainstream American culture is much less expressive or emotional compared to the African American culture or the Arabic culture. Even less expressive or emotional a culture is Japan that has a strong rule of emotional display (Matsumoto 1996). The Japanese culture is often called the culture of considerateness: People are raised to suppress their individual desires or emotions not to bother others who value serenity. Koreans and Chinese do not have this rule, which makes them much more honest to their feelings. Koreans and Chinese are not expressive or emotional as an individual speaker, but tend to let their emotions known in private conversations. Japanese, therefore, think these neighbors are unbearably noisy.

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3 Culture and people 3.1 To know culture is to use it As we have discussed above, verbal behaviors are different across cultures in a variety of ways. Then, a question arises, “What of culture causes the differences?” People often attribute the differences to norms: Different societies have different cultural norms that ‘program the mind of individuals’ in a way distinguished from other categories of people (Hofstede 1991). This normative view assumes that individuals do not have other options than following the norms partly due to automatized reaction and partly due to the fear of social sanction. However, speech acts are calculated social behaviors, which is often compared to a game, the language game (Wittgenstein 1953). The rules of games are not normative rules but constitutive ones (Austin 1962). Such rules simply define the components of a game, and players make use of these rules when they play the game. Asians are neither required to communicate high-context by the cultural norm, nor confined to high-context communication only. They all know how to develop low-context messages, and they actually often practice low-context communication. They choose between high and low context messages according to their game plan or communication purpose. The opposite is also true. The same rule applies to Europeans. They choose between different contextual messages following their communication goal. In short, verbal communication or linguistic behavior is always code-choice, regardless of whether it is studied within a speech community or across speech communities. To know the differences between one’s own culture and other cultures is important. This knowledge, however, should not be considered as categorical or dichotomous. If American sojourners in Japan know that Japanese love a quiet conversation, they learned about this culture only half-way. To act like a Japanese, they have to know when to lower voice and when to get excited. Code-choice can be influenced by many different elements. One of the most important elements underneath code-choice is relational identity. What makes people choose elaborate or restricted code is not their linguistic knowledge or familial constraints, but their identity in relation to their fellow speech community members (Bernstein 1972). Likewise, Easterners choose high-context communication to reinforce the high-level of commonality between each other. However, when they present a proposal to a potential business partner, their message is well-elaborated. They employ much lower-context communication when they need to show that there is not much commonness between them. In most cultures, people choose verbal communication styles according to their projected or subjective (not the current or objective) position within the given network of relationship. Some live in a society where they encounter more occasions that need to make the relationship closer, whereas others live in a society in which they have more instances that require their identities separated.

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3.2 Dynamics of culture and changes over time The vast majority of our knowledge on the cultural differences in verbal communication was obtained in the second half of the twentieth century. The question arises whether these differences will persist over time. The information technology is developing and communication channels are multiplying rapidly. Younger generations spend more time contacting similar age groups in other cultures than learning from their older generation. As the development of information technology accelerates, geographic boundaries will not be as strong a barrier as they used to be. Aghagolzadeh and Asadpour (2011) study and report that people’s use of address terms in Persia (i.e., Iran) has changed significantly after the revolution in 1979, which began to dismantle the traditional caste system. The solidary semantic began to play a much more important role than the power semantic. This is consistent with Brown and Gilman’s (1960) explanation that rising egalitarianism weakens the power semantic. Ofulue (2011) argues that it is important to document address systems for preservation since culturally accepted norms are eroding rapidly in Nigeria due to the lack of kinship address terms in English. Lim and Giles (2007) report that even one year of age difference among college students makes difference in the choice of address term and language style. Earlier, Irvin-Tripp (1972) observed that status difference is more important than age in the choice of address term in Korea. However, as the Korean society has grown less authoritarian over past two decades, age difference has slowly replaced status difference as the prime determinant of the formality of language including address terms. Chen (2010) and Li (2009b) report that Chinese address system is still heavily influenced by hierarchical structure implemented by the Confucian system two thousand years ago. However, Chen and Yang (2010) find that Chinese have changed drastically in responding to compliments. Compared to an earlier study done by Chen (1993), which observed overwhelming rejection of compliments, Chen and Yang observed overwhelming accept of compliments. Xi’an Chinese now accept compliments as much as do speakers of many Western languages such as English and German. They attribute this change to the influence of the Western culture.

4 Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the development of the research on the cultural differences and similarities in verbal communication. Researchers over the past five to six decades have accumulated enough data to claim that people across cultures use different linguistic practices and communication styles. However, these differences are not distinct and pervasive enough to support rigid cultural dichotomies. One may say, “Japanese love to go low-context;” however, labeling the Eastern culture a high-context culture, opposite to the Western low-context culture, is an oversimplification. Cultures are different but they are not divided.

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Disjunctive approaches hinders intercultural communication by instilling stereotypes in people’s mind. On the other hand, overemphasizing the similarities, ignoring the differences, inevitably fosters ethnocentrism. Universalists tend to think their way is the most natural and right, and any deviation from it is a sign of primitiveness. The attempt to ‘manufacture’ universal theories is to be misguided by the researcher’s own cultural bias no matter how many others cultures are accounted for. For instance, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory explores more than a dozen of languages other than English. The theory, however, has encountered a number of problems in explaining the majority of non-Western cultures (Haugh 2005). The cultural awareness should go both ways: We are different, yet we have a lot in common.

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Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula. 2000. Telephone conversations in Greek and German: Attending to the relationship aspect of communication. In Helen Spencer-Oatey (ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures, 121–140. London: Continuum. Qian, Househeng. 1996. Greetings and partings in English and Chinese: A contrastive study of linguistic routines and politeness. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2000. 'Race' as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: W. E. B. DuBois's 'Double Consciousness' Thesis Revisited. Sociological Theory 18. 242–274. Ray, George B. 2009. Language and interracial communication in the U.S.: Speaking in black and white. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Sapir, Edward. 1929. The status of linguistics as a science. Language 5. 207–214. Reprinted in David G. Mandelbaum (ed.), 1983. The selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality, 160–166. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schegloff, Emanuel A. & Harvey Sacks. 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica 8. 289–327. Searle, John. 1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sugimoto, Naomi. 1997. A Japan-U.S. comparison of apology styles. Communication Research 24. 349–369. Tang, Chen Hsin & Grace Qiao Zhang. 2009. A contrastive study of compliment responses among Australian English and Mandarin Chinese speakers. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 325–345. Ting-Toomey, Stella. 1999. Communicating Across Cultures. New York; London: The Guilford Press. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940. Science and linguistics. Technology Review 42. 227–231, 247–248. Reprinted in John B. Carroll (ed.), 1956. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, 207–219. Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press of MIT/New York: Wiley. Wierzbicka, Anna. 2003. Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (2 nd edition). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110220964 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell. [2 nd Edition 1958]. Wong, Ngan Ling. 2010. Silent communication of Japanese society. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press. Wu, John C. H. 1990. Lao Tze Tao Teh Ching (Translation). Shambhala Pocket Classics. Zaharna, Rhonda S. 1995. Bridging cultural differences: American public relations practices and Arab communication patterns. Public Relations Review 21. 241–255. Zalta, Edward N. 2015. Zhuangzi. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095–5054. Last access 23 Nov., 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ zhuangzi/.

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9 Interpersonal communication and relationships across cultures Abstract: Interpersonal communication describes how two people use psychological, communicative, relational, nonverbal, contextual, and discourse strategies to conduct their relationships. When two people from different cultures communicate, often this imposes several challenges to communication. This essay probes several phenomena including cultural differences in face, self-disclosure, and the communication of intercultural couples. Representative studies for each of these interpersonal processes are summarized. There is also a discussion of how the study of these interpersonal processes between people from different cultures has extended into the new social media. Toward the end of this chapter we discuss the strengths and limitations of the study of interpersonal processes between people from different cultures and propose directions for future research. Keywords: intercultural interaction, culturally-based face needs, cultural constructions of interpersonal processes, cultural differences in disclosure, the communication of intercultural couples, culture and the social media

For effective communication to occur, we must focus on the process of our communication with strangers. When we are mindful, we can make conscious choices as to what we need to do in the particular situation in order to communicate effectively. Gudykunst, 2004

1 Introduction Following Burleson (2009), interpersonal communication is defined as social interaction based on producing and interpreting messages to create shared meanings and to accomplish desired social goals. The core meaning of interpersonal communication continues to describe how two people use psychological, communicative, relational, nonverbal, contextual, and discourse strategies to conduct their relationships. While historically some scholars have not made a distinction between the terms intercultural and cross-cultural communication, we adopt Gudykunst’s framework (2003). In this tradition, Levine, Park and Kim (2007: 208) describe: “Cross-cultural communication involves comparing and contrasting communication patterns of people of one culture with communication patterns observed in people from a different culture. Alternatively, intercultural communication deals with the interaction between people of different cultures.” DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-009

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In 2010, New Directions in Interpersonal Communication Research was published charting a path for innovations in the study of interpersonal communication (Smith & Wilson 2010). In the opening essay, Smith and Wilson identify evolving parameters in the study of interpersonal communication including developmental processes which focus on changes in interpersonal perceptions over time, symbolic processes dealing with the management and perception of identity, and interaction processes focusing on mutual influence. We expand their conceptualization to include macro-level interpersonal social processes such as social and behavioral norms, power, status and role differences, culturally based face-needs, and structural relationships. Several authors in the New Directions volume appear to operate on the assumption that interpersonal behaviors are pancultural and that culture mediates interpersonal processes. This claim of panculturality continues to be contested ground meriting further investigation (See Heine 2005; Sedikides, Gaertner & Toguchi 2003). While a number of scholars have focused on the issue of western bias in intercultural research (e.g., Kim 2002; Park & Levine 1999), Yoshitaka Miike (2010) has argued that the Western paradigm for interpersonal behavior is often treated as the human paradigm resulting in the trivialization of non-western versions of experience. More recently, Chang and Chen (2015) called for rethinking the dualistic and often reductivistic paradigm in cross cultural studies of interpersonal communication focusing instead on unity in diversity. Scholars studying communication between people from different cultures often come to the hard realization that available theories, measures, and research designs do not work in the same way in other cultural contexts and that concepts being investigated are not equivalent (Levine et al. 2007). A classic example of this problem is the controversy over selfconstrual. Growing evidence suggests a problem with self-construal conceptualization and measurement (Bresnahan et al. 2005). Problems such as this suggest the need for re-examining cultural constructions of interpersonal processes to see both what they share and how they differ. This chapter focuses on symbolic processes dealing with self-presentation and some productive and dysfunctional interactive processes that are part of interpersonal communication across cultures and in intercultural situations. The discussion focuses on face and facework, self-disclosure and the communication of intercultural couples. Representative studies for each of these interpersonal processes are summarized. There is also a discussion of how the study of these interpersonal processes between people from different cultures has extended into the new social media. Toward the end of this chapter we discuss the strengths and limitations of the study of interpersonal processes between people from different cultures and propose directions for future research.

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2 Symbolic social processes in interpersonal communication across cultures Smith and Wilson (2010) describe interpersonal communication as a symbolic process dealing with self-presentation. Scholars consider how people in different cultures derive symbolic meanings to fulfill their self-presentational needs. This section explores how interpersonal communication practices are performed with the help of culturally-determined values to achieve self-presentation in intercultural and cross-cultural contexts. While early influential scholars such as Miller and Steinberg (1975) discussed cultural and sociological levels of communication, they conceived of interpersonal communication as a process primarily based on unique individualized information. One limitation with this conceptualization is that it is difficult to find a situation where people rely solely either on unique personal-level information or on macro-level cultural knowledge. Cross-cultural communication scholars must explore what kind of role internalized cultural values play in interpersonal communication between people from different cultures.

2.1 Social identity in interpersonal communication An individual’s self-concept derives from knowledge of membership in a social group together with emotional significance attached to that membership. Tajfel 1974: 69

One of most salient symbols for intercultural communication is social identity which deals with people’s self-concept guiding emotions, cognitions, and behaviors to deal with complex intergroup and intragroup relationships. Tajfel (1974) defined social identity as people’s knowledge of belonging to a certain social group marked by emotional attachment. Ting-Toomey (1993) proposed identity negotiation theory in which identity coherence and communicative motivations influence the identity-negotiation process. As an illustration of identity negotiation associated with group membership, Eller, Koschate, and Gilson (2011) investigated how an ingroup-outgroup audience affected embarrassment. In two studies, they found that participants reported higher embarrassment if they imagined their embarrassment was witnessed by ingroup members compared to outgroup members. Further analysis showed that the discrepancy of embarrassment between an ingroup and an outgroup audience disappeared if the outgroup was also perceived as having high status. However, few cultural explanations were offered to clarify these findings. Many studies based on ingroup-outgroup comparison often do not offer enough evidence to show how cultural values account for differences observed between groups. A second conceptual problem is that although identities are important aspects of cross-cultural research, social identities also include other di-

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mensions which are not relevant to cultures (e.g., generational differences, gender, sexual-orientations, social class). People have multiple social identities at the same time and identities related to culture are not always the most salient. Future research should specify what kind of identities are investigated rather than relying on simple ingroup-outgroup comparisons. In addition, researchers need to study conditions where culture-related identities can be overridden by other identities.

2.1.1 Face and facework Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes – albeit an image that others may share. Goffman 1967: 5

Another concept related to interpersonal communication between people from different cultures is face. Based on early scholarship on Chinese face (Hu 1944), Goffman (1967) defined face as a positive social self that a person displays for approval from others. There are two concepts deriving from face: facework as the enactment of strategies dealing with face maintenance and face threat as communicative acts which run contrary to the face needs of self and other (Brown & Levinson 1987). Individuals’ identities are revealed through the presentation of face (Cupach & Imahori 1993). Brown and Levinson (1987) discussed two types of face: negative face, dealing with personal freedom from others’ impositions, and positive face, which deals with desire for social approval and appreciation. Lim and Bowers (1991) proposed a three-dimensional face model: autonomy face about freedom, fellowship face about ingroup inclusion, and competence face about the need to be respected via demonstrating abilities. Most studies have adopted Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework (e.g., Cai & Wilson 2000; Park & Guan 2006; Wilson, Kunkel, Robson, Olufowote & Soliz 2009). In a separate line of research, Ting-Toomey and colleagues have investigated face concerns (e.g., whether an interactant is concerned with his or her self-face, his or her partner’s face, or mutual face shared by a dyad of two interactants) and facework strategies (e.g., giving in, apologizing, or defending) in intercultural and cross-cultural settings (Cocroft & Ting-Toomey 1994; Oetzel, Garcia & Ting-Toomey 2008; Ting-Toomey 2013; Ting-Toomey & Cocroft 1994; Ting-Toomey & Cole 1990). A large number of studies have been cross-cultural comparisons rather than intercultural studies of face behaviors. For example, Park and Guan (2006) found that Chinese are more likely to apologize if they threaten others’ positive face while Americans tend to apologize if they threaten others’ negative face. Cocroft and Ting-Toomey (1994) compared Japanese and American use of facework strategies for compliance requests and found that Americans were more likely to hint, use imposing negative sanctions, self-attribution, and justification strategies. Japanese preferred indirect strategies such as asking polite questions or avoiding direct or-

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ders-requests. Cai and Wilson’s (2000) cross-cultural comparison of Japanese and Americans revealed mixed findings in that Japanese reported greater concern for supporting other’s positive face than Americans but also tended to threaten others’ positive face more than Americans. Oetzel et al. (2008) found similar relationships between face concerns and facework strategies in situations of conflict in the four cultures examined. Very few studies have examined face and facework in interpersonal communication between people from different cultures. One exception is the work of Zhu (2014) who studied face concerns of Chinese international students finding that Chinese students’ sensitivity to the face of others depends on the others’ group membership and the Chinese students’ own face needs. However, the specific mechanism for how face and facework operates in an intercultural communication context still remains to be studied. A second problem of many cultural studies of facework is their de-emphasis of interpersonal relationships. For example, Cocroft and Ting-Toomey (1994) only examined facework strategies used in a hypothetical acquaintance situation. Oetzel et al. (2008) asked participants to recall a conflict with someone of same-sex and same-cultural group and measured the associations between face concerns and facework strategies. Cai and Wilson (2000) investigated how cultures (the U.S. and Japan) and relational types (same-sex friend and acquaintance) influenced face threat and face protection across different scenarios. Interpersonal relationships in most face studies tend to be over-simplified as status and intimacy differences between a dyad of interactants. Since interpersonal communication is conceptualized as a complex developmental and interactional process (Smith & Wilson 2010), most previous studies of face and facework do not address the complex and interactive nature of interpersonal relationships. Another issue is that most face studies deal with psychological processes such as perceptions or behavioral intentions rather than message components. For examples, Cocroft and Ting-Toomey (1994) and Oetzel et al. (2008) investigated facework strategies (behavioral intentions), and Park and Guan (2006) measured face concerns (perceptions) and likelihood to apologize (behavioral intention) in hypothetical situations. In contrast, Cai and Wilson (2000) asked participants to write messages they would say in hypothetical compliance-gaining scenarios and they coded message qualities. Even so, this is a snapshot in time and does not capture the full impact of turn-by-turn intercultural interaction. Future studies should examine the message components related to face concerns in intercultural and cross-cultural contexts. Finally, most face studies do not consider how face influences people’s interpersonal communication on a macro-sociological basis. Goffman (1967) described face as a symbolic social resource demonstrated in public which interacts with social rituals and cultural values. Face is also societal communicative capital in all cultures while current studies only consider it as symbolic exchange in a dyad. Especially in collectivistic cultures, the conceptualization of face might be com-

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pletely different from Western ideas of face that is based on positive self-image. Zhu (2014) proposed a new idea – collective face – defined as an individual’s need for a collective positive image for his or her salient community (e.g., a nation or a social group) that is socially and culturally a part of self. Future studies might also explore face in interpersonal relations beyond the micro dyadic level of analysis in cultural contexts and what are the boundary conditions for face in interpersonal communication between people from different cultures.

3 Interpersonal processes in intercultural communication To this point, the majority of studies of interpersonal communication based on culture have been cross-cultural comparative studies examining how a relational construct is used by people in different cultures (e.g., troubles talk and marital satisfaction for couples in Japan compared couples to the US, Taniguchi & Kaufman 2014; Euro-Canadian versus Chinese-Canadian dating relationships, Marshall 2010). Where possible, our discussion will focus on interpersonal communication between people from different cultures. Three classes of processes have been studied in interpersonal communication including strategies of relational information management, dysfunctional processes described through the metaphor of the dark side of communication, and relational maintenance processes.

3.1 Relational management strategies When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Maya Angelou, from brainyquote.com

Maya Angelou’s simple observation says something profound about the need of sharing information in situations of interpersonal communication between people from different cultures. Often these exchanges are tenuous and uncertain as people with different cultural backgrounds assess their level of relational commitment to the other in the context of family, friends, and differing social values. Productive processes in this context include the push-and-pull between trust and self-disclosure coupled with privacy management and different meanings of privacy, degree of accommodation and immediacy, and expression of social support. These interpersonal processes take on additional difficulty in intercultural communication. We focus this discussion of information management strategies on the phenomenon of self-disclosure in intercultural communication and cross-cultural comparisons. Self-disclosure is defined as the “process of making the self known to other persons” (Jourard & Lasakow 1958: 91). Most authorities agree that mutual

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self-disclosure is essential to the development of close interpersonal relationships (Altman 1975; Derlaga, Winsted, Wong & Greenspan 1987; Dindia 1997; Levesque, Steciuk & Ledley 2002; Petronio 2012). Gudykunst (1985) similarly described the importance of disclosure for close intercultural friendships. Chen and Nakazawa (2009) operationalize self-disclosure as intention, depth, amount, valence, and honesty/accuracy of the information that is disclosed to another. Interpersonal communication between people from different cultures poses a problem for successful information management where disruptive errors are likely to occur, possibly resulting in negative attribution (Bilbow & Yeung 1998). For example, the boundary between privacy and disclosure becomes much more strained and complex in intercultural communication because of different standards for privacy and different choices about whether, when, what, and how much to disclose (Ensari & Miller 2002; Miltgen & Peyrat-Guillard 2014; Petronio 2012). The majority of intercultural studies on disclosure to this point have been survey studies, recall or narrative studies revealing self-disclosure, or studies based on response to a hypothetical scenario asking whether participants or the person described would be likely to disclose in this situation. Early on, at a time when there were very few Chinese international students in US universities, Wolfson and Pearce (1983) conducted a quasi-experimental study of intercultural disclosure manipulating low and high levels of disclosure asking Chinese and American participants to write comments completing a conversation. While this investigation did not involve relational closeness, participants were prompted to think about what they would disclose. The study showed that Chinese felt that the high-disclosure situation imposed more obligation on them to act compared to Americans. However, they expressed high discomfort in responding. Chinese participants also saw both high and low disclosure conversations as less harmonious and rated the high disclosure conversation more negatively than Americans. Wolfson and Pearce were forced to speculate on how self-disclosure operated for Chinese as so little was known at that time. In the years that followed, scholars engaged in formative descriptive crosscultural research about self-disclosure in other countries. A large number of studies have compared cross-cultural differences in self-disclosure (Fitzpatrick et al. 2006; Horenstein & Downey 2003; Kito 2005; Maier, Zhang & Clark 2013; Wheeless, Erickson & Behrens 1986; Won-Doornink 1985). For example, Gudykunst and Nishida (1983) and later Nakanishi (1986) found that compared to Americans, Japanese, especially Japanese women, preferred lower levels of self-disclosure. In 1995, GuoMing Chen published a study comparing the self-disclosure of Americans compared to Chinese based upon 4 target identities and discussion of 6 topics. He also measured self-disclosure using the Barnlund (1975) Self-disclosure Scale. Chen found that Americans showed more disclosure for all identities and all topics compared to Chinese and compared to all other groups, American women showed the most disclosure with intimates. Many other similar studies present comparative

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portraits of cross-cultural similarities and differences in self-disclosure behavior (e.g., Chen & Nakazawa 2009; Croucher et al. 2010; Maier, Zhang & Clark 2013). Because of the practical difficulty of obtaining self-disclosure statements occurring between intercultural relational partners in actual interaction, many studies have taken recall approaches or narrative analysis of interviews (Gottman & Levenson 1985). Getting closer to examination of self-disclosure as an interpersonal-intercultural process, Brummett and Steuber (2015) examined self-disclosure processes of inter-racial partners in the U.S. This study was based on reported disclosure obtained during interviews with only one relational partner. Using Communication Privacy Manipulation Theory (Petronio 2012, 2013), they examined selfdisclosure processes through the 5 criteria defined in this theory including culture, gender, motive, context, and risk-benefit ratio. Processes of interest included the nature of disclosure about the inter-racial partnership to others, what was disclosed, and one partner’s perceived response of their relational partner to the fact that something private had been revealed. Tara Marshall (2010) conducted a dyadic analysis of responses provided by 60 Chinese-Canadian college dating couples on a survey study measuring relational intimacy and self-disclosure to relational partners.

3.1.1 Intercultural self-disclosure online You're talking about a younger generation, Generation Y, whose interpersonal communication skills are different from Generation X. The younger generation is more comfortable saying something through a digital mechanism than even face to face. Erik Qualman from www.brainyquote.com

Online self-disclosure has been studied extensively. For example, Loiacono (2015) examined user personality traits associated with willingness to disclose on social network sites. As in studies of interpersonal communication offline, there is a heightened tension between privacy concerns and self-disclosure online because of the extent of easy transmission of any information posted online (Shih, Hsu, Yen & Lin 2012). Initial interactions between strangers online often involve significant reciprocal disclosure compared to FtF (face-to-face) initial interactions which tend to be more guarded (Barak & Gluck-Ofri 2007; Jiang, Bazarova & Hancock 2011). More recently, Reed, Spiro, and Butts (2015) have data mined Facebook users privacy behaviors to study attitudes to self-disclosure with nearly one million Facebook users. Their preliminary findings suggest that more gender egalitarian societies (e.g., Sweden) perceive fewer threats associated with online self-disclosure. Most intercultural studies of online disclosure have focused on the amount and intimacy of disclosure often comparing FtF disclosure with disclosure occurring online (Nguyen, Bin & Campbell 2012; Valkenburg, Sumter & Peter 2011). Some studies (e.g., Lee, Noh & Koo 2013) have focused on how disclosure is conducted

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online in a single country as in the case of college students in Korea. Yu (2014) studied gender differences in FtF versus email self-disclosure with Chinese students showing that females self-disclosed more than males in both contexts whereas males disclosed more to close friends in FtF contexts. Tokunaga (2009) extended this question to study the impact of personal individualism and collectivism comparing online with FtF self-disclosure for domestic and international students in the U.S. While self-disclosure was relatively similar for individualists in both contexts, people who associated more strongly with collectivism showed more FtF disclosure and less online. Tokunaga (2009: 143) explains: “The negative bias toward self-disclosures (for collectivists online) may be more salient in computer-mediated than FtF relationships because there is less social comfort from the diminished identity cues.” Online, there is also a greater threat of unintentionally damaging other-face. Luo (2014) conducted a cross-cultural comparative study of the depth and breadth of self-disclosure in China and the United States finding that Chinese students, especially Chinese women disclosed more than Americans both on the breadth of topics and the depth of revelation. Pflug (2011) found that Indians disclosed less than Germans on facebook but used more emoticons (also see Schwab & Greitemeyer 2014).

3.2 Intercultural couples and relational maintenance We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it. John Lennon from brainyquote.com

Hiew et al. (2015: 685) observe: “Partners from different cultures are likely to have divergent life experiences that produce differences in standards. The ability to manage these differences in standards seems likely to be central to intercultural couples’ relationship satisfaction.” Relational maintenance suggests several phenomena, including both stability and quality of the relationship, level/state of the relationship and degree of intimacy, resolving relational difficulties, and balancing the need for connection with the need for personal freedom (Gaines & Agnew 2003; Molina, Estrada & Burnett 2004; Romano 2008; Rosenblatt 2009). As with studies of self-disclosure and culture, many studies of couples have been cross-cultural comparisons of couples’ behavior in different countries based on recall techniques, content analyses, and use of self-report measures (Dion & Dion 1993; Epstein, Chen & Beyder-Kamjou 2005; Gao 2001; Kamo 1993; Lieu 2009; Reiter & Gee 2008; Ting-Toomey 1991). In 2008, Terri Karis and Kyle Killian edited a seminal work studying the communication of intercultural couples. This is the go-to book for understanding the complexity of communication experienced by intercultural couples with outstanding essays included. As an example of the cross-cultural compar-

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ison approach, a recent study by Yum, Canary, and Baptist (2015) compared cultural variation in relational maintenance for couples in Malaysia, Singapore, and the United States. Their online survey measured relational maintenance strategies, equity in relationships, and developed country profiles for these three countries based on traditional, secular, survival (security), and self-expressive (freedom) cultural values. A growing body of studies has focused on actual communication in intercultural romantic relationships. A study by Cools (2006) moved squarely in this direction. Cools focused on the adaptive difficulty of being a partner in an intercultural couple living in the spouses’ home country. While Cools did not directly observe couples’ interaction, she recorded and content analyzed interviews describing their experience. Of great interest is their discussion of cultural codes that the foreign partner needed to know to be integrated into Finnish society including indirectness, silence, and appropriate disclosure. Hiew et al. (2015) similarly conducted a survey study of four kinds of couples, 33 western couples, 36 Chinese couples, and 54 intercultural couples (37 with a western male and Chinese female partner and 17 with a Chinese male and western female partner). They measured emotional closeness, communication of sharing, and relational satisfaction. All-western couples showed the highest value for emotional closeness followed by intercultural couples with all-Chinese couples showing the least emotional closeness. The same pattern was found for relational satisfaction. As might be expected, family responsibility was highest for all-Chinese couples and in the intercultural couple with a Chinese male/western female. Wu (2014) conducted interviews with 6 White/Chinese couples and narrative analysis identified challenges faced by these intercultural couples including strong opposition from families, language and communication barriers, negative social reactions such as discrimination and stigma, different views about child rearing and family maintenance, and family disapproval about the unmarried couple living together. These studies point to the necessity of studying the actual communication exchanged between intercultural couples. Another element of interpersonal behavior in intercultural couples is unmanaged conflict in intimate intercultural couples. This will be explored briefly in the following section on dysfunctional interpersonal behaviors.

3.3 The dark side of communication Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for. Bob Marley, from brainyquote.com

The dark side of communication is meant to describe dysfunctional behaviors which threaten interpersonal relationships (Cupach & Spitzberg 2007). These include such phenomena as honesty versus deception, relational turbulence, stigma and bullying, relational dissolution, troubles talk in relationships, face threat, and

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regulation of infidelity. Numerous studies have examined the negative impact of unmanaged conflict in intercultural relationships (Oetzel, Garcia & Ting-Toomey 2008; Taniguchi & Kaufman 2014). Focusing on conflict management by intercultural couples, Ting-Toomey (2008) described that conflict arises from different cultural expectations held by the couple, different expectations about the meaning of being a couple, the struggle between connection with one’s partner and personal freedom, and different approaches to what to do in situations of conflict. Ting Toomey (2008: 47) observed: “While low-context cultural members tend to use confrontational, competitive, dominative, defending and assertive communication styles, high-context cultural members tend to use accommodation, obliging, avoiding, defusing, compromising, forbearance, and passive-aggressive conflict styles.” Ting-Toomey ends her chapter on a happy note by discussing 5 relational rewards that intercultural couples are likely to experience if they persist in their relationships. These include clarifying their own values and prejudices, expanding their cultural frames of reference, experiencing more cultural vitality from their exposure to the culture of the other, weathering stigma and strengthening their relationship, and raising resourceful multicultural children. Along the same lines of examining marital satisfaction and conflict, Cheng (2010) studied 201 intercultural couples (Taiwanese husband and SE Asian or Chinese wives) living in Taiwan. She found that husbands used avoiding style to manage conflict whereas wives used integrating style. Both partners disliked competing style. Marital satisfaction for both husbands and wives was associated with use of harmonious conflict management strategies. This result is consistent with findings based on the Withdraw and Demand Relational Communication Model (Christensen & Heavey 1993).

4 Implications and directions for future intercultural communication studies There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight that does not arise out of what went before. ‘If I have seen further than other men,’ said Isaac Newton, ‘it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.’ Isaac Asimov

There are a number of conceptual and methodological challenges for research investigating interpersonal communication between people from different cultures. As we have shown through the numerous studies cited in this chapter, the majority of studies examined have largely measured attitude change based on recall techniques, scenarios, or self-report surveys rather than examining interpersonal behaviors in actual intercultural communication between close friends and intimate partners. While recall, scenario, self-report, and interview studies of intercultural friends and couples have been informative, new approaches for studying interper-

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sonal-intercultural processes are needed. Most studies of intercultural communication have limited investigation to cross-cultural comparisons of speech acts, comparison of mean scores for attitudes about interpersonal processes, or studies investigating whether some cultural orientation (e.g., self-construal) predicts certain behaviors. At the end of the day, only a few studies have examined interpersonal processes in actual communication between intercultural friends and couples. The same problem also characterizes computer mediated communication (CMC) intercultural studies. Many CMC studies claiming to measure interpersonal communication between people from different cultures end up only measuring attitude change. Often no evidence is provided for what mechanisms in communication between people from different cultures contribute to an outcome. This is a missed opportunity. We as a field need to dig deeper into interpersonal communication between people from different cultures. How can we study interpersonal communication between people from different cultures more effectively? In general, most current studies dealing with social identity and face in intercultural and cross-cultural settings need to address the following issues in the future: 1. explore a new operationalization of social identity rather than limiting investigation to the ingroup-outgroup dichotomy; 2. focus on intercultural research rather than cross-cultural comparisons alone; 3. re-conceptualize and expand investigation of interpersonal relationships instead of over-simplifying interpersonal relationships as typologies or intimacy degrees; 4. emphasize the message components rather than only measuring psychological processes or behavioral intentions; and 5. consider macro-social processes of collective symbolic exchange in addition to examination of the dyadic level of analysis. One way in which interpersonal-intercultural processes could be studied would involve revival of an idea that has been around for a long time – observing actual talk between people from different cultures (L. Chen 1995; Carbaugh 2005). Donal Carbaugh (2007: 67), in a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research remarked: “The field of intercultural communication has been criticized for failing to produce studies which focus on actual practices of communication, especially of intercultural encounters. Of particular interest have been cultural analyses of social interactions, as well as analyses of the intercultural dynamics that are involved in those interactions.” Carbaugh’s advice has not been followed in the intervening years. Researchers need to examine how interpersonal processes not just communicative practices are represented in intercultural talk. On this point, Levine, Park and Kim suggest that not all interaction between 2 people from different cultures is intercultural communication. “Only when their communication patterns reflect their corresponding cultural characteristics and assumptions can we treat their interaction as intercultural communication” (2007: 209). One way that we can know what is and what isn’t intercultural communication is to ask intercultural participants for retrospective reflection and description about what they just said to each other and what interpersonal processes are being enacted when people from different cultures communicate with each other.

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Researchers might begin by recording experimentally controlled conversations and use retrospective analysis (Gottman & Levinson 1985) to identify interpersonal processes used by intercultural interactants (Wang, Fussell & Setlock 2009). For example, Nguyen and Fussell (2015) first videotaped intercultural participants’ conversations during a lab-based problem-solving task and then asked each of the two participants to independently review the videotape along with the researcher stopping it after every minute to ask participants to explain moment by moment 1. perception of their own level of understanding of what was going on, 2. perception of their degree of involvement, and 3. assessment of emotional responses they experienced as they communicated with their partner. This technique could be extended to the identification of interpersonal processes, (e.g., I meant that statement to give support (social support) or I was lying about that (deception)). While this data is somewhat more difficult to obtain compared to interview, recall, or survey data it is likely to be more informative about interpersonal processes used by intercultural friends and couples. The points of cultural miscommunication could also be identified in retrospective analysis. For example, intercultural couples could be brought into a research facility and choose one of these topics for discussion while they were videotaped – interference from family, how to discipline a child, their experience of discrimination as an intercultural couple. These topics would be likely to generate couples’ discussion. After the videotaping is over, each participant could review the videotape following the same procedure explained for Nguyen & Fussell (2015). The retrospective analysis technique could also be used to identify and describe interpersonal processes, e.g., deception, self-disclosure, conflict and attempts to manage it, accommodation, etc. In addition, the conversations could also be content analyzed later for presence of interpersonal processes by coders who are independent of the project. These results could be compared with self-reported descriptions from the participants obtained in the retrospective analysis. This would provide a poignant insight into the evidence-based architecture of interpersonal communication between people from different cultures compared to recall and self-report techniques and attitude studies. It is also worthwhile to continue to conduct cross-cultural comparative studies of interpersonal communication processes especially in places that have not been previously studied. For example we know a lot about cross-cultural differences in self-disclosure and many other interpersonal processes for people in Japan compared to the U.S. but we know little about self-disclosure for people in Turkey, Argentina, Myanmar, and many other places (Li 1999). These studies continue to have values as they guide predictions about interpersonal behaviors and serve as an explanatory base for understanding cultural differences which are observed. We have some other ideas about how the study of interpersonal communication between people from different cultures could be advanced. One construct for understanding cultural similarities and differences in intercultural relational main-

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tenance beyond cultural factors such as individualism-collectivism is the concept of intercultural relational mobility especially if measured as an individual trait (Yuki et al. 2007). Participants with low relational mobility are described as fearing rejection and prefer to remain in stable, predictable, and exclusive relationships. Participants high in relational mobility have a greater number of relational choices and more flexibility in affiliating with these relational options. This is an interesting concept that has been only minimally studied and which offers some direction for studying intercultural intimate relationships in future studies. While many contributors in the Smith and Wilson’s 2010 volume were not thinking of intercultural communication, the idea of extending their recommendations to the study of interpersonal communication between people from different cultures is appealing. Based on their suggestions, these recommendations for future interpersonal-intercultural research are offered: extend the evolutionary framework for relationships to research on interpersonal communication in intercultural couples and for their multicultural children (Koerner & Floyd 2010), engage in more investigation based on relational uncertainty and turbulence in intercultural couples and families with multiracial kids (Knobloch 2009; Solomon, Weber & Steuber 2009), and extend the Theory of Motivated Information Management to study intercultural adaptation and intercultural families (Afifi 2010). A final thought is that while we with Isaac Newton stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us, as a field we have to do more than cross-cultural comparisons and attitude studies if we hope to advance understanding of interpersonal communication between people from different cultures.

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10 Emotion display and expression Abstract: In psychology, researchers have attempted to connect emotion to social life because emotion is critical in maintaining and improving social relationships. There are various possible perspectives with which to approach the topic of emotion in research. In this chapter, we discuss emotion and its expressions based on the premise that certain types of emotions are akin to innate psychological and behavioral mechanisms of human beings. We explain what emotions are and how they are displayed as one way to communicate with others socially, and describe how research has been conducted on the topic. We focus on emotional expressions on the face because the face is one of the most prevalent channel of displaying emotions in our daily lives. The role of culture in displaying emotions is also thoroughly discussed based on research evidence because it is one of the best ways to understand emotional expressions of others from different cultural backgrounds. Keywords: emotion, culture, emotion expression, display rules, ingroup advantage

1 Introduction Emotion is critical in understanding the psychological and behavioral mechanisms of human beings; it is also highly communicative. The fact that social relationships are important in our society for a successful life, and that we often have needs for a variety of therapeutic treatments, imply that humans live with emotion and are sometimes overwhelmed by it, regardless of whether or not we are aware of it consciously. Identifying emotion and understanding how it is displayed is important because it improves the quality of our social interactions and communications. This chapter explores the nature of emotion and emotional expressions in relation to culture, and contains three sections: a definition of emotion, emotional expressions on the face, and emotional expressions and culture. We also briefly review evolutionary theory underlying emotion research and discuss how culture interacts with displaying emotions. We begin with a discussion of defining emotion.

2 Emotions 2.1 Definition of emotion In general, emotion is defined by laypersons as “a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others” (Oxford EngDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-010

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lish Dictionary). This standard definition implies interesting characteristics about the nature of emotions because emotions are innate; we are born with them. Emotions are often elicited during social interactions and aid in communicating with others by sending and receiving messages through their expressions, which can vary depending on context. Of course, many people have their own definition of emotions, and there is no perfect way of defining or approaching emotions. We define emotions as transient, bio-psych-social reactions to events that have consequences for our welfare and potentially require immediate actions (Matsumoto & Hwang 2012). Emotions are biologically residual products of our evolutionary history, providing the platform for universality in the domain of their immediate reactions (Matsumoto & Juang 2013). Emotions are tied to immediate, biological reactions in that they are elicited along with physiological responses from the central and autonomic nervous systems (Matsumoto & Hwang 2012; Matsumoto & Juang 2013). Because emotions are involved in specific mental processes from their elicitation to their regulation, they are psychologically related to mental activities. Emotions are continuously interactive with the environment and context in which they are provoked. The environment can be considered literally as a physical place (e.g., restaurant, office), but also can be infused with cultural meaning in the form of norms, expectations, and tacit agreements applicable to certain groups (e.g., weddings or funerals; see Matsumoto & Juang 2013). Emotions are rapid information processing systems that help us act with minimal conscious deliberation (Tooby and Cosmides 2008). Survival issues such as birth, battle, death, and seduction have been present throughout our evolutionary history, and emotions have aided individuals in adapting to problems that have arisen with minimal conscious cognitive intervention. Emotions are associated with the selection of goals, attention, memory, and management of physiological reactions (Tooby & Cosmides 2008). Regardless of how emotions are defined, we know that we cannot process every single piece of information we perceive and see. If we did not have emotions, we could not make rapid decisions regarding whether to attack, defend, flee, care for others, reject food, or approach something useful. For example, think about a situation in which your friend has to rapidly avoid a car that is coming at him/her, and what your immediate behavioral reactions such as a fearful face or gripping your seat would quickly signal. This immediate reaction may be more efficient than describing the danger verbally. Happiness or joy is another core emotion that is crucial for well-being and social relationships. A major morphological feature of genuine smiles of happiness (Duchenne smiles) involves the raising of the lip corners by the zygomatic muscle and the raising of the cheeks and formation of crow’s feet around the eyes by the orbicularis oculi muscle (Frank, Ekman & Friesen 1993; Soussignan 2002). Smiling with relaxations in the muscles around the mouth and eyes often signals playfulness and affiliation/submission, just as it occurs in chimpanzees. Expressing happiness may be one of the easiest ways to reduce tension in social interactions.

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Smiles often signal no opposition. Think about when you cooked your first meal for a friend and were anxious about its taste. At the moment you saw your friend’s smile of enjoyment, you would not even have to ask your friend’s feedback or worry about it. Are you likely to approach your neighbor who never smiles at you? Probably not, because you might instinctively know you have no signal of being accepted or affiliated with him or her.

2.2 Evolutionary theory of emotion and expression For this chapter, we understand emotions based on evolutionary theory established by Darwin (1872/1998). As a pioneer of emotion theory, Darwin’s contributions have been recognized in three ways (Dewsbury 2009). First he introduced a viable mechanism for evolutionary change and natural selection, explaining the continuum of humans’ involvement over time; he proposed that individual variation in heritable appearances and populations are capable of increasing exponentially. Second, he claimed that evolutionary change occurs by natural causes, and is totally explicable without any inherent purpose or predetermined direction. In other words, environmental changes such as weather, draught, or earthquake force us to develop certain or newly modified functions and features better fitting for survival. This theory of naturalism has influenced many developing disciplines, including not only psychology but also biological and natural sciences. Third, he accumulated massive amounts of supporting evidence across phylogenetic lines, such as data on beetles, barnacles, people from different cultures, etc. (Dewsbury 2009). His endeavors helped us to understand humans in relation to animals as outcomes of nature. Of the three main contributions, Darwin’s argument concerning the continuity between human and nonhuman animals has had a strong impact on understanding emotions. He posited that humans share fundamental, core properties with nonhuman primates, including emotions, despite the unique traits and characteristics that humans are born with. Thus, much of Darwin’s work was about instinctive behavior ranging from the supernatural and theological to the natural. Darwin introduced the study of individual differences within species because such differences were essential for natural selection to work. Darwin believed that emotions and their expressions were functionally adaptive and biologically innate. In particular, Darwin (1872/1998) claimed in his principle of serviceable associated habits that facial expressions are the residual actions of more complete behavioral responses. For example, he suggested that humans express anger by furrowing the brow and tightening the lips with teeth displayed because these actions are part of an attack response. He also believed that all humans, regardless of race or culture, possessed the ability to express emotions on their faces in similar ways. Darwin engaged in a detailed study of the muscle actions involved in emotion and concluded that the muscle actions are universal and their antecedents can be seen in the expressive

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behaviors of nonhuman primates and other mammals. This analysis set the stage for the development of coding systems used in the identification of facial expressions, and these have been central to the empirical literatures. In addition to the principle of serviceable associated habits, Darwin proposed an inhibition hypothesis that people are unable to perfectly simulate facial expressions in the absence of a genuine emotion, and are unable to completely suppress their true expressions when feeling strong emotions, resulting in emotional leakage on the face. Many of his principles and hypotheses regarding emotions were empirically tested and supported by subsequent research, and formed the foundation for recognizing a class of emotions known as “basic emotions” (see Hwang & Matsumoto 2016, for a fuller discussion). These principles suggested by Darwin are crucial in understanding emotional messages in social interactions because unspoken messages sometimes deliver more reliable and meaningful information than words alone. All or most people pursue identifying credible information so that they can make appropriate decisions for themselves; this might be one of the reasons why people do not want to be deceived by others. Understanding emotional signals when interacting with others is useful as one way to improve the quality of social communications.

3 Emotional expressions on the face As humans, we have many ways of sharing signs about our emotions. Facial expressions are one of the most common, but complex, communication channels in our body because our faces consist of many muscles that can produce literally thousands of different types of expressions. The emotions that have been empirically documented to be universally expressed and recognized in the face are anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, and are called basic emotions (Ekman & Friesen 1978). In expressions of those emotions, muscle contractions of the face are under the neural control of two different areas of the brain − one controlling voluntary movements and the other involuntary reactions, called the pyramidal (voluntary) and extrapyramidal tracts, respectively. In order to understand how emotions are elicited and expressed, being aware of the inseparable relationship between basic emotions and the brain is crucial. For example, the left side of the face, controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, appears more emotionally intense (Fernandez-Carriba, Loeches, Morcillo & Hopkins 2002; Hauser 1993). Our brain and autonomic nervous system (ANS) were found to have a close connection in the entire process of experiencing and expressing discrete emotions (Stephens, Christie & Fredman 2010). Neuroimaging studies reported that basic emotions of fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness are represented in the human brain and showed reliable neural correlations with regional brain activations for each of the emotions examined (Vytal & Hamann 2010).

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A recent study documented that the basic emotions are specifically represented via our body in the somatosensory system in universal categorical somatotopic maps (Nummenmaa, Glerean, Har & Hietanen 2014). These strong connections between the elicitation process of emotions and the reactions of our brain to it indicate that emotions are biologically driven. Of course there must be numerous ways that our brain and our nervous system interact with each other in the process of elicitation, perception, and physiological reaction of emotions. However, eventually the outcomes of the emotion elicitation process are expressed via behavioral signals. The face is a fundamental and primary region in which emotions are expressed and managed in social interactions. When emotions are elicited, spontaneously produced expressions are under the neural control of the subcortical areas of the brain. When individuals attempt to control and manage their expressions or emotions, however, those impulses are likely to stem from the cortical motor strip – another mechanism or route. In the next section, we explore emotional expressions on the face as one of the outcomes of the elicitation of emotions in our bodies.

3.1 Research on facial expressions of emotion: Judgment studies Understanding emotions matter in our social life and knowing about them as one of the main characteristics of emotions affects how to deal with them when they occur. Appropriate perception of emotional expressions is crucial in social interaction (Van Kleef, Van Doorn, Heerdink & Koning 2011) because it often determines how to react in the situation, as well as the degree of urgency. Thus, there is no doubt about the importance of the judgment of others’ emotions, attested to by the many studies that have explored this topic. For more than 45 years, much research has been conducted to document the universal recognition of basic emotions. Tomkins conducted the first study demonstrating that facial expressions were reliably judged to be associated with certain emotional states (Tomkins & McCarter 1964), and later studies showed consistent and similar findings (Ekman, Sorenson & Friesen 1969; Izard 1971). Those initial findings were criticized, however, because the evidence for universality (i.e., high levels of cross-cultural agreements in judgments) might have occurred because of the influences of mass media (e.g., TV) and shared visual input. To address these potential limitations, Ekman and colleagues conducted two studies with two visually isolated, preliterate tribes in the highlands of New Guinea (Ekman & Friesen 1971; Ekman, Sorenson & Friesen 1969). In their first study, the tribespeople could reliably recognize facial expressions of emotion (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness) posed by westerners; in the second study films of the tribespeople expressing emotions were shown to Americans who had never seen New Guineans before, and the Americans were able to recognize the expressions of the New

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Guineans. Thus the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion in the earlier studies did not occur because of learning through mass media or other shared visual input as the New Guineans had had no exposure to the outside world at that time. Many subsequent studies on the universality of facial expressions of emotion examined judgments of the same facial expressions used in the initial studies and have successfully replicated the universal recognition of emotion in the face (Matsumoto 2001; Matsumoto, Olide, Schug, Willingham & Callan 2009). Later, contempt was also identified as a universally recognized expression in various studies (Ekman & Heider 1988; Matsumoto 1992, 2005). For example, Biehl and colleagues (1997) used stimuli that validly and reliably portrayed emotional expressions, of the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE, Matsumoto & Ekman 1988). They demonstrated that the seven emotions were reliably identified in Hungary, Japan, Poland, Sumatra, the United States, and Vietnam. In addition, a meta-analysis of 168 datasets examining judgments of those emotions in the face and other nonverbal behaviors indicated universal emotion recognition well above chance levels (Elfenbein & Ambady 2002). Even when low intensity expressions are judged, there is strong agreement across cultures in their judgments (Matsumoto et al. 2002). Some of these studies included cross-cultural judgment studies of spontaneous expressions instead of posed ones (Matsumoto et al. 2009), which were convincing because of the ecological validity of the expressions tested. Not only are the seven universal facial expressions reliably recognized (Elfenbein & Ambady 2002; Matsumoto 2001), but cultures are similar in other aspects of emotion judgments as well. For example, there is pancultural similarity in judgments of relative intensity among faces. That is, when comparing expressions, people of different countries agree on which is more strongly expressed (Matsumoto & Ekman 1989). There is also cross-cultural agreement in the association between perceived expression intensity and inferences about subjective experiences (Matsumoto, Kasri, and Kooken 1999), and in the secondary emotions portrayed in an expression (Biehl et al. 1997; Matsumoto & Ekman 1989).

3.2 Research on facial expressions of emotion: Production studies The first study that documented the universal production of facial expressions of emotions was Friesen’s (1972). In that study 25 American and Japanese participants watched highly stressful films (first episode: body mutilation, second episode: sinus surgery) while their spontaneous facial reactions were recorded. The coding of the spontaneous facial behaviors that occurred indicated that the American and Japanese participants displayed emotions such as disgust, fear, sadness, and anger similarly when the participants of the two groups watched the stimuli alone. Although the experimental context did not perfectly match a natural setup, the study

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was worthwhile because it marshaled cross-cultural evidence for the production of emotional expressions, and the emotional stimuli were valid elicitors of the intended emotions. This study provided pioneering evidence that facial expressions of emotion were universally produced when emotions were spontaneously elicited. Many subsequent laboratory studies have provided additional, compelling evidence for the universality of facial expressions of emotion (see Hwang & Matsumoto 2016; Matsumoto, Keltner, Shiota, O’Sullivan & Frank 2008 for reviews). To be sure, examining natural, actual expressions of emotions on the face has been challenging in research because doing so requires many conditions to elicit the targeted emotions reliably. Although there may be no error-free experimental procedure in eliciting emotions, capturing emotions in various natural contexts as much as possible may be one way to observe spontaneous reactions of emotions. To this end, Matsumoto and Willingham’s (2006) study was important, for it assessed expressions produced in a natural context – the Olympic Games. They examined the expressions of 84 judo athletes from 35 countries at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and reported that the first immediate emotional reactions on faces of winners and losers at the completion of their final medal match were consistent with the prototypical expressions of basic emotions. In particular, winners displayed Duchenne, or genuine, smiles while losers displayed sadness, disgust, anger and other negative emotions. As mentioned above, Duchenne smiles are smiles that involve not only the smiling muscle (zygomatic major), which raises the lip corners, but also the muscles surrounding the eyes (orbicularlis oculi), which raise the cheeks, narrow the eyes and the eye cover fold. Many studies have shown that only these types of smiles are correlated with the experienced positive emotion genuinely (see Ekman, Davidson & Friesen 1990 for a review). While there have been many other valuable cross-cultural studies of facial expressions of emotion (Hwang & Matsumoto 2016), the Olympic study was persuasive for several reasons. First, the results of the study were based on spontaneous expressions instead of posed expressions. Many previous studies often had to deal with variations in the basic emotions when testing posed expressions rather than ones naturally produced in an emotional context. Second, the study was derived from individuals from various countries and cultures at the Olympic games. Olympic matches can be considered as special, yet they are part of our reality and are non-experimental. Third, the context of the Olympic matches validly elicited strong emotional experiences and signals. Collectively, the findings were meaningful given that previous research findings documenting the universality of facial expressions of emotions had been mainly tested under laboratory, not field, conditions (albeit in different laboratories using different methodologies with participants from many different cultures around the world, but all converging on the same pattern of results). Thus, today there is robust evidence for the universality of seven facial expressions of emotions.

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3.3 Further evidence for the universal expressions of basic emotions One of the critical challenges to the notion of the biological innateness of emotion is that humans can learn and imitate emotional expressions by observing others. One of many sources of evidence for universality and/or biological innateness of expressions is research comparing the emotional expressions of blind and sighted individuals. Blind individuals, who are limited in observing and imitating others’ behaviors compared to sighted people, are an exceptional group in which to explore the pure effect of biologically wired systems on the universality of emotions. This is especially true for studies involving congenitally blind individuals because they are expected to have limited social learning about how to produce sophisticated facial muscle movements of each emotion because they could not visually learn them from birth. Previous studies have reported on the similarities between blind and sighted individuals in their spontaneous expressions of basic emotions on the face. For example, researchers have early on noted and measured spontaneous facial behaviors when emotions were aroused in blind children (Cole, Jenkins & Shott 1989). Galati and colleagues (2001) documented that there were no significant differences in displaying emotions on the face among congenitally blind and sighted young children. Later they (Galati, Sini, Schmidt & Tinti 2003) also reported that the emotional facial expressions of ten congenitally blind and ten sighted children (8–11 years old) were similar; the frequency of certain facial movements was higher in the blind children than in the sighted children. The studies reviewed above, however, did not directly compare the expressions of blind individuals from different cultures, and most tested posed, not spontaneous, facial expressions in experimental contexts rather than natural, emotionally aroused contexts. These gaps were addressed by a later study of the spontaneous expressions of blind athletes at the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games. Matsumoto and Willingham (2009) examined spontaneous facial expressions of emotions of congenitally and non-congenitally blind judo athletes at these Games, which was a highly intense and emotional event for any athlete. The blind athletes, who came from 23 cultures, produced the same facial configurations of emotion documented in sighted athletes in the same emotionally evocative situations occurring in the 2004 Athens Olympic Games (see Matsumoto & Willingham 2006). Collectively, evidence for the similarity of facial expressions of emotions between blind and sighted individuals is compelling, and suggests that facial expressions of emotion are biologically innate. Studies of congenitally blind individuals have been especially important because it is impossible for congenitally blind individuals to produce by imitation the complicated facial expressions – such an expression involves complex muscle combinations that are activated spontaneously in a fraction of a second when they experience an emotion; they would not have these automatic reactions unless they were born with the capability of experiencing

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and expressing the emotions in the same way as sighted individuals. We believe that these studies provide convincing evidence for biologically based, emotional expressions. In particular, the Olympic data were from players of multi-national countries, which indicate cross-cultural similarities of the basic emotions in spontaneous reactions on faces. Despite various definitions of emotions, none of us can deny their existence and importance in our lives. The issue is how we define and approach them. Based on our approach driven from Darwin’s emotion theory, emotions (known as basic emotions later) and their expressions have evolved across species. Specific emotions are evolutionarily adaptive, biologically innate, and universal across humans and even non-human primates. They are primarily expressed through the face. Much empirical evidence has supported Darwin’s ideas, as we discussed above. The pan-cultural recognition of emotional expressions has been supported not only via facial expressions of emotions, but also through vocal cues of the basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust). Pell and colleagues, for example, reported that voices of the basic emotions were recognizable regardless of an individual’s culture or linguistic ability among English, German, Arabic language groups (Pell, Monetta, Paulmann & Kotz 2009). We believe that for further evidence of universal emotions, non-face channels would be worthwhile to explore.

4 Emotional display and culture 4.1 Culture We define (human) culture as a unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted across generations (Matsumoto 2007; Matsumoto & Juang 2013) although there are many definitions of culture depending on researchers, just like emotion. One of the major functions of culture is to maintain social order, so culture creates rules, guidelines, values, and norms concerning the regulation of emotion (Matsumoto & Juang 2013). Because emotions are primary motivators of behavior and have important social functions (Keltner & Haidt 1999), cultures create norms concerning the regulation of emotion to facilitate social coordination (Matsumoto & Hwang 2012). Cultures regulate emotions to calibrate what we become emotional about and adapt the reactions that occur when elicited. Unique human cognitive abilities including language, memory, and abstract thinking allow cultures to elaborate on human emotions by facilitating the construction of culturally based emotions and their associated meanings. Norms provide guidelines for expected behaviors, thinking, and feelings derived from the cultural meanings ascribed to contexts, relationships, and events. They identify the range of permissible behavior that allows groups to function effectively. Cultures encourage adherence to norms and create sanctions against infractions, which aids individuals and groups in negotiating the complexity of hu-

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Fig. 10.1: The function of emotion and expression vis-à-vis the function of culture. © Matsumoto and Hwang (2016).

man social life. By regulating emotions via norms, cultures ensure that behaviors follow culturally prescribed scripts, increasing social coordination and decreasing social chaos, as illustrated in Figure 10.1 (for more details see also Hwang & Matsumoto in press; Matsumoto & Juang in press).

4.2 Cultural display rules: Cultural differences in expressing emotions Cultural display rules are cultural norms learned early in life that govern the regulation of expressive behaviors depending on social contexts. Cultural display rules help us manage the appropriateness of emotional display in social situations when there is the need to do so in a particular situation (Diefendorff & Greguras 2009; Matsumoto 1990, 1993). The rules are conventions that determine when, where, and how expressive behaviors should be conveyed (Saarni 1984) and are different across cultures, contexts, and interactants. Social contexts across different cultures have been an important factor in understanding cultural display rules in relation to facial expressions of emotions. Cultural display rules are important as they explain how cultures can interact with emotions that are biologically-based (uncontrollable and involuntary). The rules make it possible to understand how universal emotions can be expressed when the elicited emotional reactions need to be managed in a socially proper

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manner. These rules center on the appropriateness of displaying each of the emotions in particular social circumstances. The rules are learned early and dictate how the universal emotional expressions should be modified according to the social situation. By adulthood, use of these rules is automatic, having been very well practiced. There are multiple ways in which display rules can act to modify expressions: 1. Express less than actually felt (Deamplification), 2. Express more than actually felt (Amplification), 3. Show nothing (Neutralization), 4. Show the emotion but with another emotion to comment on it (Qualification), 5. Mask or conceal feelings by showing something else (Masking), 6. Show an emotion when they really don’t feel it (Simulation). Friesen’s (1972) classic cross-cultural study described earlier demonstrated the existence of display rules. In that study, American and Japanese participants viewed stressful films alone and later in the presence of an experimenter. When alone, they displayed the same expressions of disgust, anger, fear, and sadness. When with the experimenter, however, there were dramatic differences. While the Americans tended to continue to show their negative feelings, many Japanese smiled. Friesen concluded that cultural display rules were operating then, which prevented the free expression of negative emotions in the presence of another person in the Japanese culture. A later study on display rules by Matsumoto (1990) was conducted, which was meaningful as it was the first cross-cultural study that directly measured differences between two cultures on their display rules. In the study, Americans and Japanese were shown two examples of six universal facial expressions of emotion, and rated the appropriateness of displaying each in eight social contexts. Americans rated some negative emotions in in-groups, and happiness in outgroups, as more appropriate than did the Japanese. The Japanese, however, rated some negative emotions as more appropriate to outgroup members. These findings were interpreted within an individualism v. collectivism framework; members of collectivistic cultures (e.g., Japan) tend to discourage the expression of negative emotions to their ingroup members because doing so would be potentially perceived as a threatening signal, and discourage expression of potentially bonding positive emotions to their outgroups, while there would be no such tendency for members of individualistic cultures (e.g., the U.S.). Most recently, Hudson and Jacques (2014) reported that children (5–7 years old) were capable of regulating their negative emotions in front of parents in a disappointing gift paradigm. Age was the reliable predictor of overt effort to regulate emotions. This finding implied that in addition to cultural differences, individuals learn and acquire social rules and manners over time.

4.3 Subsequent research on display rules Matsumoto and colleagues (Matsumoto, Takeuchi, Andayani, Kouznetsova & Krupp 1998; Matsumoto, Yoo, Hirayama & Petrova 2005) created the Display Rule

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Assessment Inventory (DRAI), in which participants choose a behavioral response when they experience different emotions in different social situations. The behavioral responses were based on the six response alternatives described above. They demonstrated cultural differences in display rules and provided evidence for its internal and temporal reliability and for its content, convergent, discriminant, external, and concurrent predictive validity with personality. Later, Matsumoto and colleagues (2008) administered a more comprehensive version of the DRAI in over 30 countries, examining universal and culture-specific aspects to display rules, and linking the cultural differences to culture-level individualism (vs. collectivism). In spite of the large potential range of scores, most countries’ means on overall expression endorsement fell around the midpoint, and there was relatively small variation around this mean, suggesting a universal norm for expression regulation. Individuals of all cultures endorsed expressions toward in-groups more than toward out-groups, indicating another universal effect. Collectivistic cultures were associated with a display rule norm of less expressivity overall than individualistic cultures, suggesting that overall expressive regulation for all emotions is central to the preservation of social order in these cultures. This finding is commensurate with the behavioral findings from previous studies (Matsumoto, Willingham & Olide 2009). Individualism was also positively associated with higher expressivity norms in general, and for positive emotions in particular. Individualistic cultures were also positively associated with (endorsement of) expressions of all emotions toward in-groups, but negatively correlated with all negative emotions and positively correlated with happiness and surprise toward outgroups. Cumulatively, these findings suggest a fairly nuanced view of the relationship between culture and expression endorsement that varies as a function of emotion, interactant, and overall expressivity endorsement levels. The challenge of unpacking how and why display rules vary by country and group has been examined by a variety of research angles. Koopmann-Holm and Matsumoto (2011) suggested that specific values (e.g., conservation and self-enhancement) would be associated with how people apply emotional display rules for specific emotions and tested it in American and German groups. American participants who valued conservation and self-enhancement tended to endorse more contempt and disgust than did German participants; anger and sadness were endorsed by German participants, who valued more openness to change and selftranscendence than did Americans. Another study (Hwang & Matsumoto 2012) using the DRAI reported that Asian Americans and European Americans had different display rules for their emotional expressions. Asian Americans endorsed the expression of their emotions less than European Americans, but endorsed the modification of their expressions more. However, perceived relationship commitment ratings mediated the ethnic group variations on endorsed expressivity. European Americans had significantly higher scores on perceived relationship commitment than did Asian Americans toward parents, close friends, and older siblings, and these differences completely mediated ethnic differences in display rules.

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4.4 Cultural decoding rules: Cultural differences in perceiving emotions As discussed above, culture interacts with the ways emotions are expressed in certain social contexts. Similarly, culture influences how individuals perceive emotions in others (also known as cultural decoding rules; Buck 1980; Matsumoto & Ekman 1989). For instance, Americans are better at recognizing negative emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, and sadness than Japanese; however, cultural differences do not appear in happiness recognition (Matsumoto 1989, 1992). In two-country comparisons, individualism and collectivism has been used to explain the differences in judgments of emotions because people of individualistic cultures have a tendency to recognize some facial expressions better than others (Matsumoto 1990; Schimmack 1996). Studies examining cultural similarities and differences in inferences about emotional expressions have suggested an interesting approach in understanding cultural variations in perception of emotional expressions. Matsumoto, Kasri, and Kooken (1999) asked American and Japanese observers to rate how strongly expressions were displayed and how strongly the expresser was actually feeling the emotion. Americans rated external display more intensely than did the Japanese. In contrast, Japanese rated internal experience more intensely than did the Americans. Within-culture analyses indicated no significant differences between the two ratings for the Japanese. Significant differences were found, however, for the Americans, who consistently rated external display more intensely than subjective experience. These results help us to understand general assumptions and premises about Western vs. non-Western cultures in showing and decoding emotions: although American-Japanese differences in judgments and expressions could have occurred because the Japanese suppressed their intensity ratings, these findings indicated that in fact it was the Americans who exaggerated their external display ratings relative to subjective experience, not the Japanese who suppressed.

4.5 A possible ingroup advantage in perceiving emotions A concept that has been discussed in the literature of the last decade has concerned a possible ingroup advantage in perceiving emotion, which refers to individuals likely to be more accurate in recognizing expression of emotions by someone from the same culture as them than by someone from another culture (Matsumoto & Hwang 2011). Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) were the first to propose the existence of an ingroup advantage, reporting data that suggested that individuals more accurately recognize emotional expressions produced by members of their own culture than those produced by a different culture. Matsumoto (2002) raised questions concerning the scientific methodologies required to adequately test the ingroup hypothesis, including the need for balanced designs and equivalent stimuli. Using

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JACFEE described earlier, Matsumoto (2002) reported no evidence for an ingroup effect. Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) suggested that ingroup effects should not occur with posed expressions that were rendered equivalent across expressor ethnicities (such as those in the JACFEE), and instead argued for the existence of “cultural dialects” in emotional expressions that presumably facilitated ingroup perceiver effects. In their meta-analysis, Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) insisted that cultural specificity of emotional experiences and expressions was likened to cultural differences in linguistic expressions, cultural learning of emotional behavior, culture specific information processing systems, and so on. They suggested that, when expressing emotions, people of different cultures displayed them slightly differently, using culture-specific “dialects.” Evidence for cultural dialects has been reported among American, Japanese, and Indian observers and expressors in their follow-up study (Elfenbein et al. 2002), and among Asian American and Chinese observers who judged Caucasian and Chinese expressions (Elfenbein & Ambady 2003). One of the reasons why different findings related to the ingroup hypothesis have been found is in the methodology used to test for ingroup effects (Matsumoto 2002, 2007). Matsumoto (2002, 2007) noted that, first, conducting studies with balanced experimental designs is critical in the group comparisons. In a two-culture design, for example, observers of cultures A and B should judge expression of members of both cultures A and B. An unbalanced design cannot possibly test the ingroup hypothesis; the results from judges of cultures A and B observing expressions displayed by members of only of one culture (e.g., culture A) cannot rule out the possibility that members of culture B may have the same tendency to judge emotions as those of group A. His second comment concerned the necessity for stimulus equivalence. It is important that balanced studies test stimuli that are equivalent across the cultural groups in terms of expressors’ physical signaling properties on emotions; testing group differences on expressions that differ between groups of expressors renders conclusions concerning ingroup effects due to cultural dialects inconclusive. Even if culture-specific dialects in spontaneously produced expressions exist (note, however, that to date no such evidence exists), expressions with the same characteristics in all expressor cultures need to be used in tests of the ingroup hypothesis. To date, the documented evidence concerning the ingroup hypothesis has not met these critical methodological requirements. The only study to date that has tested the ingroup hypothesis using spontaneously produced expressions by expressors of different cultures, and thus inclusive of possible expressions that differ according to cultural dialects, is that by Matsumoto, Olide, and Willingham (2009). This study tested spontaneous expressions of emotions in which certain contexts triggered the targeted emotions (happiness, sadness, etc.) captured in a real setting (the Olympic Games). One can imagine how intense emotional reactions and displays could be aroused among players in

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Olympic matches. The researchers reported no evidence of an ingroup advantage in judging emotions from these spontaneously produced expressions. In contrast to Matsumoto et al. (2009), Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) used posed expressions of emotions that were produced by recollections of expressors’ previous emotional experiences of the targeted emotions, and reported an ingroup advantage in emotion recognition. But, as explained above, we believe that the results from posed expressions cannot provide evidence for an ingroup effect occurring because of cultural dialects in spontaneous expressions of emotion. To be sure, we do not believe that spontaneous emotional expressions are the only type of expressions that occur or that exist in reality because in social interactions we often exchange intentional expressions of emotions that can be interpretable and understood only among particular group members. However, those mimed/simulated expressions do not necessarily represent how people of different cultures recognize others’ spontaneously produced expressions in their own groups. Elfenbein (2007) argued that a theoretical approach should be discussed first as the more important part of the debate before the methodological argument about the underlying empirical research. But this might be a dangerous proposition as theory should be supported, or validated, by empirical data reflecting reality. Unfortunately, a lack of understanding the details of methodological issues and concerns, and the phenomenon of hasty generalization, often contaminate the value of research findings. Thus, the ingroup advantage in judging emotions may occur only when people pose emotions intentionally and voluntarily, but not when emotions are expressed spontaneously. If this conclusion is valid, many subsequent studies and their findings make more sense. A recent study on voice cues of positive emotions (triumph, relief, amusement, sensual pleasure, etc.) produced by expressors of different countries found that Dutch participants did not particularly identify their own group members’ vocal cues better, compared to ones from England, even though Dutch participants did slight better in the judgment accuracy in their own group in comparison to when they judged voice cues expressed by Namibian sounds (Sauter 2013). Another finding reported by the same study was that the participants were not able to identify their own group’s vocal cues better than other group members’ emotional vocalizations. The researchers concluded that the ability to judge whether sounds (emotional vocalization) were produced by in- or out-group individuals did not predict the advantage displayed for recognizing in-group vocalizations. These findings re-emphasized the importance of the methodological issues related to the points raised by Matsumoto (2002, 2007); first, although Elfenbein and colleagues claimed that cultural/emotional dialects exist and influence the judgments of in- vs. outgroup members’ emotions, the study by Sauter (2013) showed that (at least) for certain types of emotions, the emotional dialect hypothesis does not take into account why accuracy levels on vocal cues was not affected by culture. Second, the stimuli used for the examinations of the emotional dialect

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were not derived by the spontaneous expressions. When methodological approaches are different, comparing findings prematurely may render conclusions invalid. (It is also interesting to note that ingroup effects have not been reported for gender, either.)

5 Conclusion Emotions (basic emotions) and their expressions are evolved across species and are adaptive, biologically innate, and universal (Darwin 1872/1998). Research studies have supported this idea with empirical findings as reviewed above. As humans, sharing certain similarities and base lines for survival is reasonable and has been functional since human history had begun. Understanding emotional signals on the face that are applicable across cultures, ethnicities, and gender is beneficial in our daily lives and social interactions. However, we do not argue that all humans are exactly the same and that there is no difference and variation in displaying emotions at all. Human culture functions in an important role in moderating the universal facial signals of emotions once they are experienced and expressed. Culture is an essential guideline for people to socially modify their facial reactions in order to smooth social interactions for social coordination. Culture more heavily influences learned expressions such as those associated with speech illustration or emblematic information. Also, the effect of context should not be neglected. Universal behavioral reactions and culturally specific management of those reactions occur in specific contexts. Understanding and analyzing why people have emotions and display them in certain ways often provide us with crucial information that could not be conveyed via words. To utilize the valuable contribution of emotion and its expression in our daily life, future research will need to continue to expand cross-cultural studies on the expressions of emotions on the face along with other nonverbal channels, while addressing important methodological issues and concerns. Being aware of and understanding variations in underlying psychological traits and behavioral reactions is meaningful when it is derived from valid scientific evidence. As we have learned via the argument on the ingroup hypothesis, sometimes we do not measure what we set out to test and easily rely on the outcome without understanding the detailed process. Improving the quality of research as all researchers have been doing is crucial in cross-cultural research on emotion, which is directly applicable to real life in inter-cultural interactions.

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Hudson, Amanda & Sophie Jacques. 2014. Put on a happy face! Inhibitory control and socioemotional knowledge predict emotion regulation in 5- to 7-year-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 123. 36–52. Hwang, Hyisung C. & David Matsumoto. 2012. Ethnic differences in display are mediated by perceived relationship commitment. Asian American Journal of Psychology 3(4). 254–262. Hwang, Hyisung C. & David Matsumoto. 2016. Facial expressions. In David Matsumoto & Hyisung C. Hwang (eds.), APA handbook of nonverbal communication, 257–287. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Hwang, Hyisung C. & David Matsumoto. in press. Measuring emotions in the face. In Herbert L. Meiselman (ed.), Emotion measurement. Cambridge, UK: Elsevier. Izard, Carroll E. 1971. The face of emotion. East Norwalk, CT: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Keltner, Dacher & Jonathan Haidt. 1999. Social functions of emotions at four levels of analysis. Cognition and Emotion 13. 505–522. Koopmann-Holm, Birgit & David Matsumoto. 2011. Values and display rules for specific emotions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42. 355–371. Matsumoto, David. 1989. Cultural influences on the perception of emotion. Journal of CrossCultural Psychology 20. 92–105. Matsumoto, David. 1990. Cultural similarities and differences in display rules. Motivation and Emotion 14. 195–214. Matsumoto, David. 1992. American-Japanese cultural differences in the recognition of universal facial expressions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 23(1). 72–84. Matsumoto, David. 1993. Ethnic differences in affect intensity, emotion judgments, display rule attitudes, and self-reported emotional expression in an American sample. Motivation and Emotion 17. 107–123. Matsumoto, David. 2001. Culture and emotion. In David Matsumoto (ed.), The handbook of culture and psychology, 171–194. New York: Oxford University Press. Matsumoto, David. 2002. Methodological requirements to test a possible in-group advantage in judging emotions across cultures: Comment on Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) and evidence. Psychological Bulletin 128. 236–242. Matsumoto, David. 2005. Scalar ratings of contempt expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 29(2). 91–104. Matsumoto, David. 2007. Apples and oranges: Methodological requirements for testing a possible ingroup advantage in emotion judgments from facial expressions. In Ursula Hess & Pierre Philippot (eds.), Group dynamics and emotional expression, 140–181. New York: Cambridge University Press. Matsumoto, David, Theodora Consolacion, Hiroshi Yamada, Ryuta Suzuki, Brenda Franklin, Sunita Paul, Rebecca Ray & Hideko Uchida. 2002. American-Japanese cultural differences in judgements of emotional expressions of different intensities. Cognition and Emotion 16. 721– 747. Matsumoto, David & Paul Ekman. 1988. Japanese and Caucasian facial expressions of emotion (JACFEE). San Francisco, CA: Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University. Matsumoto, David & Paul Ekman. 1989. American-Japanese cultural differences in intensity ratings of facial expressions of emotion. Motivation & Emotion 13(2). 143–157. Matsumoto, David & Hyisung S. Hwang. 2011. Culture, emotion, and expression. In Michele J. Gelfand, Chi-Yue Chiu & Ying-Yi Hong (eds.), Advances in culture and psychology. Vol.1, 53– 98. New York: Oxford University Press. Matsumoto, David & Hyisung S. Hwang. 2012. Culture and emotion: The integration of biological and cultural contributions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 43(1). 91–118.

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Matsumoto, David & Hyisung C. Hwang. 2016. The cultural bases of nonverbal communication. In David Matsumoto, Hyisung C. Hwang & Mark G. Frank (eds.), APA handbook of nonverbal communication, 77–101. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Matsumoto, David & Linda Juang. 2013. Culture and psychology, 5 th edn. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. Matsumoto, David, Fazilet Kasri & Kristie Kooken. 1999. American-Japanese cultural differences in judgments of expression intensity and subjective experience. Cognition & Emotion 13. 201– 218. Matsumoto, David, Dacher Keltner, Michelle N. Shiota, Maureen O’Sullivan & Mark Frank. 2008. What’s in a face? Facial expressions as signals of discrete emotions. In Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones & Lisa Feldman Barrett (eds.), Handbook of emotions, 3 rd edn. 211–234. New York: Guilford Press. Matsumoto, David, Andres Olide, Joanna Schug, Bob Willingham & Mike Callan. 2009. Crosscultural judgments of spontaneous facial expressions of emotion. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 33(4). 213–238. Matsumoto, David, Andres Olide & Bob Willingham. 2009. Is there an ingroup advantage in recognizing spontaneously expressed emotions? Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 33. 181–191. Matsumoto, David, Sachiko Takeuchi, Sari Andayani, Natalia Kouznetsova & Deborah Krupp. 1998. The contribution of individualism-collectivism to cross-national differences in display rules. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 1(2). 147–165. Matsumoto, David & Bob Willingham. 2006. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat: Spontaneous expressions of medal winners of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91(3). 568–581. Matsumoto, David & Bob Willingham. 2009. Spontaneous facial expressions of emotion of congenitally and noncongenitally blind individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96. 1–10. Matsumoto, David, Bob Willingham & Andres Olide. 2009. Sequential dynamics of culturally moderated facial expressions of emotion. Psychological Science 20(10). 1269–1274. Matsumoto, David, Seung Hee Yoo & Johnny Fontaine. 2008. Mapping expressive differences around the world: The relationship between emotional display rules and Individualism v. Collectivism. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 39(1). 55–74. Matsumoto, David, Seung Hee Yoo, Satoko Hirayama & Galina Petrova. 2005. Validation of an individual-level measure of display rules: The Display Rule Assessment Inventory (DRAI). Emotion 5(1). 23–40. Nummenmaa, Lauri, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari & Jari K. Hietanen. 2014. Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111(2). 646– 651. Pell, Marc D., Laura Monetta, Silke Paulmann & Sonja A. Kotz. 2009. Recognizing emotions in a foreign language. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 33(2). 107–120. Saarni, Carolyn. 1984. Observing children’s use of display rules: Age and sex differences. Child Development 55. 1504–1513. Sauter, Disa A. 2013. The role of motivation and cultural dialects in the in-group advantage for emotional vocalizations. Frontiers in Psychology 4. 1–9. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00814 Schimmack, Ulrich. 1996. Cultural influences on the recognition of emotion by facial expressions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 27. 37–50. Soussignan, Robert. 2002. Duchenne smile, emotional experience, and autonomic reactivity: A test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Emotion 2. 52–74. Stephens, Chad L., Israel C. Christie & Bruce H. Friedman. 2010. Autonomic specificity of basic emotions: Evidence from pattern classification and cluster analysis. Biological Psychology 84. 463–473.

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Tomkins, Silvan S. & Robert McCarter. 1964. What and where are the primary affects? Some evidence for a theory. Perceptual and Motor Skills 18(1). 119–158. Tooby, John & Leda Cosmides. 2008. The evolutionary psychology of emotions and their relationship to internal regulatory variables. In Michael Lewis & Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (eds.), Handbook of emotions, 3 rd edn., 114–137. New York: Guilford. Van Kleef, Gerben, Evert A. Van Doorn, Marc W. Heerdink & Lukas F. Koning. 2011. Emotion is for influence. European Review of Social Psychology 22. 114–163. Vytal, Katherine & Stephan Hamann. 2010. Neuroimaging support for discrete neural correlates of basic emotions: A voxel-based meta-analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22(12). 2864–2885.

Valerie Manusov

11 A cultured look at nonverbal cues Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of scholarship investigating culture and nonverbal cues/signs and gives a means for organizing different bodies of scholarship. These areas of inquiry include cultural, cross-cultural, and intercultural research. The chapter begins with a discussion of some of the primary nonverbal cues (such as the use of space, physical appearance, and time) that have been found to differ in use and meaning across cultures. To help provide a framework and relevancy to this large area of work, the chapter identifies communicative functions (i.e., what nonverbal cues can do for communicators) that have found to be enacted differently across cultural groups through largely nonverbal means. These functions include the expression of emotion, identity displays, and relational messages, among others. The chapter also provides some discussion of pancultural use of nonverbal cues, although it emphasizes the differences between groups and how nonverbal cues may work to reflect on the nature of the culture whose members use those signs. It ends with a brief foray into the challenges that nonverbal communication – and the incorrect assumption that nonverbal cues make up a “universal language” – may create for people from different cultural groups who interact with one another. Keywords: nonverbal behavior, culture, communication, functions, identity

1 Introduction Nonverbal cues provide an ideal site for providing information about culture. That is, we can look qualitatively or quantitatively for the ways in which one culture reflects itself through nonverbal means – and/or compare one group’s ways of engaging and making meaning of behavior to another group – in order to discern where culture shows up to alter and frame action and where it does not. When culture does not seem to affect behavior or the interpretation of behavior, those cues are arguably innate and pancultural and provide a glimpse into who we all are as human beings separate from culture. Whereas both sets of answers are compelling, this chapter focuses primarily on those behaviors and meanings that have been found to differ between and/or define and reflect cultures. In so doing, it challenges the idea that nonverbal cues overall make up a “universal language”; rather, it will show that much of the time, our use and understanding for a range of nonverbal cues is inextricably “cultured”. Nonverbal behavior has been defined in a range of ways (see Burgoon, Guerrero & Manusov 2011), but in this chapter, I use the simplest characterization, as DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-011

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doing so is consistent with most of the scholarship on nonverbal cues and culture. That is, nonverbal cues are all those elements other than spoken words that have the potential to be meaningful to and are used in rule-governed ways by people in a group. I use the term “cues” here purposefully, as the work in this area focuses not just on behaviors such as facial expressions, vocal variability (e.g., accents, pitch), and proxemics (i.e., use of space between people), but it also includes elements such as objects or artifacts, buildings, use of time, and other aspects of one’s environment. Thus, nonverbal cues encompass a rich array of potentially meaningful moments, many of which are influenced by culture through the rules associated with their use and the interpretations given to them. When such cues are inextricably bound with their cultural context for meaning, they are consistent with what Ferdinand de Saussure referred to as “signs”, a semiotic term that emphasizes the arbitrary or assigned nature of meaning to cues (Bussmann 1996). In this chapter, I also use the term signs as largely equivalent to cues to emphasize the culturally-determined connection between the signifier (i.e., the vocalic cue of silence) and its given meaning (the signified). Doing so is also consistent with Erving Goffman’s (1959) understanding that many cues are given their meanings by the people who use them, and, when employed, the cues are meaningful only to others who are in that group. As such, cues are a means through which communicative problems may occur between groups who use nonverbal cues in different ways, as I discuss briefly at the end of this chapter. This distinction is a central one within the study of nonverbal cues. For some scholars, cues should be labeled “nonverbal” (rather than verbal) only when they have the character of having “a direct, nonarbitrary, intrinsic relationship to the thing they represent” (Andersen 2008: 5). From this perspective, all cues characterized as nonverbal have an innate, universal quality, although they may be affected at some level in use by the larger cultural norms and rules. For others (e.g., Buck & Renfro Powers 2006; Floyd 2004), the most interesting lines of work on nonverbal cues focus on their biological/physiological (and therefore pancultural) origins, as they speak to the larger human condition. Other lines of scholarship, many based in work or conducted by Ekman and his colleagues, center on determining when certain cues, specifically facial expressions of emotions, are consistent across cultures or when they vary, so as to look at the co-occurring forces of biology and culture (but there are those who take a very different perspective, particularly about facial displays, e.g., Fridlund & Russell 2006). Some of this important work is incorporated here, but more of it is left for other discussions of nonverbal cues and their impact, given the objective of this Handbook. Scholarship on nonverbal signs or cues as relevant to this chapter can be categorized as cultural, cross-cultural, or intercultural. Studies that are classified as cultural tend to take a more qualitative and in-depth approach that describes patterns of behaviors and meanings associated with the behaviors or other cues within a cultural context. The culture may be a national one (e.g., Japanese) or one that

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represents an identifiable cultural collective (e.g., Cherokee), or it may be a group within a larger culture or region based on, for example, ethnicity, age, location, gender, or occupation (e.g., youth in Armenia). This research often comes from an Ethnography of Communication tradition and refers typically to the study of speech communities and their cultural codes (see Philipsen 2009). Studies that are classified as cross-cultural compare two or more cultural groups (e.g., Lao to Thai or Latino- to African-Americans) and their potentially differential use of the same cues (e.g., proximity norms, touch behavior) or, less often, the meaning for those cues. Intercultural work is defined as research centering on people from different cultural groups talking with one another and investigates the ways in which the behavior of members of the groups is aligned or distinct and/or whether the interactants interpret what goes on between them in the same or different ways that may influence the interaction. In this chapter, I will overview the types of work that have been done looking at culture and nonverbal cues and try to provide some useful ways to organize different bodies of scholarship. I will also emphasize places in which the innate nature of nonverbal cues is superseded by, interacts with, and exists outside of cultural patterns. I start with the most manifest of cultural differences: a focus on some of the nonverbal cues themselves that are found to differ in use and meaning across cultures. I then move onto the communicative functions that appear to be enacted differently across cultures through nonverbal means. I next discuss some of the ways in which latent values as described in cultural dimensions have been found to differentiate culture members’ cues from one another. Finally, I offer a brief discussion of some of the scholarship that suggests specifically what may occur – often creating problems – when people from different cultures interact with one another. This review is necessarily incomplete, but my hope is that it will guide the reader to exemplars that help speak to the full body of scholarship as well as provide some new means for organizing this work.

2 Nonverbal cues and cultural variation As noted, nonverbal cues comprise a rich and diverse set of objects and actions that can become part of a culture’s rules and patterns and take on specific meanings within a culture. When they do, they can be considered signs (i.e., cues that are given meaning by the group that uses them, which allows the opportunity to investigate the worldviews, values, attitudes, histories, and beliefs of that culture). These signs also tend to be a part of the rule-system in a culture, letting cultural members know what it is appropriate or inappropriate to do. In this section, I introduce some of these cues, with a focus on those where cultural variation has been found.

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2.1 Kinesics One of the earliest sets of nonverbal cues that received scholarly attention is kinesics. “Kinesics” refer to the body movements that people make, such as hand or facial gestures, eye behavior, touch, sitting positions, gait, and body lean, and its usage as a category of behavior was coined by Ray Birdwhistell (1970). Birdwhistell was particularly aware that such cues occur in context and that they largely come to mean what they do within that context. Within the study of intercultural interaction, hand or arm gestures have been studied the most. Morris, Collette, Marsh, and O’Shaughnessy (1980), for example, documented a form of symbolic gesture, called an emblem, and its use across regions. Emblems are gestures with specific and arbitrary meanings, ones that, unlike naturally-occurring gestures, people need to learn in order to use and understand (Matsumoto & Hwang 2013). Morris et al. (1980) found that, among other things, emblems arise within particular groups but may “drift” into other near-by regions, eventually losing their use and meaning across geographical distance. More recently, Matsumoto and Hwang (2013) catalogued cultural differences in emblem use across six world regions. Following an argument about the pancultural capacity to use gestures (i.e., all cultures use gestures), the authors set out to look across cultures for larger patterns that could speak to the ways individual cultures actually employ them. Whereas the authors did not aim to capture all emblems in all these areas, they did choose a range having clear verbal translations that at least 70 % of their encoders could provide. They then looked at cultural differences across the use and meaning of these emblems and found three noteworthy results. First, the researchers noted that emblems of some kind arose across the groups in order to symbolize the same meaning (e.g., greeting), but different signs for the meaning were used by different groups (e.g., a wave in one and a head movement in another). This was particularly notable for emblems that were meant to insult, where all groups used emblems to insult but the emblems each group employed to do so were unique to that culture. Second, there were some emblems that were the same across two or more cultures, but the meaning assigned to them varied (e.g., making a ring with the thumb and index finger while keeping the other fingers open was used in multiple cultures but meant different things). Third, the authors found some emblems where the cue and the meaning were both unique to a particular culture and not found elsewhere. Gesture/emblem use is only one example of kinesic behavior that can vary across cultures. Differences in gaze patterns, for example, have been found across groups (Harper, Wiens & Matarazzo 1978), and greeting behaviors such as shaking hands or kissing also are used differently and given different meanings by the culture that uses/observes them (Manusov & Milstein 2005), Moreover, these patterns can be found in mediated “interaction” that reflect on cultural beliefs. For instance, Roy (2005) argued that women are often portrayed by mediated sources in India as “the province and property” of men, in that they are positioned most

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commonly in advertisements so as to be gazed upon by men. Men were not gazed at in the same way by women in the media sources he reviewed. Studies also reveal large differences in sense-making for touch behavior across cultures, such that different cultural groups vary from one another in how they view the amount, body location, and type of touch and whether it occurs in public or in private (Albert & Ah-Ha 2004). Observable differences in touch during leave-taking have also been found (McDaniel & Andersen 1998).

2.2 Proxemics and use of space Edward Hall published several early works that introduced his ideas around variance in nonverbal cues based in cultures. He is most well-known for describing cultural variance in physical space, or proxemics, in The Silent Language (1959) and The Hidden Dimension (1966) where he argued for a set of distance zones based in relationship type, the size of which differs across cultures (although he also notes that there is variation within cultures as well). Hall (1959) also argued that proxemics behavior are affected by underlying cultural values, with the importance of equality, for instance, predicting whether or not cultural members stand in a line or queue. In an interesting test of proxemic norms, Hasler and Friedman (2012) explored differences between members of Asian and European cultures on distances in online interactions between avatars (i.e., a figure that is chosen to represent a person/ player in a videogame or other online space). They found that Asian pairs had their avatars interact at larger distances than did European dyads, consistent with the cross-cultural differences the authors report are typical in face-to-face interactions. When engaging in mixed-culture dyads, Asians did not differ from Europeans (i.e., they placed their avatars closer), indicating the Asian participants’ greater willingness to converge space norms. Other researchers have studied proxemic distances and related cues in field settings. Ozdemi (2008), for instance, watched over 3,000 interacting pairs in Turkish and U.S. shopping malls, finding Turkish dyads used closer interpersonal distances than did those in the U.S. Age and sex/gender also were found to affect distance zones, with adolescent pairs keeping the most distance in both locales. Likewise, Patterson and his colleagues (2007) discuss the passing encounter paradigm as a rich area to investigate how people negotiate shared proximity. In a study of more than 1,000 pedestrians in the U.S. and in Japan, the research team observed what happened nonverbally when people walked past a confederate who attempted to engage with them nonverbally (e.g., with glances, smiles, and nods) and noted whether their reactions to these cues occurring in shared space differed. As the researchers expected, the Japanese pedestrians were less responsive to the confederates’ cues than were the U.S. Americans. In particular, only 1–2 % of the Japanese participants returned smiles, nods, or verbal greetings, compared with

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9–25 % of the U.S. group. Patterson et al. suggest that the Japanese tendency to limit emotional “exposure” to someone not close relationally and/or their overall lower levels of expressiveness may explain their results, whereas, in the U.S. reciprocity of positive behavior is expected, which may have undergirded their pattern of response.

2.3 Vocalics Vocalics or paralanguage refer to all speech-related cues involving sound (or lack of sound, including silence and pauses) and are very relevant to discussions of culture. Vocal cues in the form of accents can be important markers of cultural belonging. According to Marsh, Anger Elfenbein, and Ambady (2003), accents are characteristically different pronunciations used by speakers of the same language, help us to identify members of a group, and aid in understanding for in-group members in that we are more able to make sense of what others with our own accent say than we can do with others who speak the same language but with a different accent. Additionally, pacing, emotional expression through sound, and inflection are also included in vocalics and relevant in the cultural context. For instance, Arabic speakers tend to use a higher pitch range that, while normative and “unmarked” in their own speech community, is evaluated by non-Arabic speakers as emotional, aggressive, or threatening (Safadi & Valentine 1990). In Korea, slower rates of speech are associated with greater power in males, whereas in the U.S. faster rates are seen as reflecting higher status (Peng, Zebrowitz & Lee 1993). In Peng et al.’s study, both groups associated more power with loudness and more competence with greater rate or speed, however. A particularly important perspective that emerged with vocal variation is explained in Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT; Giles, Coupland & Coupland 2010). CAT has been studied with many aspects of language variation but argues that, when interacting with others who have different language or vocal patterns than one another (particularly accents), people tend to change their own vocal characteristics to either be more like (convergence) or disparate from (divergence) one another, at least in some circumstances. Most typically, people tend to converge toward those in their own culture or in-group and diverge from those they see as “Other” or out-group members. Underlying this change is purportedly a tendency for people to identify with like others and distance themselves from those they perceive as unlike them. These intergroup dynamics are discussed in Chapter 17 of this Handbook in more detail. Work that focuses more on individual cultures also finds cultural patterns for vocalic cues, including the use of silence. Carbaugh, Berry, and Nurmikari-Berry (2006), employing an Ethnography of Communication approach, investigated people’s talk in Finland for evidence of cultural codes and found that their talk, ironically, revealed a strong value for silence. Specifically, the researchers noted that

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cultural patterning “structures some cultural scenes as occasions for positive silence, exhibiting a social model of personhood for which this is a valued, respected, and natural practice” (Carbaugh et al. 2006: 203). That is, within a Finnish cultural code, the value of silence – and its tie to “natural” social engagement – both reveals what is important to members of that culture and helps dictate how people are to behave and judge one another within that culture.

2.4 Physical appearance Physical appearance cues comprise an array of nonverbal signs including dress, body adornment, skin color, hair texture, and facial features. Such cues work in a number of important ways within and across groups. The perception of facial features (as opposed to facial expressions, which are a part of kinesics), for example, has been studied with diverse cultures. Rule et al. (2010) investigated Japanese and U.S. Americans’ tendency to predict personality from politicians’ facial cues across four studies. The authors found both groups associated traits (e.g., power and warmth) with faces, and these perceptions were predictive of the outcome of elections. But the authors found that each group was only able to predict their own culture’s election outcomes from traits, perceived from faces, suggesting the same underlying process of connecting faces to traits, but different meaning and value systems at play when looking across the groups as to what traits were tied to political success. Specifically, the Japanese participants assumed that warmth would predict success, which it did in Japan but not in the U.S., and the U.S. participants predicted that power would be more electable, which it was in the U.S. but not in Japan. More commonly in studies of cultural or cross-cultural communication, physical appearance cues have been found to be important markers of a person’s culture or his/her place within that culture (see discussion later in this chapter on identity management). Nonverbal cues can also “mark” a person as a marginalized member of a culture, with profound impact. Goffman (1963), in Stigma: Notes of the Management of Spoiled Identity, wrote about the groups he observed who were given devalued status within his culture, and many of those in such groups are identified as group members through nonverbal means. This includes those with physical movement differences (see also Emry & Wiseman 1987 for an argument about seeing able-bodied and disabled persons’ communication as a form of intercultural interaction). Murphy (1990) in his book The Body Silent, for example, recounts the history of his own weakening body and growing awareness of what it means to be part of the culture of motor-disabled people within the larger U.S. culture. He argues that the “lessons to be learned from paralysis also have profound meaning for our understanding of human culture and the place of the individual in it” (Murphy 1990: 4). Specifically, Murphy shows the ways in which a marginalized group – in this

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case one that is indicated by its members’ physical appearance and capacity – can tell us about the larger culture and its patterns and values. The U.S. ideal, for instance, is a clean, toned, young, and beautiful (as defined culturally) body; “the disabled person becomes the Other … a counterpoint to normality … [and serves] as a constant, visible reminder to the able-bodied that the society they live in is shot through with inequity and suffering, that they live in a counterfeit paradise” (Murphy 1990: 117).

2.5 Objects Personal and environmental objects or artifacts are also cues that can be given meaning. Ruesch and Kees (1956) referred to an “object language” that could act as statements about the cues’ user. One class of objects or artifacts that has received particular attention by intercultural scholars has to do with gift-giving. Godbout (1998) argues that gift-giving has long been a cultural process and remains so in the contemporary world. But cultures vary in what meaning they give to and how meaningful gift-giving can be. According to Salleh (2005), for instance, presenting the gift of a clock to someone from China amounts to telling the receiver that the giver wants him or her to have a short life, whereas in Malaysia, the clock-as-gift exemplifies friendship. Objects may also play a communicative role within cultures to mark important social distinctions. Hamilton (2013), for instance, assessed the use of artifacts in a British farm veterinarian practice as a form of symbolic capital and noted the ways in which “mundane” objects were given meaning by those in power. Moreover, the study revealed that, once imbued with such meanings, those who use the artifacts could extend additional power over those with whom they interacted. Objects can also reflect on the culture itself. Gannon (2004), for instance, reflects on a culture’s art forms as potentially reflective of a culture, and particular time periods in that culture. He speaks specifically to the Belgian culture and its love for art and beauty – along with practicality. He makes the case that Belgian paintings – although influenced originally by Italy – eventually encapsulated a greater national identity by making the subject of paintings both beautiful and more realistic, a nod to the Belgian value of practicality. Gannon also speaks to the cultural role of objects or artifacts in ritual (e.g., Chinese family altars and Japanese martial arts).

2.6 Chronemics The use and interpretation of time, known as chronemics, is a fundamental component of – and a means for distinguishing – cultures. In A Geography of Time, Levine (1997: xi) states that “Time talks, with an accent”. By this he seems to mean two

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things: 1. that time can have communicative/meaning value, and 2. that it is used differently across cultures. He also claims that time use – and the overall conception of time a culture holds – can reflect that culture’s values. For instance, Levine describes the Brazilian concept of amanha, which suggests that things can be put off to another time, with other activities and values being more important than getting things done quickly. Gannon (2004), on the other hand, talks about German values of punctuality, where such behaviors as tardiness are strongly discouraged. Stelzner and Egland (1995, cited in Andersen 2008) found that, in the U.S., willingness to spend time with another was the most significant predictor of relational satisfaction and understanding, reflecting a cultural view on the importance and nature of relationships. Hall and Hall (1990) also talk about time as a defining cultural feature. They contend that there are two primary ways in which cultures structure time. These are monochromic (i.e., the tendency to schedule and complete one activity at a time) and polychronemic (i.e., an orientation to do multiple things at once and not separate them from one another). Hofstede (1991) likewise references a time dimension on which cultures vary. This ranges from short- to long-term and refers “to the degree to which cultural members are willing to defer present gratification to achieve long-term goals” (Gannon 2004: 10). Members of different cultures also have different attitudes about waiting. After recounting a story of a four day wait to make a phone call in Nepal, Levine (1997: 105) states “I was struck even more than by the delay with how little my fellow waiters shared my suffering. Waiting, it seems, is indigenous to so much of the lives of most Nepalese that having to wait hours to make a long distance call is neither unexpected or taxing”.

3 The functions of nonverbal behavior As can be seen, an array of cues can take on sign value and/or be part of the rule system in a culture, often reflecting what is important within that culture and what worldview it holds. But it is useful to go beyond the cues to deeper processes. One of the largest bodies of research by nonverbal scholars – usually outside the intercultural context – identifies the functions that nonverbal behavior serves for people. Functions can be defined as “the communication-related activities” (Remland 2004: 26) that our behavior helps us with, and they include such things as persuading another, impression formation, and expressing emotions. Several reviews of these functions have been written (e.g., Burgoon et al. 2011; Patterson 1992). Within the intercultural literature, however, certain functions appear as particularly noteworthy, although the research itself seldom references itself this way. The primary functions that are revealed as important within this scholarship are emotional expression, coordinating interaction, relational messages, and identity management.

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3.1 Emotional expression Perhaps more than any other area of scholarship, the ways in which people express and interpret emotions within and across cultures have been scrutinized (see Chapter 10 of this Handbook for more on this topic). Early work focused on finding out whether people across highly disparate cultures could identify (and in some cases express) emotions in the same way. Although controversial for its methodology, Ekman and his colleagues found support for several basic emotions (usually anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) that people across groups can recognize in others’ faces and, particularly when done in the absence of others, that people have similar expressions for some of those emotions (Ekman 1992). Cross-cultural recognition of the basic emotions from vocal cues has also been found (Sauter et al. 2010). More germane perhaps to this chapter, however, was the observation that, in some cases overriding biologically-based expressions, cultures create a set of rules for how to enact emotions. Cultural display rules (Ekman 1977) refer to the ways in which a particular group defines “appropriate” and normative emotional expression, including whether or not to show an experienced emotion. In a project testing a categorization of display rules (the Display Rule Assessment Inventory), Matsumoto, Yoo, Hirayama, and Petrova (2005) found that, of the groups they studied, their Japanese participants were least likely to show anger and contempt, with U.S. Americans showing the most happiness. Wikan (1990) studied a particular display rule within the Balinese culture. In detail, the author looked closely at one cue (a smile when talking about a loved one’s death) used by one woman, Suriati. According to Streeck (2002: 318–319), “Wikan’s analysis exhibits a pervasive dilemma of Balinese interpersonal life. The dilemma is that, according to the assumptions of their culture, the Balinese are inscrutable to one another. The culture puts premium on keeping a ‘bright face’ … Accordingly, they must constantly reassure one another that they are not angry – which they do by keeping a bright face”. Streeck argues that similar smile-based display rules exist in other cultures, although their value bases for the smiles are different, and cites Hochschild’s (1983) work on emotional labor and her example of U.S. flight attendants’ smiles as a cultural commodity, a behavior required of the employees and sold to the customers as part of the airlines’ service.

3.2 Coordinating interaction Having a conversation with another requires knowledge and implementation of a range of cues that signal the beginning of a conversation, changes in topic, when to avoid talk, and the like. These cues allow for the coordination of interaction (also referred to as conversation management) between people, one of the fundamental social functions of nonverbal cues. Research on culture and nonverbal cues related

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to this function has looked frequently at differences in greeting behavior. This may be because, as Hassanain (1994: 68) contends, “[m]odes of greeting rituals represent the fabric and the conceptual aspect of the daily life of the individuals and [are] the mirror that reflects the interactional social life of any given speech community”. Singh, McKay, and Singh (1998) note that, as body contact is often not appropriate in Sri Lanka and India, people greet one another by holding their hands together and using a slight head nod. For Saudis, the value of communion is at the basis of their greeting rituals (Hassanain 1994). Detailed looks at nonverbal cues-in-talk have found additional ways in which nonverbal cues work as part of conversation management as influenced by culture. Yang (2010a), for example, argued that the Mandarin Chinese concept of mianzisaving (face-saving) for both self and other is revealed in nonverbal interaction cues. Yang (2010b) also found that looking at nonverbal aspects of coordinating interaction reveals gender-based rules of conduct for Mandarin-speaking Chinese, with female speakers unique in using gestures that shield the mouth and clapping while expressing joy, and males showing a tendency to put their chins up and point their index-finger when implying blame. In a different vein, Zhang and Kalinowski (2012) compared nonverbal responses to another’s stuttering and found that their Chinese participants were more likely than their African- or EuropeanAmerican participants to avert gaze from speakers’ eyes and mouths, although gaze aversion from the others’ eyes was common to all groups. Some groups rely more on nonverbal cues within interaction than do others (see, also, the section on high- and low-context). Mejia-Arauz, Roberts and Rogoff (2012), for instance, reviewed literature on indigenous communities in North and Central America and found consistently that the communities are particularly reliant on nonverbal means of communicating. Indeed, the authors work to conceptualize this practice by referencing nonverbal conversations, which they define as the “articulate complex rounds of back-and-forth communication with multiple turns where the main exchange is nonverbal” (207). The authors provided data that support the conclusion that children in these communities learn such patterns early in their lives; Mejia-Arauz et al. argue that this early learning reflects Mesoamerican groups’ value of balancing across nonverbal conversations and talk as a way to accomplish shared activities. The authors suggested that the specific value of respecto (mutual consideration and support) may explain these patterns.

3.3 Relational messages Nonverbal cues are also used regularly to “speak to” the relationship people have with one another, a process involving what have been called relational messages (Burgoon & Hale 1984). Within the intercultural literature, the relational message studied most frequently is status, perhaps because status differential is one way in which cultures have been distinguished from one another (Gudykunst 1997). Bente,

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Leuschner, Al Issa and Bascovich (2010), however, were interested in pan- or transcultural status displays. Comparing Germans, Arabs, and U.S. Americans, the researchers found that that many nonverbal cues of status were the same across the groups. Interestingly, however, differences arose in the group members’ evaluation of the cues, suggesting that, in this case, the meaning more than the behavior was culturally-influenced. Consistent with this finding, Kowner and Wiseman (2003) observed that the same cues were perceived by Japanese and U.S. Americans to connote status, but the magnitude to which they were perceived as being used as such varied, with their Japanese respondents noting greater differences in the behaviors of high and low status people. Rule et al. (2010) also provided evidence that cultures differ based on how much warmth is connected to status or power. Other forms of relationship-based variables have also been highlighted in the intercultural context. Bello, Brandau-Brown, Zhang, and Ragsdale (2010), for instance, compared 200 people from China and the U.S., who were asked how they showed appreciation to others. They found that those from China strongly preferred nonverbal means of letting another know they appreciated them, with those from the U.S. reporting that they used verbal and nonverbal means in equal parts. Moreover, the U.S. respondents reported showing appreciation more often overall than did those from China, reflecting a greater cultural value on expression. People can reveal their regard for others in many ways, including time spent together (i.e., chronemics). Witte (1991), for example, studied Arab health care workers and found that, in order to be effective in their work, they learn that they must take time to establish relationships and build rapport with patients and families before proceeding with medical consultation.

3.4 Identity management An additional function of nonverbal cues relevant to the cultural/intercultural context has to do with signs that reflect on people’s group or cultural membership (i.e., their social identity). As part of self-presentation (Goffman 1959), identity management references in what ways we “display” aspects of our identity to others, including our cultural identity/ties. According to Keating (2006: 325), “[a]cross cultures and millennia, face and body parts have been dressed, painted, pierced, shaved, plucked, injected, molded, stretched, cut and sewn to manage images of self and identity”. Keating also asserts that “[t]hese (pre)occupations often reflect cultural values” (325) and cites the TV show Extreme Makeover as reflective of a U.S. American ethos of (a certain) beauty at any cost. She likewise references Chinese plastic surgeons who are called upon to increase people’s height, as, like in the U.S., height in China often equates with greater status or power that, in turn, engenders higher salaries, for men at least. Vocal accents are one of the primary ways that people recognize a person’s cultural or social identity. But Marsh et al. (2003) contend that people also have

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facial “accents” that signify our group membership. They asked their participants to judge the nationality of people’s faces and found that they could do so when the posers were displaying an emotional expression rather a neutral one, leading the authors to argue that the decoders could see facial markers that were more common to one culture than another.

4 Cultural dimensions Grouping scholarship on culture and nonverbal communication into the functions that the cues serve for members of those cultures is not often done. As with much work in intercultural scholarship, the most easily identifiable scholarship tends to focus on the factors or dimensions of culture and how they affect the nonverbal behavior of cultural members. Although a dimensional approach has been critiqued for being too simplistic and static (Gudykunst et al. 1996), it remains a commonly used and oft-recommended construct (Ting-Toomey 2010). Some of these dimensions (e.g., high and low contact and high and low context) are particularly likely to mark cultural differences in nonverbal cues, as the dimensions themselves implicate nonverbal action (i.e., to be a high contact culture means that people are more likely to touch and have close proxemic distances). Others (e.g., status differential) are less inherently tied to nonverbal cues, although nonverbal cues have been discussed outside of the cultural context as important means by which that dimension may be reflected (see Burgoon & Dunbar 2006). Although taking a dimensional approach to culture is somewhat controversial, it offers some advantages. Specifically for the purposes of culture’s tie to nonverbal cues, cultural dimensions tend to reflect underlying values and beliefs of a culture (e.g., collectivism suggests that harmony is a deep cultural value). In doing so, they provide a way to understand why certain cultural differences exist and why they show up in a culture in the way that they do. Importantly, although “the dimensions of cultural variability afford broad predictions of cultural similarity and difference, each dimension is manifested in a unique way within each culture” (Gudykunst 1997: 335). Whereas there are other ways to identify the larger world views and attitudes of a culture, specifically in culture-based studies that work to provide rich background for making sense of a group’s ways of behaving and making sense of nonverbal elements, research that uses dimensions as the basis of predicted differences provide at least a surface-level story for such differences. This section therefore reviews some of the cultural dimensions where scholarship has been done looking at nonverbal similarities and differences between cultures.

4.1 Individualism/Collectivism Perhaps more than any other defining dimension of culture, the degree to which a culture can be identified as more individualistic (oriented toward the individual’s

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needs) or collectivist (oriented toward the group’s needs) has been at the basis of many cross-cultural studies of nonverbal behavior. Following Hofstede (1980) and Triandis (1995), a range of scholars have looked for ways in which different cultural orientations on this dimension show up in varying behaviors across cultures. Most notably, Matsumoto (1991) developed a theory about the role of orientation in explaining differences in expressiveness. He argued that individualistic cultures tend to promote self-expression; as such, people within them tend to be more overtly expressive of a wide range of emotions, usually through nonverbal means. More specifically, politeness norms within these cultures tend to encourage the (sometimes false) displays of positivity. People in collectivist cultures are taught to note the effect of their behavior on the group, and the suppression of negative emotional displays is more likely to be part of the rules people follow, at least with those within their cultural (in) group. The same pressure does not apply with those outside of their group, however. Consistent with the theory, Matsumoto, Yoo, and Fontaine (2008) found that, compared to individualistic cultures, collectivistic cultures enforce a display rule of less emotional expressivity overall. Interestingly, the connection between individualist/collectivist orientation and emotional display preference carries into the online environment. Park, Baek, and Cha (2014) used “big data” analyses to look at whether emoticon use is related to the orientation of the user’s nationality. Using Twitter data from 78 countries, the authors saw a pattern of favoring horizontal and open-mouthed emoticons by people from cultures labeled as individualistic, with vertical and eye-oriented emoticons used more often by people in countries labeled collectivist. It is not only expressiveness that has been found to differ between individualist and collectivist cultures, however. Choi (1991), for example, found that collectivist mothers (from Korea) are more likely to value listening than are individualist mothers (from Canada). Andersen and Wang (2006) assert that individualism likewise affects U.S. Americans’ dance style.

4.2 High and low context In addition to introducing cultural differences in the use of space and time, Edward Hall (1966) referenced the idea of context, which underlies a second cultural dimension. For Hall, high context cultures are particularly “nonverbal” in that less of their social meaning is encoded in what they say to one another; instead people rely on what they know about a person and on information in the environment, including that expressed nonverbally. Singh et al. (1998) also note communication within high-context cultures is more indirect. Given that cues available in the larger context, such as each interactant’s status, become a primary way of understanding behavior and determining what social actions are appropriate, being able to understand the system of cue reliance in one’s own culture is part of an individual’s mental health (Singh et al. 1998).

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Myriad studies have been produced to test the observable differences of people from high and low context cultures (e.g., Kim, Pan & Park 1998). In high context cultures, such as China and Malaysia, for instance, knowing cultural rules and meanings is imperative (Salleh 2005). In Japan, another high-context culture, people tend to look carefully at another’s eyes for unspoken information about what she or he is feeling (Yuki, Maddux & Masuda 2007). Such differences show up in the media as well: In their study of political advertisements, Tak, Kaid and Khang (2007) found that the Korean (a high context culture) ads were more subdued and subtle than were the U.S. (a low context culture) ads. Singh et al. (1998) likewise discuss how silence is used differently based on whether or not a culture is more context-oriented. “In low-context cultures, silence is a linguistic space to be filled; in high-context cultures, silence is an active part of communication” (Albert & Ah Hah 2004: 258).

4.3 High and low contact In addition to high and low context, Hall’s (1966) work also delineates cultures into contact and noncontact groups, with those in contact cultures more likely to engage in touch and have smaller proxemic zones, two cues in a set of behaviors referred to elsewhere as immediacy cues (Mehrabian 1981). Indeed, Andersen (2008) argues that cultures should be differentiated on their immediacy orientation rather than as high or low contact, as immediacy supercedes the cues associated with contact. But “contact” is used more commonly in the cultural/intercultural literature at present, even as its use as a cultural determinant is contested. Moreover, being low contact can be tied more specifically to touch avoidance, and in general, research across regions suggests that “Asia is the most touch avoidant in the world, and countries in the Mediterranean region are the most touch oriented” (Andersen 2008: 82). Hall (1966) had originally categorized North and Central American cultures as low contact, but more recent research (e.g., McDaniel & Andersen 1998) found support that they, along with Great Britain, are contact cultures. Interestingly, there may be a link between nature and nurture when it comes to a culture being high or low contact, but with a twist. Several scholars have found that cultures being contact or not often depends at least in part on the latitude where they exist. Andersen, Lustig, and Andersen (1990), for instance, found that, globally, cultures in cooler zones tended to be cooler interpersonally as well, which led to less contact. This occurred even within a single nation, with warmer parts of a country associated with warmer temperament and more contact than in colder regions. Some of the possible reasons for this climate-based difference include greater time interacting with others in warm temperature cultures and increased structure of or formality in colder climate cultures, seen as necessary for dealing with the lower temperatures.

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Given that cultures differ on how much contact they expect and engage in, it makes sense that people from diverse cultures would also interpret contact behaviors differently. Albert and Ah Ha (2004) asked teachers and students from Anglo and Latino countries to respond to various scenarios in which the actors touched one another (they also looked at interpretations – or attributions – made for silence). Among other things, the authors found Latinos were particularly likely to evaluate a man being hit in the face in one scenario as an insult when compared to their U.S. Anglo counterparts. The authors suggested this difference may be due to the dimension of masculinity-femininity (Hofstede 1991), with the U.S. Latinos’ culture reflecting more masculinity, wherein being hit shows weakness and can be used to emasculate another.

5 Implications of nonverbal differences in intercultural and multicultural contexts Whereas I have only been able to scratch the surface of the extensive literature on “cultured” nonverbal cues, my hope is that the discussion in this chapter points toward some primary areas of scholarship relevant to intercultural communication. I also believe that the literature suggests some the potential challenges (and benefits) of communicating with others who are culturally different from us. I end this chapter, then, with some places where scholarship speaks to areas for investigating – and potentially improving – intercultural discourse. A large area, of course, is the recognition that, despite some cues being used and understood universally, and the underlying biological and evolutionary consistency we share (Floyd 2004), culture tends to shape the rules, use, and interpretation of its members’ nonverbal cues. If we do not see nonverbal cues as cultured we risk judging and interpreting others erroneously from our own cultural perspective. Vargas-Urpi (2013), for instance, writes about difficulties for Chinese immigrants living in Catalonia, noting that interpreters for the immigrants have been challenged to understand the Chinese pattern of gaze aversion and smiling to cover negative emotions. Rule et al. (2010) offer that people may tend to judge another’s behavior from their own (cultural) perspective rather than take the other’s into account as they may be influenced by people’s tendency toward self-projection (Krueger 2007). To help, Albert and Ah Hah (2004: 254) suggest the following: “To interact effectively with members of another culture, it is helpful if individuals learn to make ‘isomorphic attributions’ to those made by members of the other culture … The explanations of social behavior that individuals provide about the behavior of the other must be similar to the attributions that the other makes about his or her own behavior; otherwise, the message received will not be the message the other is attempting to convey”.

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Doing so is challenging, however, as in some ways we seem hard-wired into understanding the world once we are enculturated to see it a certain way. Condon and Yousef (1983: 65), for instance, state that “[t]he fusion of individualism and equality is so valued and so basic that many Americans find it most difficult to relate to contrasting values in other cultures where interdependence greatly determines a person’s sense of self”. Moreover, it may be easier for us to interpret our own culture’s (in-group) communication than that of another’s (out-group), but this advantage has been strongly contested (Matsumoto 2006). We may also prefer our own cues. As an example, Endrass, Andre, Rehm, and Nakano (2013) used computational models to create prototypical behaviors of people from German and Japanese cultures. Overall, they found that people from each culture, at least in part, preferred the behaviors that resembled their own background. These preferences or tendencies often lead to discriminatory behavior, including subtle cues such as spending more time in an interview when the interviewee is of the same race (Dovidio 2009) or being more engaged nonverbally with cultural members who we believe come from cultures that are more like our own (Manusov, Winchatz & Manning 1997). Such behavior patterns are often outside of our awareness and can have significant consequences. Importantly, time spent in another culture can help people become more competent at recognizing others’ behaviors according to the users’ system (Molinsky, Krabbenhoft, Ambady & Choi 2005) – this points to the importance of sojourning in increasing cultural awareness. As we work to create additional scholarship on similarities and differences across cultural members’ use of nonverbal cues, these dynamics are important to consider.

Further Readings Burgoon, Judee K., Lesa A. Stern & Leesa Dillman. 1995. Interpersonal adaptation: Dyadic interaction patterns. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Edward. 1977. Beyond culture. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Kendon, Adam. 1985. Uses of gestures. In Deborah Tannen & Muriel Saville-Troike (eds.), Perspectives on silence, 215–234. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Schegloff, Emanuel. 1984. On some gestures’ relation to talk. In J. Maxwell Atkinson & John Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action, 266–296. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

6 References Albert, Rosita D. & In Ah Hah. 2004. Latino/American differences in attributions to situations involving touch and silence. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 28. 253–280.

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Andersen, Peter A. 2008. Nonverbal communication: Forms and functions, 2 nd edn. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Andersen, Peter A., Myron W. Lustig & Jan A. Andersen. 1990. Changes in latitude, changes in attitude: The relationship between climate and interpersonal communication predisposition. Communication Quarterly 38. 291–311. Andersen, Peter A. & Hua Wang. 2006. Unraveling cultural cues: Dimensions of nonverbal communication across cultures. In Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter & Edwin R. McDaniel (eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader, 11th edn., 250–266. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Bello, Richard S., Frances E. Brandau-Brown, Shuangyue Zhang & Donald J. Ragsdale. 2010. Verbal and nonverbal methods of expressing appreciation in friendships and romantic relationships: A cross-cultural comparison. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 34. 294–302. Bente, Gary, Haug Leuschner, Ahmad A. Issa & James Blascovich. 2010. The others: Universals and cultural specificities in the perception of status and dominance from nonverbal behavior. Consciousness and Cognition 19. 762–777. Birdwhistell, Ray. 1970. Kinesics and context. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Buck, Ross & Stacie Renfro Powers. 2006. The biological foundations of social organization: The dynamic emergence of social structure through nonverbal communication. In Valerie Manusov & Miles L. Patterson (eds.), The Sage handbook of nonverbal communication, 119– 138. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Burgoon, Judee K. & Norah E. Dunbar. 2006. Dominance, power, and influence. In Valerie Manusov & Miles L. Patterson (eds.), The Sage handbook of nonverbal communication, 279– 298. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Burgoon, Judee K., Laura K. Guerrero & Valerie Manusov. 2011. Nonverbal signals. In Mark L. Knapp & John A. Daly (eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication, 4th edn, 239–282. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Burgoon, Judee K. & Jerry L. Hale. 1984. The fundamental topoi of relational communication. Communication Monographs 51. 193–214. Bussmann, Hadumod. 1996. Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics. London: Routledge. Carbaugh, Donal A., Michael Berry & Marjatta Nurmikari-Berry. 2006. Coding personhood through cultural terms and practices: Silence and quietude as a Finnish “natural way of being.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 25(3). 203–220. Choi, Soo-Hyang. 1991. Communicative socialization processes. Korea and Canada. In Bambi B. Schieffelin & Elinor Ochs (eds.), Language socialization across cultures, 213–250. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Condon, John C. & Fathi S. Yousef. 1983. An introduction to intercultural communication. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Dovidio, John F. 2009. Racial bias: Unspoken but heard. Science 326. 1641–1642. Ekman, Paul. 1977. Biological and cultural contributions to body and facial movement. In John Blacking (ed.), Anthropology of the body, 34–84. London: Academic Press. Ekman, Paul. 1992. An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & Emotion 6. 169–200. Emry, Robert & Richard L. Wiseman. 1987. An intercultural understanding of ablebodied and disabled persons’ communication. International Journal of Intercultural Relation 11. 7–27. Endrass, Birgit, Elisabeth Andre, Matthias Rehm & Yukiko Nakano. 2013. Investigating culturerelated aspects of behavior for virtual characters. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 27. 277–304. Floyd, Kory. 2004. An introduction to the uses and potential uses of physiological measurement in the study of family communication. Journal of Family Communication 4. 295–318. Fridlund, Alan J. & James A. Russell. 2006. The functions of facial expressions: What’s in a face? In Valerie Manusov & Miles L. Patterson (eds.), The Sage handbook of nonverbal communication, 299–319. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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12 What’s past is prologue 1: Lessons from conflict, communication, and culture research from half a century ago Abstract: To examine the current state of cross-cultural research on conflict and communication, this chapter examines research published half a century ago – specifically between 64 to 45 years ago. By looking at past research, we examine the driving issues, theoretical concerns, and social context that informed this early research so that we can look where this research is today. Articles were selected and examined from journals published between 1950 and 1971 that addressed research related to conflict, culture, and communication – or peace, the other side of conflict. The articles reviewed provide a glimpse into what issues were of interest then, how they were conceptualized, and what we might learn from this 50 year old (give or take a decade) research that informs current work. Perhaps most striking is, after a half century, how little has changed. All these years later, we are still addressing the same issues related to conflict: How do we achieve peace? How do we prevent violence? How can people understand each other and overcome attitudes, norms, stereotypes, and policies that contribute to harming one another? Keywords: conflict, culture, communication, ethnocentrism, Cold War, civil rights, systems theory, roles

1 Introduction To examine the current state of cross-cultural research on conflict and communication, this chapter examines research published half a century ago – specifically between 64 to 45 years ago. By looking at past research, we identify trends that were present at that time so that we can look at where this research is today. Eleven carefully selected articles from journals published between 1950 and 1971 were reviewed that addressed research related to conflict, culture, and communication – or peace, the other side of conflict. Over these two decades, from 1950 to 1970, little research addressed culture, conflict, and communication. However, the research in this area grew significantly in the 1970s. This chapter traces trends just before this growth in research on conflict, culture, and communication: what the research looked like then compared to the current state of those topics and what we can learn for today’s research agenda. 1 The title is taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Act 2, Scene 1). DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-012

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1.1 Background The period from 1952 to 1971 is replete with major conflicts and social movements, many of which took place in or involved the United States. We expect that these events would affect the perspectives of the authors of the articles we chose to examine. Table 12.1 provides a list of some of the events that played a major role during this time period; the end of World War II is included because of the long shadow it cast over the subsequent years. The beginning of the period under discussion is primarily about international conflict. Wars, East-West hostility, the fear of Communism in the U.S., the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and clashes with Cuba or its Soviet ally made the era after World War II heavily oriented to conflict. However, it was also a time that general theory and functionalism was being promoted, as for example, in sociology by Talcott Parsons (author of The Social System, 1951) and Robert K. Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1949); see also Aberle, Cohen, Davis, Levy, and Sutton’s (1950) essay on “The Functional Prerequisites of a Society.” Functional theory rather than conflict theory was dominant in American social science. Preceding this period there were significant works and schools that developed that had a profound influence on how current events were to be interpreted, especially events about conflict, culture, and communication. For example, although Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto was published in English (1850) relatively quickly after it appeared in German and other languages (1848), Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value was translated into English and was published in an abridged edition in English in 1951. Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life appeared in English in 1915, but The Division of Labor in Society was first published in English in 1933. Freud’s The Future of an Illusion appeared in English in 1928. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, a large number of Jewish academics fled from Europe and wound up in the U.S.; this list includes Bruno Bettelheim, Kurt Lewin, and members of the Frankfurt School. Paul Lazarsfeld remained in the U.S. in 1935 rather than return to his Austrian homeland. Many of these scholars, especially from the Frankfurt School, studied Marx and were, therefore, attuned to the study of conflict. In 1954, several scholars studying, among other things, conflict, established the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, which later was renamed the Society for General Systems Research. The founding scholars were Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Anatol Rapoport, Ralph W. Gerard, and Kenneth Boulding. Their approach had aspects of evolution in it, and this work continued a functional approach. However, mathematical modeling, which was part of the systems approach, directly addressed conflict. For example, Lewis F. Richardson, an English meteorologist and a Quaker (and also a mathematician, psychologist, and physicist), horrified by the brutality of World War I, wrote a paper on the mathematical psychology of war (written in 1919 and published in 1935 as 1935a, 1935b), and his work on war culminated in his Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1950/1960). Similarly,

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Tab. 12.1: Major Historical and Social Events for the U.S., 1945–1971. Event

Years

End of World War II

1945

President Truman ends racial segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces

1948

Berlin Blockade and Airlift

1948–1949

Korean War

1950–1953

Vietnam conflict and Vietnam War

1950*–1975

Army-(Senator Joseph) McCarthy hearings

1954

U.S. Supreme Court issues Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision

1954

Warsaw Pact forces crush the Hungarian Revolution

1956

Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins initiate a wave of sit-ins in the southern United States

1960

U.S. severs diplomatic relations with Cuba

1961

Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba

1961

Freedom Riders protest segregation in the United States

1961

Cuban Missile Crisis

1962

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech

1963

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is published; sells 1.4 million copies in 1st paperback printing

1963

President John F. Kennedy killed

1963

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act

1964

U.S. Supreme Court issues the Miranda v. Arizona decision

1966

Martin Luther King Jr. killed

1968

Tet Offensive in Vietnam

1968

Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty opened for approval; in effect in 1970

1968

Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia

1968

First draft lottery for the Vietnam War

1969

Raid on Stonewall Inn in New York City: gay resistance to police tactics

1969

National Guardsmen kill four students at an anti-war protest at Kent State University, Ohio

1970

26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution approved granting voting rights to U.S. citizens at least 18 years old

1971

Note. Sources include the following: Timeline of events in the Cold War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_in_the_Cold_War); List of wars, 1945–1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1945 %E2 %80 %9389); United States relations with Russia: The Cold War (http://2001–2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/85895.htm); Timeline of major events in U.S. history from 1950–1999 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903597.html); Pfetsch & Rohloff (2000), National and international conflicts, 1945–1995: New empirical and theoretical approaches. Other events were added by the current authors. *The starting date of American involvement in Vietnam is not agreed upon.

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Flood and Dresher developed the Prisoner’s Dilemma game in 1950, which became a model for analyzing cooperation and conflict (see Dresher 1961; Flood 1952; see also Roth 1995). The next set of events that attracted the attention of conflict scholars was the civil rights movement. Although the plight of African Americans was well known – starting in 1909, over 200 bills were introduced to the U.S. Congress to make lynching a federal crime, and not a single one became law – the events in the 1950s and 1960s heightened the awareness of the treatment of African Americans and resulted in new federal legislation that was designed to insure voting and other fundamental rights. The conflict between Whites and Blacks came to the fore, along with the movements for women’s rights, gay rights, and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Domestic conflict appeared to replace international conflict both for the public and for American academics; these conflicts also had a global impact.

2 An analysis of the literature on conflict, communication, and culture We set as a goal the analysis of the driving issues, theoretical concerns, and social context that informed the early research on the intersection of conflict, communication, and culture. We began by searching all academic journals published between 1950 and 1980 that included in the journal title any of the following terms:

Tab. 12.2: Journals Published between 1950 and 1980 Related to Culture, Conflict, and Communication. Journal

First year published

Speech Monographs / Communication Monographs Journal of Communication Journal of Conflict Resolution Journal of Peace Research Cooperation and Conflict Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Communication Research Human Communication Research Journal of Peace Science / Conflict Management and Peace Science International Journal of Intercultural Relations

1934 / 1976 1951 1957 1964 1965 1970 1974 1974 1974 / 1981 1977

One year impact factor (in 2014) 1.319 2.076 1.373 2.280 1.053 1.746 2.444 1.886 1.082 1.216

Note. Titles separated by a virgule represent a change in the journal’s title. This impact factor is taken from the Thomson Reuters’ InCites Journal Citation Reports.

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communication, culture (or intercultural or cross-cultural), conflict, or peace. This search identified 14 journals (Speech Monographs was included, being renamed Communication Monographs in 1976). From these 14 journals, only those that are currently (i.e., in 2015, which reports the 2014 impact factor) rated in the Thomson Reuters’ InCites Journal Citation Reports were included, which reduced the number of journals to ten (see Table 12.2). Finally, because there was a sharp increase in culture, communication, and conflict research after 1970, we restricted our focus to only articles published from 1950 to 1970. Only six of the ten academic journals were published during this period: Speech Monographs, Journal of Communication, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Cooperation and Conflict, and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.

2.1 Identifying articles To examine how the understanding of the intersection of conflict, communication, and culture has changed, we conducted a small exploratory study. After identifying the six academic journals, we selected articles that met the following criteria: 1. Articles were identified by doing a search using the EBSCO databases with the keywords communicat*, conflict, and intercultur* or cross-cultur*. In EBSCO, the use of an asterisk (*) allows for a Boolean search, so that communicat* brought up the words using this root, such as communicate, communication, and communicating. 2. In addition to the keyword search, we reviewed the table of contents of each of the six journals for the years between 1950 and 1970, searching titles for articles relevant to the combined focus of culture, conflict, and communication. The articles had to have conflict and culture as central to the focus of the article’s research, eliminating articles that, for example, mentioned only conflict as an aspect of communication in general. Further, the articles could not be editorial introductions or other pieces not reflecting original research. Given that the first article in the set identified was published in 1952, we extended our range to 1971 to round out the 20 year range, which would allow us to include the first volume of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 3. The keyword search, review of the journals’ table of contents, and elimination of articles that did not fit the criteria described above resulted in eleven articles, from only three journals, published between 1952 and 1971. The following analysis describes the trends that emerged from analyzing the eleven articles published between 1952 and 1971. These articles are identified in Table 12.3, which also includes the total number of words in each article. (Included in Table 12.3 are also nine articles published in 2015 used for a comparison that is discussed below.)

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Tab. 12.3: Articles Employed, in Chronological Order with Their Word Count. Article Citation

Total Number of Words

Knode, Donald P. 1952. The Iron Curtain refugee in a new world. Journal of Communication 2(1). 1–5.

2,007

Singer, J. David. 1958. Threat-perception and the armament-tension dilemma. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2. 90–105.

8,275

Janis, Irving L. & Daniel Katz. 1959. The reduction of intergroup hostility: Research problems and hypotheses. Journal of Conflict Resolution 3. 85– 100.

8,589

LeVine, Robert A. 1961. Anthropology and the study of conflict: An introduction. Journal of Conflict Resolution 5. 3–15.

6,869

Campbell, Donald T. & Robert A. LeVine. 1961. A proposal for cooperative cross-cultural research on ethnocentrism. Journal of Conflict Resolution 5. 82–108.

14,007

Levi, Werner. 1964. On the causes of peace. Journal of Conflict Resolution 8. 23–35.

7,044

Weilenmann, Alex. 1966. Communication and control in international politics. Journal of Communication 16. 322–332.

3,794

Hoedemaker, Edward D. 1968. Distrust and aggression: An interpersonalinternational analogy. Journal of Conflict Resolution 12. 69–81.

6,666

Brehmer, Berndt, Hiroshi Azuma, Kenneth R. Hammond, Lubomir Kostron & Denis D. Varonos. 1970. A cross-national comparison of cognitive conflict. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 1. 5–20.

4,558

Daniel, Jack L. 1970. The facilitation of White-Black communication. Journal of Communication 20. 134–141.

2,349

Lester, David. 1971. Suicide and homicide rates and the society’s need for affiliation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 2. 405–406.

704

Bausch, Andrew W. 2015. The geography of ethnocentrism. Journal of Conflict Resolution 59. 510–527.

6,594

Brylka, Asteria, Tuuli Anna Mähönen, Fabian M. H. Schellhaas & Inga Jasinskaja-Lahti. 2015. From cultural discordance to support for collective action: The roles of intergroup anxiety, trust, and group status. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46. 897–915.

7,817

Buttny, Richard & Azirah Hashim. 2015. Dialogue in “1 Malaysia”: The uses of metadiscourse in ethnopolitical accounting. Discourse and Society 26. 147–164.

7,517

Caust, Josephine. 2015. Cultural wars in an Australian context: Challenges in developing a national cultural policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy 21. 168–182.

6,523

Dixon, Travis L. & Charlotte L. Williams. 2015. The changing misrepresentation of race and crime on network and cable news. Journal of Communication 65. 24–39.

5,549

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Tab. 12.3 (continued) Article Citation

Total Number of Words

Günsoy, Caren, Susan E. Cross, Ayse K. Uskul, Glenn Adams & Berna Gercek-Swing. 2015. Avoid or fight back? Cultural differences in responses to conflict and the role of collectivism, honor, and enemy perception. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46. 1081–1102.

9,410

Hauk, Esther & Hannes Mueller. 2015. Cultural leaders and the clash of civilizations. Journal of Conflict Resolution 59. 367–400.

13,913

Murayama, Aya, Carey S. Ryan, Hiroshi Shimizu, Koichi Kurebayashi & Asako Miura. 2015. Cultural differences in perceptions of intragroup conflict and preferred conflict-management behavior: A scenario experiment. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46. 88–100.

5,182

Reidy, Catherine M., Laura K. Taylor, Christine E. Merrilees, Dean Ajduković, Dinka Č. Biruški & E. Mark Cummings. 2015. The political socialization of youth in a post-conflict community. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 45. 11–23.

8,532

Note. The total number of words excludes headers, footers, and references, but footnotes are included. Numbers were counted as words.

2.2 Keyword analysis The next step for our analysis was to consider terms that we expected to be prominent in these 11 articles. Based on the content and focus of the articles, we selected 39 terms (see Table 12.4). We searched for how often the root of each term was mentioned in each article (see Appendix for notes on the word counts); two of the terms included two different words (East and Soviet, and arms and weapons). The number of times the terms were used per article was converted to a frequency per 20,000 words. Finally, as is typical for frequency data, the data were positively skewed; to make the data more symmetric for further analysis, they were transformed by taking their natural logarithm after adding 1. Using these terms, we conducted several analyses using the transformed data. First, we conducted a principal components analysis (on the correlations among the terms, without rotation) using the articles published between 1952 and 1971 to see the extent to which the terms formed coherent patterns. There were three components that represented the broad perspectives of these articles. Table 12.4 provides the results of this analysis. From Table 12.4, we surmise that Component I represents general theoretical discussions of hostilities between groups with cultural differences. Component II appears to be focused on the Cold War. Component III seems tied to the civil rights movement and the conflict between Blacks and Whites. We next regressed the

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Tab. 12.4: Terms Used, Their Mean and Standard Deviation per 20,000 Words of Text, and the Component that Each Term was Significantly Associated With (loading > .600; N = 11), for 11 Articles from 1952–1971. Term

Aggression Argue Arms, Weapons Civil rights

Mean Usage per Standard 20,000 Words Deviation of Text 24.42

49.70

2.06

3.76

63.96

210.15

*Loadings > .600 on Component I

Component II

Component III

* *

2.32

7.70

*

Communication

22.03

35.32

*

Communism

11.33

29.95

Conflict

72.31

125.62

6.66

10.76

Culture

23.78

45.72

Data

33.79

76.63

1.89

3.86

Cooperation

Deterrence

*

* * (negatively) *

Disarm

8.89

27.57

Distrust

35.63

102.33

East, Soviet

23.76

61.39

Ethnocentrism

7.85

22.60

*

Fight

1.21

1.89

*

Foreign

3.55

6.30

Freedom

6.61

20.96

History

5.26

5.99

Hostility

21.54

26.75

Information

30.90

73.99

Intergroup

4.14

7.78

International

43.33

63.98

Military

14.24

27.66

Nation

88.82

105.86

Negro, Colored

36.98

120.46

Network

1.96

4.74

25.59

62.03

Quarrel

0.75

1.45

Race

1.81

5.27

Peace

* *

* * *

*

*

*

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Tab. 12.4 (continued) Term

Society

Mean Usage per Standard 20,000 Words Deviation of Text

*Loadings > .600 on Component I

Component II

102.74

117.99

Statistics

2.47

4.95

Stereotype

7.13

14.47

Theory

13.86

20.32

Threat

18.03

23.54

*

Treaty

1.45

3.35

*

War

15.24

20.00

West

13.81

29.63

White

40.38

133.45

Component III

* *

* * *

Note. To standardize the use of the terms as per 20,000 words of text, the following formula was used: Term per 20,000 words of text = ([Number of times the term appeared in the article]/[number of words in the article]) × 20,000). Terms that are different grammatical forms of these core terms were included; for example, peace includes peaceful; arms includes armaments. However, “arms race” was included in arms but not in race; see the Appendix. The components are based in the terms per 20,000 words being logarithmically transformed: Transformed term per 20,000 words of text = Ln (numbers of words used for that term per 20,000 words of text + 1). Percent variance accounted for by each component: I: 20 %; II: 19 %; III: 13 %.

three component scores on the article’s date (the year) and a variable that represented whether the article appeared in the Journal of Communication (JOC; n = 3) versus the Journal of Conflict Resolution (n = 6) and the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (n = 2). Earlier articles were significantly (p < .05) more likely to use the Component I terms than later articles. This result suggests a decline in perceiving conflict in general theoretical terms and that communication research was less likely to do so from the start. Compared to the other two journals, the JOC was significantly (p < .05) more likely to use terms associated with the civil rights era. This result probably is tied to the JOC’s closer examination of U.S. race relations than the other two journals. In a subsequent analysis of variance with date treated as a categorical variable (with three categories), three significant (p < .05) interactions were found between date and journal. First, for Component I, the later the articles, the less Component I terms were used. Second, there was a main effect for date such that later articles were less likely to use Component II terms; the effect seems to be due primarily to the JOC. Third, for Component III, JOC used these terms significantly more than the other two journals, and there was a significant interaction of date by journal such

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that the later the date, the more JOC used Component III terms, whereas the other two journals decreased in their use of these terms over time. These analyses of the 11 articles help provide the themes that we discuss in the following sections.

3 Overarching observations of research topics, approaches, and insights We recognize that these eleven articles are not representative of the type of research being published over these two decades. We limited our focus to a very specific area of research within a very specific subset of academic journals. It is noteworthy, nonetheless, that there were very few articles at the time that met our criteria. The growth in research that focuses on all three areas – conflict, culture, and communication – really takes off in the early- to mid-70s. But these articles do provide a glimpse into what was of interest, how it was conceptualized, and what we might learn from this 50 year old (give or take a decade) research. Perhaps what was most striking was, after a half century, how little has changed: The research from then remains relevant today. On the one hand, we might expect concepts to change or theory to be developed to address the issues with new ways of thinking. Yet, perhaps the disturbing part of this observation is that the focus of this past work was on intergroup and international conflict, and fifty-some years later, we are still addressing the same issues: How do we achieve peace? How do we prevent violence? How can people understand each other and overcome attitudes, norms, stereotypes, and policies that contribute to harming one another? The following sections examine insights gained from this review of past research.

3.1 Systems, levels, and conflict Although the Journal of Conflict Resolution is often associated more with political science and international relations than with the research in communication or psychology, one notable feature is that the set of articles published in JCR appear more likely to cut across levels of analysis without distinguishing between the levels. The five JCR articles address the causes of peace, disarmament, the anthropological study of conflict, and ethnocentrism. Within these articles, to understand nations as international actors includes the need to understand the influence of individual leaders, policymakers, and negotiators who make decisions. One way of dealing with multiple levels is to treat one level as analogous to another. For example, Hoedemaker (1968) used psychodynamic approaches for ad-

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dressing hostile and distrustful individuals as analogous to managing hostile and distrustful nations. In the other four JCR articles, conflict processes at the international level and the individual level are treated as interdependent: Multiple levels of analysis are used to understand conflict dynamics. Current scholars acknowledge that this approach is informative but have moved away from doing so. In keeping with this perspective, several authors discussed this interrelationship between society and government with regard to the acceptance of violence and norms of peace. Levi (1964) wrote about the causes of peace mostly from an international level, but he recognized that peace often happens at the interpersonal, family, and community levels. From this approach, there are values instilled within nations that reinforce peace: “The nationally-organized control of violence reinforces the use of more peaceful controls … Behavior patterns must be formed which discount violence” (1964: 24). Similarly, the use of violence has influences that cross levels: Janis and Katz (1959: 96) differentiated between personal hostility and institutional aggression and discussed what happens when violence and hostility is legitimized and sanctioned by groups and institutions. In times of war almost all sources of authority within each nation assert that it is noble and proper to kill for one’s country. The social support for the antisocial action generally has three elements: the justification of a moral purpose, the justification of legitimacy, and the justification that others approve. Since the traditional inhibitor of violence has been the social environment, violence can assume intense and bizarre forms when the inhibitor is transformed into the facilitator. This is the classic theory of crowd behavior … Thus within the areas where aggression is socially sanctioned, individuals can resolve their conflicts by indulging their worst impulses and by attaining social recognition and reward for so doing.

Related to integrated levels of analysis is Weilenmann’s (1966) article, published in the Journal of Communication, which provides a systems view of communication within international politics. This article reads like old news, and it is just that – old news, which at the time was brand new. Viewing international politics through the lens of various subsystems that interact in hierarchical relationships was indeed a new conceptualization of international relationships when this article was published, but once again, this approach treats levels as interdependent. Systems thinking is exemplified in the work of von Bertalanffy, who published many pieces of his general system theory in the 1950s, with his seminal work appearing in 1968, too late for the Weilenmann article (see also Hammond 2002; von Bertalanffy 1972); Weilenmann relied instead on the contemporary (to him) systems thinking of James G. Miller and Norbert Wiener. Note that the very first words in the title of this article – “communication and control,” which are now mostly applied to engineering – emphasize the systems approach that is used (see Beniger 1986, especially p. 39, for the development of this idea). In Weilenmann’s article, complex systems that involve many “organizations, groups, and individuals, each of which may carry out several of the [receptor,

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memory, and decision subsystem] functions” (1966: 323) are distinguished from “‘primitive’ systems that are largely non-political” (1966: 325). This approach highlights the interrelationship between society and government. In the same vein, LeVine proposed that “conflicts within and between small social units promote the solidarity of larger units (particularly the society as a whole)” (1961: 3), because rebellions and hostilities reinforce the values and moral order in which these conflicts occur. Further, Levi noted, “peace within nations is not preserved by the elimination of conflicts or violence or by refashioning of human nature. For the same men who fight wars abroad preserve the peace at home” (1964: 24). These arguments that social norms at the societal level influence and are influenced by the effort to preserve peace or to engage in war at the national and international level have implications for current research. Too often we talk about the need to cross levels of analysis, but over time researchers have moved culture and conflict research away from that cross-level approach to focus more on individuals or on groups that comprise individuals with specific attitudes and beliefs. The article by Brehmer, Azuma, Hammond, Kostron, and Varonos (1970) is indicative of the shift in culture, conflict, and communication research, which has evolved from viewing levels as interdependent to comparing participants in specific nations or cultures on attitudes and behaviors. Brehmer et al. studied participants from five countries (Czechoslovakia, Greece, Japan, Sweden, and the United States) who were first taught different views about the influence of the state on democracy and were then brought together to discuss policy. This article, the first empirical article in the first issue of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, concluded that the unwillingness to give in to an opponent is a greater source of ongoing conflict than the inability to adjust to the opponent’s views. Thus, differences in beliefs are enough to create and perpetuate conflict between people. On the one hand, this article still reflects a bilevel approach: Individuals influence how national policy is debated. On the other hand, the shift is toward individual attitudes and behaviors. Understanding how violence, aggression, hostility, and peace are sought at various levels, and how the norms and values of a nation influence the norms and values of individuals within those nations, can broaden our insights into how and why people – and governments – behave as they do. Durkheim argued that society is a collective, not merely a sum of individual members, and that it should be studied this way (1895/1982). Although international peace is influenced by nations made up of individuals, Singer (1958) noted that, within each nation, policy decisions result from some type of collective decision-making and cultural norms. Personal aggression may be normative within a society; see, for example, Nisbett and Cohen’s (1996) Culture of Honor, which examined southern U.S. social norms related to protecting one’s honor through aggression. In a similar vein, Lester (1971) tested whether societal need for achievement versus societal need for

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power would predict homicide versus suicide rates, respectively. Such norms contribute to a nation’s institutionalized violence, and they may be deemed acceptable even when the people within a nation are generally peaceful and are generally opposed to violence (Collins 2009). Crossing these levels of community to national to international norms and actions toward peace and conflict has theoretical and methodological consequences. Theoretically, we need to understand Durkheim’s (1895) notion that social facts are sui generis: They are not generated from individuals’ psychology; instead, individuals’ reality is influenced by the society within which they live and the prevailing social facts. Thus, instead of focusing on individual psychology as a means for understanding culture, conflict, and communication, we need to study the social facts – institutions, societal structures, national values – that shape individuals’ behaviors. Methodologically, this reasoning suggests research designs that represent the interdependence of these levels are necessary for understanding the determinants and outcomes of conflict.

3.2 Functional value of conflict Conflict can contribute to peace. This insight was made by Durkheim, Simmel, and others, who analyzed conflict between groups and within societies. Some of the authors in our set of articles addressed whether and how conflict can be eufunctional – have a positive function – within society (see Coser 1956). LeVine (1961) cited two schools of thought on this issue. One school, by Gluckman and Turner, proposed that social conflict is functional for the maintenance of social systems. For example, conflict that is a result of criminal behavior can serve to reinforce social norms about what behaviors are sanctioned or condemned within the society. The other school, by Siegel and Beals, disagreed with this functional approach. To them, social conflict is maladaptive, “produced by the interaction of strains – sensitive points of potential disruption within the social system – and stresses – alteration in pressures external to the system” (LeVine 1961: 3). In opposition to Siegel and Beals, LeVine argued that behavior that promotes group solidarity is eufunctional: “It has often been pointed out in sociological discussions that open conflict between groups aids the internal cohesion of the groups” (1961: 9). For example, more frequent or intense conflict at the intercultural or intercommunity level could result in less frequent or intense conflict at the intrafamily or intracommunity levels, and vice versa. In other words, conflicts at one level can promote solidarity at other levels, making the conflict eufunctional. Thus, solidarity is improved at one level at the cost of conflict at another. Conflict reinforces the social norms of what is acceptable and unacceptable both within and outside of any one of the structural levels. Levi proposed that, for conflict to contribute to peace, “the social structure must tolerate conflict and in particular must provide institutions excluding force for their solution; conflicting interests

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must not be valued more highly than common interests; and the interdependent groups must be sufficiently large” (1964: 29). LeVine proposed that, at a societal level rather than an individual one, one way to assess the functional value of social conflict would be to rank the degree to which conflict behaviors are more or less accepted. In other words, to what extent are conflict behaviors, such as types of avoidance, verbal dispute, or physical aggression, more disruptive than others in different societies? By organizing cross-cultural data in this way, it would be possible to find out if different conflict-indicating culture-patterns, varying in their disruptiveness at a given structural level, are functional substitutes for one another. If it turns out that they are, then one can compare societies in terms of the relative disruptiveness (dysfunctionality) of their solution to the same functional problem. (LeVine 1961: 9–10)

Three lessons are learned from this discussion. First, conflict does not necessarily have a negative function within or across groups. Second, studying conflict at the intergroup, societal, and intercultural levels – more than the study of the psychology of individuals – is likely to yield different insights about the function of conflict. And third, conflict behaviors and actions are not likely to be viewed the same way across groups and societies. For example, avoidance of another person during a conflict may be viewed as passive aggressive in one culture but as preserving relationships in another culture (Wang, Fink & Cai 2012). Comparing societies on which behaviors are considered disruptive and which behaviors can be substituted for other less acceptable ones can be useful for identifying eufunctional as compared to dysfunctional conflict. Finally, what becomes evident in reviewing this past literature is that the research on conflict and communication across cultures is not bounded by dimensions, such as Hofstede’s (1980) individualism and collectivism, as the primary predictors of how people manage conflict. Instead, how conflict operates as eufunctional or dysfunctional is understood within contexts of relationships and norms within and between societies. In other words, if we didn’t have dimensions such as individualism-collectivism as explanatory crutches, what norms and behaviors would explain the differences – or similarities – across cultures when people engage in conflict? Our social obligations to preserve face or harmony, for example, may differentiate how openly we engage in conflict or how we work to preserve face, and whose face is worth preserving (Cai, Fink & Xie 2012). Additional characteristics have emerged more recently that are perhaps more useful to define societies, such as honor (Nisbett & Cohen 1996), face, and dignity cultures (Günsoy, Cross, Uskul, Adams & Gercek-Swing 2015). Nonetheless, the trend in social science research on communication and conflict is to rely on psychological descriptions rather than on societal structures, values, and norms to explain and compare differences in behavior across cultures.

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3.3 Ethnocentrism Related to the discussion of functional conflict is the observation that ethnocentrism typically involves “hatred and unfavorable stereotypes of outgroups [to] help maintain feelings of solidarity within the ingroup” (LeVine 1961: 9). Hostilities between groups and nations are exacerbated by ethnocentric beliefs, and policymakers who hold ethnocentric values are less likely to pursue peace. To address this issue, Campbell and LeVine (1961) proposed an agenda for developing a general theory of ethnocentrism, one that would explain the concept and make predictions regarding ethnocentrism across groups and cultures and over time. These researchers reviewed the difficulty of developing a comprehensive theory of a concept that is often reduced to its simplest meaning – people consider their own culture better than those of others, which are typically assumed to be bad. Campbell and LeVine (1961) provided very detailed descriptions of the many methodological considerations for doing research that would culminate in a comprehensive general theory of ethnocentrism. They did not propose to use simple measures administered via surveys to convenience samples. Their goal was to achieve as close to a universal understanding of ethnocentrism as possible, and to this end, they elaborated on processes and procedures, on target participants and methods for recording data, and on the complexities of conducting this research. In short, they provided a game plan for researchers to follow. Campbell and LeVine expected researchers around the world to collect a tremendous amount of data in the effort to understand ethnocentrism and to share the data in an international database. They identified three research topics related to ethnocentrism that they believed merited attention: 1. “the universality of selflove and out-group hostility” (1961: 83), 2. stereotypes that ingroups assign to outgroups, and 3. the effect of social distance. Regarding the first topic (also see Chapters 15 and 17, this volume), using data from the Human Relations Area Files, Campbell and LeVine challenged the assumption that “ingroup adulation” must result in “out-group hostility” (1961: 84): “Of 55 groups examined … 35 were judged to be ethnocentric” (1961: 84). Therefore, ethnocentrism did not appear to be universal. Regarding the second topic – stereotypes – Campbell and LeVine noted that, in 1961, almost all of the work on stereotypes was done within the U.S. or other similar cultures. The question they asked then is an important one still: Are there universal or core stereotypes that ingroups tend to hold about outgroups, namely that “the outgroup was aggressive and self-aggrandizing, immoral, and unclean” (1961: 84)? The possibility that a core set of stereotypes might exist was rooted in two types of theories. The first type is an assumption that to justify hostility toward the outgroup, the worst attributes are ascribed to the group. The second type of theories is rooted in the idea that the guilt and wishes of an ingroup are projected on the outgroup. In other words, the problems or desires of one group are imposed as negatives on the outgroup. This perspective is similar

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to the predictions made by Bronfenbrenner (1961) in the mirror image hypothesis, which posited that Soviet and U.S. citizens held similar but opposite values and beliefs about their own and the other nation; tested first in 1965, this hypothesis was supported when subjects were asked to compare the two nations (Oskamp 1965). A contrasting view was provided by Knode’s (1952) research in which he described refugees who arrived in the United States from behind the Iron Curtain as distrustful of each other. Knode argued that the refugee coming to the West found it necessary to “sterilize himself relative to his nationality” (1952: 1). In this case, once the refugees arrived in what they considered to be the Free World, stereotypes were applied to any compatriots who were not part of the refugees’ ingroup, because the refugees assumed that those compatriots would act similarly to how outgroup members behaved in the Soviet Union. This view of stereotypes predicts that negative attributes are assigned to the outgroup and opposite positive attributes are assigned to the ingroup. Stereotypes have received widespread concern and attention related to their contribution to intergroup conflict. For example, a group of 24 researchers developed a cross-cultural stereotype content model, which proposed a universal two-dimensional model of stereotypes across different types of societal structures (Cuddy et al. 2009); the two dimensions relate to perceptions of outgroup members on competence (high or low) and warmth (high or low). But prior to this study and other research by Cuddy, Fiske, and their colleagues, Richard, Bond, and Stokes-Zoota (2003), in their report on more than 25,000 studies over 100 years in social psychology, identified only three supported generalizations concerning stereotypes: 1. within gender roles (i.e., “exposure to TV increases acceptance of gender role stereotypes,” 2003: 355), 2. within intergroup relations (i.e., “people attribute negative behaviors to members of stereotyped groups,” 2003: 357), and 3. within social cognition (i.e., “people are most likely to recall information from social memory if it is consistent with their stereotypes,” 2003: 362). Thus, after half a century since Campbell and LeVine, and after the one hundred years of research examined by Richard et al., it seems that we are just beginning to learn about the evolution and structure of stereotypes. (See more on stereotypes in Chapter 24 of this volume.) Regarding the third topic by Campbell and LeVine, that social distance should reduce ethnocentrism, social distance is associated with intimacy between members of the ingroup and outgroup (Bogardus 1933). As one approach for reducing threat between nations, Singer proposed a tensions-first approach: to encourage cultural exchanges, educational programs, and increased trade to “reduce or eliminate people’s ignorance of each other’s ways and lives” (1958: 95). This approach is similar to the Allport’s (1954) intergroup contact hypothesis, in which tensions between groups are reduced through increased contact. But Singer (1958) asked some questions related to this approach with regard to the nations that perpetuate the arms race: If governments depend on people hating the enemy, how much encouragement will the government give to exchanges that reduce hostility be-

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tween people? Further, public opinion can be swayed by denigrating the other side, playing up ethnocentric beliefs that are already established. In other words, Singer argued, it is not so easy for such cultural exchanges to accomplish the good will they are intended to achieve. A visitor returns from such an exchange, only to be hit with the continuing negative attitudes of others who did not go (Singer 1958). In a recent analysis of the relationship between mobility and ethnocentrism, De, Gelfand, Nau and Roos (2015) used simulated models of group evolution to demonstrate that ethnocentrism decreases within groups when there is greater mobility; conversely, they showed that “low mobility leads to in-group cooperation and out-group hostility” (2015: 5). These researchers confirmed their results with an archival study. Further, Bausch (2015) proposed a model that builds on recent efforts to provide broad theory that explains the effects of geography on ethnocentrism. He showed that, in general, the greater the distance over which interactions take place and the further children live from their parents, the less ethnocentrism. Thus, there seems to be progress on this theoretical issue. This discussion of ethnocentrism, stereotypes, and social distance suggests two directions for future research. First, we still do not know if the content of ethnocentrism and stereotypes are the same within different societies, if by content we mean things like cleanliness, sexuality, and the like (but see Brown 2010: 183). Second, the increase in international travel and exchanges should result in a reduction in stereotypes and ethnocentrism. But anxiety and uncertainty over interacting with people across cultures can contribute to rather than alleviate ethnocentrism (Logan, Steel & Hunt 2015). International prejudices continue and at times increase despite international contacts, because limited conflict between nations can increase stereotypes: Contact is enough to bring people together but may not be enough to mitigate prejudices and stereotypes. Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) conducted a meta-analysis of over 500 studies on the intergroup contact hypothesis. Although they found overall support for the hypothesis, as a result of their analysis they argued that future research needs to look at the factors that result in contact between groups that fail to reduce prejudice.

3.4 Roles One influence on international conflict, peace, and hostility is the particular role of those involved in these processes. Role is the part that a person plays within society or a social group, which carries societal, organizational, or professional expectations for appropriate behavior and attitudes related to a position. These expectations can constrain a person’s actions, and when a person has more than one role, the expectations of competing roles can create intrapersonal as well as interpersonal conflict. Across cultures, expectations can often differ for the seemingly same role. Hierarchy, power distance, norms, beliefs about equality, and au-

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thority related to the status of the role are some of the many influences that can differ across cultures and affect role behavior. One perspective on roles was addressed by Janis and Katz (1959) in their discussion of hostility between conflicting groups. Their concern was with the role of leaders and what happens when a leader uses violent means toward a group to accomplish the leader’s own group’s goals. Four outcomes are predicted when leaders use “bad means for good ends” (1959: 91). First, followers are likely to do the same. Second, the leader may undermine the followers’ confidence in his or her leadership, because the leader has taken short cuts rather than taking the more ethical route to achieve goals. Third, to restore followers’ confidence, the leader may feel compelled to use even more aggression toward the opponent to look stronger and make the opponents look worse. And fourth, once aggression is used the first time, it is easier for the leader and followers to accept the subsequent use of aggression, making efforts to reduce hostility more difficult. But when a leader chooses to avoid using violence, the result can reduce hostility and create a positive attitude toward the rival, which should reduce hostility. Thus, the role of the leader is an important one for reducing intergroup hostility. In his article on the anthropology of conflict, LeVine (1961) identified three social categories that influence conflict across cultures, each of which involves roles. One category is economic, which includes issues related to land and ownership, employment, goods and possessions, and positions of status and authority within economic structures. A second social category is structural, which includes demographic structures, such as the proximity, frequency, and amount of contact between people within societies, and roles, which include status ambiguity and the competition between the roles that people hold within the society. The third category is psychological; it includes cross-cultural differences due to the environment within which children are raised and due to the stresses that adults experience. Adult stress can include, among other things, the stress from acculturation that comes with changing cultures at a micro or macro level (e.g., moving from town to town or job to job as well as moving from one country to another). LeVine’s perspective directs our attention to the patterns of behavior within society and how these patterns influence how conflict is managed, alleviated, or exacerbated. The societal approach is found across most of the articles in this historical set. Furthermore, absent from this set of articles is a focus on individual psychology and attitudes. Although individuals are important to understand conflict management, individuals are understood as embedded within societal structures that provide a collective influence that shapes the individual’s attitudes and behaviors rather than individual’s being treated as free agents within their cultural context. Singer (1958) described three assumptions about the effectiveness of deterrence that connects to our discussion of roles. The first assumption is that the United States and the Soviet Union will, in the end, be responsible for either main-

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taining or destroying the equilibrium in their relationship. The other assumptions focus more on the people involved in keeping the equilibrium. The second assumption is that within each nation, policy decisions result from collective decisionmaking within the government rather than being the result of a single individual’s decision, such as that by the President or First Secretary. In other words, it is not just the President with his or her finger on the red button; it is a group of individuals in related roles who make decisions of peace and war. Decisions are rooted in “the existence of a large and complex bureaucracy … rather than the whim or caprice of a single mind” (1958: 93). And the third, and related, assumption is that these decision-makers “are more concerned with the preservation (and extension) of national power than with the fulfilment of abstract political dogmas” (1958: 93). That said, Singer noted that the role of decision-makers may exacerbate the hostility with which they act because the role itself demands it. “He who is responsible for the protection of the nation from outside enemies is not likely to regard such potential sources of attack with either apathy or detachment. To the contrary, Soviet and American decision-makers view each other today with cold, calculating, suspicious hostility” (1958: 94). Is this the role policy makers are required to play? Is a decision-maker bound by his or her role to perceive the other side with suspicion? How long does a person last in a position if he or she is unwilling to be suspicious when such suspicion comes with the role? And if roles perpetuate the distrust between enemies, how is peace ever achieved? Roles reflect a complex of actuarial expectations (based on one’s projections from the past) as well as interpersonal expectations (based on information gained by interacting with or observing others). Cultures differ in the extent to which a given role is expected to be consistent with these different types of expectations. For example, the socialization experiences in traditional cultures are designed to create conformity to expectations that are based on the past. At the same time, environmental, economic, political, and social changes may require adjustment and creative responses to exigent circumstances that may violate existing traditions. Conflict is a critical area in which adjustment and creativity are likely to be needed, and tradition may not provide the guidance required to deal with conflict. Thus, a general theory needs to be created that addresses how roles evolve to respond to changing societal circumstances, especially ones that involve conflict and decision making. Atheoretical case studies do exist on this issue (e.g., Caro 2003) as well as attempts to describe role relationships empirically (Hage & Marwell 1968) and to study specific roles in depth (Gross, Mason & McEachem 1958), but a culturally based model of role relationships, decision-making, and role evolution in the international arena has not been proposed.

3.5 Civil rights, distrust, and aggression Recall that we conducted a principal components analysis that yielded three interpretable components; for the third component the following term were significant:

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civil rights, communication, White, Black (including Negro and Colored), history, stereotype, and distrust. Table 12.1 highlights several of the key historical events during the period from 1948 to 1964 that were significant and culminated in legislation for civil rights in the United States. The article by Daniel (1970) fits clearly into the period when efforts of the U.S. civil rights, Black Power, anti-Vietnam war, women’s rights, and gay rights movements were stirring. Issues of race relations were urgent, and Daniel’s (1970) study was timely. Daniel’s research was on the types of things that White people say that contribute to Black people’s perception that White people are insincere. Based on interviews with 130 Black people from Pittsburgh, Daniel identified four categories: 1. “Attempts to show affinity for Black people” (e.g., “One of my best friends is a Negro.” 1970: 139). 2. “Attempts to show an understanding of the Black person’s experiences” (e.g., “I know exactly how you feel.” 1970: 139) 3. “White speakers’ use of stereotypes and what Black people consider to be derogatory expressions” (e.g., “you people”; 1970: 139) 4. “White speakers indicating that they do not understand Black people’s problems” (e.g., “Negroes should be more grateful.” 1970: 140). Published in 1970, one would hope this article would now be terribly out of date. However, the perceptions by Black people – and other minority groups in the United States – that White people are insincere still ring true. Daniel (1970) indicated several reasons why Black people distrust White people, including White policemen who deal with Black people as if they are something less than human, and White politicians who promise and systematically fail to deliver. In light of the ongoing “Black Lives Matter” movement in the United States, which emerged in response to several cases of Black people being killed by police officers acting with deadly force, and given the problems of race relations more generally, Daniel’s research remains pertinent. Recall that, after being challenged about his recommendation that all Muslims be banned from entering the United States, Donald Trump, in his campaign for President of the United States, responded to a news reporter that, "I have many Muslim friends. They're wonderful people …" (Reilly 2015). This type of speech is clearly known – and identified in Daniel’s research – as indicative of insincere and untrustworthy speech. More recently, nonverbal behaviors were examined for their influence on distrust and dislike in the context of intergroup relations across racial and ethnic groups (Dovidio & LaFrance 2013). In a recent study on representations of race on network and cable news, Dixon and Williams (2015) showed that, between 2008 and 2012, Blacks were underrepresented as both perpetrators and victims of violent crimes, compared to Whites, who were accurately represented in news stories about crime. Latinos were overrepresented as immigrants, both documented and undocumented. And Muslims were widely overrepresented as terrorists. Not only

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do verbal and nonverbal behaviors contribute to distrust, representations of ethnic groups perpetuate this distrust. Cited in Daniel’s article is U.S. Senator Fred Harris’s foreword to the book, Black Rage, by Grier and Cobbs (1968), in which Harris wrote the following: Despite the passage of civil rights bills since 1957, despite our erosion of legal supports for segregated institutions, despite greater acceptance of Negroes into our major institutions, both public and private, it is still no easy thing to be a black person in America. As the authors put it, this is to say that for the average Negro, “so much time has passed and so little has changed.” (Daniel 1970: 134–135)

4 Looking at 2015 To draw comparisons between the past and the present, we identified articles published recently in relation to culture, communication, and conflict. Using 2015 as the target year, we used procedures similar to the ones we used to select the earlier 11 articles: We first did a Boolean search on keywords, narrowing down the search for academic journal articles published only in 2015. Articles published in specialized journals not clearly related to culture, communication, or conflict, such as Patient Education and Counseling, were eliminated. The articles had to be listed in Thomson Reuters’ InCites Journal Citation Reports and have conflict and culture as central to the focus of the article’s research, eliminating articles that, for example, mentioned conflict as an aspect of communication in general. The articles could not be editorial introductions or other pieces not reflecting original research. This procedure resulted in a total of three articles published in 2015. Next, we reviewed the table of contents of the three journals used in the earlier period: Journal of Communication, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Six articles were identified from these three journals. In all, nine articles were found for 2015. We next examined whether the use of the 39 terms (Table 12.4) differed between the early period (1952–1971) and the later period (2015). Of course, our sample is very small, but we nevertheless found differences that deserve attention. Table 12.5 displays the four terms that differed significantly by period. Controlling for article length, two of the terms were more common in the earlier period. These terms were hostility and international (see Figure 12.1). On the other hand, two terms – culture and argue – were used proportionally more in the 2015 articles than in the earlier articles. Hostility and international both seemed tied to general hostility of an international sort and to the specific hostility associated with the U.S. interaction with the Soviet Union. Recall that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991; although the hostility between Russia and the United States was to some extent a continuation of the earlier hostility with the Soviet Union, the content of the dis-

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Tab. 12.5: Significant Mean (SD) Differences in Terms Used, 1952–1971 Versus 2015. Term

Argue** Culture* Hostility* International*

Period 1952–1971 (n = 11)

2015 (n = 9)

0.57 1.75 1.92 2.52

2.14 (1.40) 4.19 (2.12) 0.24 (0.72) 0.83 (0.87)

(1.00) (1.86) (1.90) (1.86)

Note. Terms reflect logarithmically transformed use per 20,000 words of text. *p < .05; **p < .01.

Fig. 12.1: Terms with a significant change between the time periods investigated. The Y-axis represents means from transformed data.

cussion apparently changed. In addition, the increasing significance of other nations within the international arena – China in particular – may have affected the rhetoric of conflict scholarship. The relative increase in the use of argue and culture reflects a shift in scholarship. The nine 2015 pieces focus on real or proposed cultural changes and challen-

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ges and their effect (potential or real) on individuals. For example, Caust (2015) discussed a new national cultural policy in Australia; Reidy, Taylor, Merrilees, Ajduković, Biruški, and Cummings (2015) examined the political socialization of youths in a multi-ethnic, post-conflict society (Croatia); Buttny and Hashim (2015) considered the ethno-political conflict between Malays and non-Malays. This shift represents the attention to specific cross-cultural conflicts and relationships rather than examining communication and conflict in general terms with less regard to specific hostilities. The earlier articles place more emphasis on generating theory and perspectives that can apply to hostilities more generally. Even when the hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States is used as a referent, as in Hoedemaker (1968) and Levi (1964), the goal of the research at that time was on developing principles that applied beyond the U.S. and Soviet context. Nevertheless, some of the more recent articles have looked for causal relations and have been successful. For example, Günsoy et al. (2015) looked at interpersonal conflict cross-culturally, using cultural factors to predict individual differences in avoidance and retaliation. Bausch (2015) used a simulation based on the prisoner’s dilemma to examine the relationship between ethnocentrism and cooperation. Murayama et al. (2015) conducted an experiment to determine the role that types of conflict play in conflict management. These and other recent studies provide a more formal approach to modeling culture, conflict, and communication.

5 Conclusion Through this look back we have drawn a number of conclusions that provide directions for future research: – Incorporate multiple levels of analysis for how we think about culture and conflict; – Consider the shift that has occurred from thinking about conflict in general theoretical terms to thinking about the specific values and attitudes that influence behaviors within specific cultures; the articles found in the Journal of Conflict Resolution are exceptional in that they seek to provide generalized theory and models to explain conflict across societies; – Examine the societal differences in the influence of roles and the evolution of role expectations, and how these factors create and control conflict; – Ponder society’s influence on behaviors rather than only considering psychology’s influence; – Integrate theory and application, which contributes to both good theory and good application (Lewin 1952: 169, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory”);

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Address the ongoing challenge to understand ethnocentrism and stereotypes as causes of chronic conflict; Examine the role of language as both an interactional tool and a provider of a vocabulary for understanding the conflict linguistic universe; doing so will clarify language’s role in perpetuating racism and distrust; Recognize the international change in researchers’ discourse about conflict, where East used to refer primarily to the Soviet Union, but East now refers primarily to China; Reflect on how the change in the scholarly discourse used to talk about conflict, culture, and communication has redirected how we think about conflict across cultures.

Finally, we recognize that the research covered is very much U.S.-centric. The discussion of civil rights, disarmament, and the Cold War represent a very U.S. American lens on the world. Nonetheless, this look backward at research from the past reminds us of directions that can shape research as we look forward.

Acknowledgement The authors wish to thank Carolyn Montagnolo for assistance with this project and preparing the data and Appendix.

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Hofstede, Geert. 1980. Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Janis, Irving L. & Daniel Katz. 1959. The reduction of intergroup hostility: Research problems and hypotheses. Journal of Conflict Resolution 3. 85–100. Knode, Donald P. 1952. The Iron Curtain refugee in a new world. Journal of Communication 2(1). 1– 5. Lester, David. 1971. Suicide and homicide rates and the society’s need for affiliation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 2. 405–406. Levi, Werner. 1964. On the causes of peace. Journal of Conflict Resolution 8. 23–35. LeVine, Robert A. 1961. Anthropology and the study of conflict: An introduction. Journal of Conflict Resolution 5. 3–15. Lewin, Kurt. 1952. Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers by Kurt Lewin. London: Tavistock. Logan, Shanna, Zachary Steel & Caroline Hunt. 2015. Investigating the effect of anxiety, uncertainty, and ethnocentrism on willingness to interact in an intercultural communication. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 48. 39–52. Marx, Karl. 1951/1969. Theories of surplus value, Vol. 1. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels. 1850/2014. The communist manifesto. New York: International Publishers. Merton, Robert K. 1949. Social theory and social structure. New York: Free Press. Murayama, Aya, Carey S. Ryan, Hiroshi Shimizu, Koichi Kurebayashi & Asako Miura. 2015. Cultural differences in perceptions of intragroup conflict and preferred conflict-management behavior: A scenario experiment. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46. 88–100. Nisbett, Richard E. & Dov Cohen. 1996. Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Oskamp, Stuart. 1965. Attitudes toward U.S. and Russian actions: A double standard. Psychological Reports 16(1). 43–46. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The social system. New York: Free Press. Pettigrew, Thomas F. & Linda R. Tropp. 2006. A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90. 751–783. Reidy, Catherine M., Laura K. Taylor, Christine E. Merrilees, Dean Ajduković, Dinka Č. Biruški & E. Mark Cummings. 2015. The political socialization of youth in a post-conflict community. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 45. 11–23. Reilly, Mollie. 2015. December 7. Donald Trump in September: “I love the Muslims.” Huffington Post. Retrieved on November 6, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ donald-trump-muslims_us_56660437e4b072e9d1c742d8. Richard, F. D., Charles F. Bond Jr. & Juli J. Stokes-Zoota. 2003. One hundred years of social psychology quantitatively described. Review of General Psychology 7. 331–363. Richardson Lewis F. 1935a. Mathematical psychology of war. Nature 135. 830–831. Richardson, Lewis F. 1935b. The mathematical psychology of war. Nature 136. 1025. Richardson, Lewis F. 1950/1960. Statistics of deadly quarrels. Somerset, UK: Boxwood Press. Roth, Alvin E. 1995. Introduction to experimental economics. In John H. Kagel & Alvin E. Roth (eds.), Handbook of experimental economics, 3–109. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Singer, J. David. 1958. Threat-perception and the armament-tension dilemma. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2. 90–105. von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. 1968. General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. New York: George Braziller. von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. 1972. The history and status of general systems theory. Academy of Management Journal 5. 407–426.

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7 Appendix Notes on Word Counts The following are lists of words included under the term indicated; variations of words that were simply grammatically different from the terms that we used are not listed here. The articles are listed by author in chronological order. ○

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Knode (1952): ◾ Anticommunist: 1 (under communism) ◾ Foreign employee: 1 (under foreign) Singer (1958): ◾ Interwar: 2 (under war) ◾ War-mongering: 1 (under war) ◾ Arms-tension: 8 (under arms & weapons) ◾ Arms race: 3 (under arms & weapons) ◾ Weapons race: 1 (under arms & weapons) ◾ Foreign (-policy, -power, -ministry, -target, -forces): 1 (for each term listed with foreign) ◾ Sociocultural: 2 (under culture) Janis and Katz (1959): ◾ Warlike: 2 (under war) ◾ Postwar: 1 (under war) ◾ Counter-aggression: 5 (under aggression) ◾ Hyper-aggression: 1 (under aggression) ◾ Non-aggression: 1 (under aggression) LeVine (1961): ◾ Warfare: 4 (under war) ◾ Case history: 1 (under history) ◾ Interculture/interculturally: 5 (under culture) ◾ Acculturation: 4 (under culture) Campbell and LeVine (1961): ◾ Warfare: 2 (under war) ◾ Warlikeness: 2 (under war) ◾ Historians: 1 (under history) ◾ East-West: 1 (1 added to East & Soviet and 1 added to West) ◾ Anti-Western Europeanism: 1 (under West) ◾ Western-European: 1 (under West) ◾ Westernization: 1 (under West) ◾ Cross-cultural: 9 (under culture) ◾ Psychocultural: 1 (under culture)

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Weilenmann (1966): ◾ Theorists: 2 (under theory) ◾ Foreign (country, correspondence, growth, envoy, organization, ministry): 1 (for each term listed after foreign) Hoedemaker (1968): ◾ Uncooperative: 2 (under cooperation) ◾ Armistice: 1 (under disarm) ◾ Disarmament: 1 (under disarm) ◾ Counterthreat: 1 (under threat) Brehmer et al. (1970): ◾ Intranational: 1 (under nation) ◾ Cross-national: 9 (under nation) Daniel (1970): ◾ Nig-ra: 2 (under Negro) Buttny and Hashim (2015): ◾ Intercultural: 15 (under culture) ◾ Multicultural: 5 (under culture) Reidy et al. (2015): ◾ Peacebuilding: 4 (under peace) ◾ Paramilitary: 3 (under military) Brylka et al. (2015): ◾ Acculturation: 13 (under culture) ◾ Ethno-cultural: 1 (under culture) Hauk and Mueller (2015): ◾ Militantly: 1 (under military) ◾ Historian: 1 (under history) Dixon and Williams (2015): ◾ Black: 20 (under Negro, Colored) ◾ African American: 14 (under Negro, Colored)

Robert M. McCann, Howard Giles and Hiroshi Ota

13 Aging and communication across cultures Abstract: This chapter examines and overviews research on aging and communication conducted in various corners of the world, and illuminates critical issues such as age stereotypes, the changing roles of family and older person norms, intra- and intergenerational communication perceptions in general, and the subjective health implications of intra- and intergenerational communication. Against the backdrop of rapid technological advancement and societal structural transformation, old age has increasingly been associated with negative meanings, especially in so-called Eastern countries, where the tradition of respect for older adults has been eroding. Under such circumstances, younger adults are likely to struggle and be dissatisfied in their communication with older adults, who consider communication with the latter to be rather problematic. Turning to the workplace, which has more recently garnered scholastic attention from intergenerational scholars, older adults tend to suffer from negative age stereotypes and discrimination in this context too. This chapter thus provides a synthesis of research on intergenerational communication across cultures both in and out of the workplace, and sets the stage for the promotion of a more positive and interactional intergenerational climate. Keywords: ageism, communication accommodation, age stereotypes, filial piety, deference, respect, intergenerational, culture, workplace

1 Introduction Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will double from about 11 % to 22 %, with the number of people aged 60 years and above expected to reach 2 billion by 2050 (from close to 700 million today). In other words, it is projected that approximately 1 in 5 people around the world will be 60 years or above within 35 years (World Health Organization 2014). This emerging “silver tsunami” or “age-quake” has spawned political, media, and academic interest in the cultural conditions and processes of aging, as well as academic journals such as the Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology and the International Journal of Aging and Human Development largely devoted to the topic. While there is a great amount of uncertainty about how societies, governments, organizations and families will cope with the rapid increase of older people, one issue remains certain as we consider these changes. This is that communication, whether mediated, face-to-face, or other, will remain at the heart of how we relate to and interact with those of the same and different ages and in ways that can, correspondingly, have significant and profound effects on successful aging (Giles, DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-013

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Gasiorek & Giles 2013). The more that we can understand how people of different generations communicate (and perceive their communication) with each other, the better poised we are to craft solutions for the intergenerational opportunities and challenges of now and of the future across cultures. As governments across the world debate and implement major policy decisions in areas including retirement age, pensions, workplace safety, age discrimination, eldercare, healthcare and the mandating of care to aging parents, it is inevitable that such dynamics will set up many new challenges and opportunities for the study of intergenerational interaction, culture, and communication. We can expect that culture-specific modes (and social perspectives) of communication and aging will hold an increasingly prominent place in the gerontological, organizational, and intercultural communication literatures (to name but a few) as researchers attempt to better understand the global flows and exchanges of people, products, technology, ideas, ways of thought, and information. This chapter is intended to provide a synthesis of research on intergenerational communication across cultures, especially from the viewpoint of intergroup communication. In the sections that follow, we discuss age and its interplay with stereotyping, norms, and perceptions of communication, together with their health implications. Prior to the last 10–15 years, most intergenerational communication research (as well as the theories formulated to account for it) was undeniably Western- and Anglo-centric. The research was largely conducted from a young adult’s perspective, and primarily with Anglo-European participants from Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA, where the primary values are best described as rooted in individualism and independence (Markus & Kitayama 1991; Triandis 1995). With this milieu in mind, several researchers set out to explore different modes of intergenerational interaction to discover if the conclusions drawn in Anglophone societies held true elsewhere, and along the way, eliminate some of the existing Western bias in this line of research (for review, see Giles et al. 2002). An additional goal, whether implicitly or explicitly stated in many of these studies, was to investigate whether cross-cultural comparisons might point to cultures where intergenerational interactions were more positive and, hence, provide ideas for solutions to problematic intergenerational interaction. Interestingly, as we will detail shortly, this so-called “positive intergenerational dynamic” was not necessarily found in the places (cultures) that one might expect. The cross-cultural communication and aging literature, as seen from an intergroup communication perspective (e.g., Harwood, Giles & Ryan 1995), is generally divided into four areas, these being: – Age group stereotypes across cultures – Communication and the changing role of the family and older person norms (including filial piety) across cultures – Intra- and intergenerational communication perceptions across cultures in general and in the workplace

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The subjective health implications of aging and communication (including cultural considerations)

The first two areas (age group stereotypes and respect norms) can be seen as the “building blocks” for research into areas three and four (intra- and intergenerational communication perceptions and the subjective health implications of aging and communication).

2 Age group stereotypes across cultures 2.1 Culture and age group stereotypes Age group stereotypes have significant implications for one’s communication with members of different age groups (e.g., Hummert 2010). Theoretical frameworks such as the communicative predicament of aging (CPA: Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci & Henwood 1986), the stereotype activation model (e.g., Hummert 2012) and variants of these frameworks (e.g., Barker, Giles & Harwood 2004) highlight the role of positive and negative stereotypes in guiding actual communicative behaviors to older adults. Empirical research into Western cultural attitudes toward elders, including traits and stereotypes, has been conducted for several decades and has indicated that elders are viewed very negatively (e.g., Kite & Johnson 1988). These stereotypes include perceptions of older adults as being nagging, irritable, decrepit, cranky, weak, feeble-minded, verbose, cognitively deficient, asexual, useless, ugly, miserable, and unsatisfied with their lives. Age stereotypes for those in the younger age groups tend to be comparatively more positive (Lockenhoff et al. 2009). In line with Western societies being depicted as “youth-oriented,” comparative data have led to the suggestion that “young American adults enjoy being young much more and maintain higher life satisfaction than do Japanese youths” (Ota, Harwood, Williams & Takai 2000: 38). However, evidence has emerged of both positive and negative sub-stereotypes associated with elderly people (Hummert et al. 1994) in research using trait sorting tasks and experimental manipulations. The findings from this study identified various types of elderly people, isolated into four predominantly negative sub-stereotypes (severely impaired, despondent, shrew/curmudgeon, and recluse) and three positive sub-stereotypes (perfect grandparent, John Wayne conservative, and golden ager). Many Asian cultures have been traditionally characterized as having more positive attitudes toward old age (Tobin 1987), a stereotype that is grounded in Confucian ideals of filial piety (or Xiao: Ho 1994; Yum 1988). In particular, increased age is accompanied by greater respect, wisdom, and even tremendous so-

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cial power in certain Asian cultures (Park & Kim 1992). Some research has posited that respect norms in East Asia are associated with reduced levels of negative stereotyping as compared to the West (Levy & Langer 1994). From this, one might predict that, in stark contrast to prior (Western) findings in this field, older people in East Asian cultures would be viewed more positively and that the communication climate between younger and older adults would be one of mutual accommodation. Interestingly, on various dimensions of age stereotypes, an increasingly large body of research has emerged consistently whereby Eastern respondents were found to espouse a less favorable image of older people than their Western counterparts. First, one study showed, perhaps surprisingly, that there were no differences in young adults’ stereotypes about the young, middle-aged, and elderly across Canada, South Korea, Philippines, USA, and New Zealand (Harwood et al. 1996). In a sample of over 1,000 students, ratings of activity, strength, and the like declined with increasing age whereas ratings of wisdom and generosity increased comparably (for additional research on the traits of wisdom and culture, see Grossmann et al. 2012). The Hong Kong sample (in the Harwood et al study above) displayed far more negative images than any of the foregoing, with respondents even associating declines in wisdom and generosity with increasing age (see also, Giles et al. 1998). Similarly, in a companion study examining Australian versus Japanese students’ stereotypes, it was found that the former had more positive images than the latter. Looking at the other side of the intergenerational coin, Harwood and colleagues found that older age informants from Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) also endorsed negative stereotypes of their own age group; for them, wisdom and generosity declined with age (Harwood et al. 2001).

2.2 Workplace age stereotypes The workplace represents one stirring context to examine intra- and intergenerational communication within and across cultures. Workplace age stereotypes, defined as the beliefs and expectations about a worker based on his or her age (Posthuma & Campion 2009) do not occur in isolation, and tend to reflect widespread societal stereotypes of people of different ages. In general, older and younger workers are stereotypically perceived differentially, with older worker stereotypes often having negative overtones, while younger worker stereotypes tend to be comparatively more positive (e.g., young workers as physically and mentally more prepared to take on the demands of today’s workplace, etc.; for review, see Posthuma & Campion 2009). Minimal research has addressed the topic of age stereotypes in the workplace across cultures (Posthuma & Campion 2009). Addressing this research lacuna, McCann and Keaton (2013) compared young Thai and American workers perceptions of age stereotypes of older and same age younger workers. With few caveats,

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they found that both “negative” and “positive” age stereotypes were accentuated in the Thai sample. In other words, young Thai workers agreed more than their American counterparts with “negative” items that older workers make more mental mistakes, are slower to adapt to new technology, are more fearful of technology, and are less flexible at work, but they also agreed more with “positive” items that older workers are absent less, have a better attitude toward work, and have a higher level of commitment to the organization than younger workers. In interpreting their findings, the authors invoked the extremely fast pace of urbanization, industrialization, digitalization, and westernization in Thailand as a potentially exacerbating factor in the “generation gap” between older and younger workers. Because of changes in the workforce, technological developments, and so on, at some level young Thai workers may see older workers in an “enhanced age stereotypical light” – thus accentuating the more traditional positive older person stereotypes, but too seeing them as less prepared to cope with the changes of the new digitally connected world.

3 Communication and the changing role of the family and older person norms (including filial piety) across cultures As was suggested in the previous section, culture can be regarded as a fundamental context of communication. Culture translates into an individuals’ cognition and affect which, in turn, may influence their communication patterns. The broad socio/religio-philosophical tendencies of nations (e.g., collectivism, Confucianism) may form some basis for the emergence of cultural differences in intergenerational communication. Perhaps equally importantly, though, and central to the study of intergenerational relations, is the aforementioned notion of filial piety, a Confucian-based doctrine that represents a natural backdrop and starting point for any meaningful discussion of cultural notions of intergenerational communication. Filial piety, as a concept, is known by different labels, and has been linked to various religions and philosophies (e.g., Buddhism, Taoism). It is also shared as a moral norm in a number of cultures, primarily across the East Asian Pacific Rim (e.g., Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). The closely related concept of “familism” (familismo) found in Central and South America is also central to intergenerational understanding, where multigenerational households are more common than in North American and Europe (Kao 2005). According to the filial piety perspective, older adults are viewed positively and respected (e.g., as sources of wisdom), and offer various types of resources to people in the younger generations, while young people, in return, observe their elders and provide care and support when needed. As we consider communication among

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the generations, one might, thus, predict – prior cross-cultural age stereotyping findings notwithstanding − that older people in Asian cultures would be viewed more positively, and that the communication climate between young and older adults would be one of young to old accommodation. However, research strongly suggests that this may not be the case, and that intergenerational interactions may be at least different, if not more problematic, in many Asian countries than in Western countries. It is important to keep in mind that, somewhat counterintuitively, the norms of filial piety, or respect for elders, could potentially have, because of its nature, adverse effects on intergenerational communication (Yeh 2003). One oft-cited study that supports this counterintuitive view investigated filial piety by comparing four Asian (Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the Philippines) and four Western (Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Canada) cultures (Gallois et al. 1999). Results showed that while East Asian students claimed they would indeed respect and look after older people (especially parents), this care was generally in terms of tangible instrumental support (e.g., financial, living arrangements). If we consider the sheer magnitude of migrant workers across Asia and much of the world who support older members of their family (in the Philippines, for example, it is estimated that 15 % of workers are working abroad), there is no denying that filial piety is alive and well in the form of monetary support. This financial filial support is also characteristic of many quarters of Latin America. Recent research on the concept of familismo among Hispanic/Latino groups in the USA identified three dimensions of it: a) family obligations − or the norms to provide emotional or material/ financial support to one’s extended family; b) family support − or helping relatives to solve their problems; and c) family as referents − or the perception of relatives as attitudinal or behavioral referents (Kao 2005). One core aspect of familism frequently takes the form of migration abroad and remittances sent home. Latin America has one of the largest remittance flows in the world, representing roughly 40 % of that sent to developing countries, exceeding both foreign investment and development aid in the region (Moctezuma Longoria 2003). Whereas financial support remains as a core aspect of filial piety, the young adult Asian respondents in the Gallois et al. (1999) study were particularly concerned that they would not be able to match the elders’ expectations of contact and socio-emotional support. With increasing migration, jobs dispersed across the globe, the proliferation of nuclear households, and growing distances between older relatives and children, the social aspects of filial piety, necessarily involving communication, may be more difficult to carry out for many young Asians. One interesting East-West contrast point that we can take away from this study is that respondents from the four Western cultures felt less social pressure from older people, and indicated more filial commitment to socially supporting, communicating with, and listening to their elders. The above studies represent but a small part of the mounting evidence that, with changes in family structure, migration, modernization, and Westernization,

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filial piety has eroded – or at least changed − in numerous urban quarters in Asia (e.g., Hong Kong, Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, and Bangkok). Implicit understandings of elder support − as elegantly summarized by the old Chinese phrase − “raise children to ensure old age support” (yang er fang lao) may be changing, and even supplanted by government intervention. For example, more than 13 million families in China have signed the FSAs (Family Support Agreement, jiating shanyang xieyi), a voluntary contract between older parents and adult children on providing support to parents (State Council of the People’s Republic of China, cited in Chou 2010). Classical filial norms in China may no longer exist in a “pure” form in urban centers like Shanghai but, instead, may co-exist with other general social values that differ from Confucian scholarly ideals. Young adults in Hong Kong report that elders are still treasured for household contributions (e.g., helping with chores, taking care of grandchildren), and that they may play a role in ceremonial decisions such as picking wedding dates (similar to what has been reported in Thailand). But these same elders are no longer regarded as the head of the household and are not entrusted to make financial decisions as they had done in the past. Japan is not an exception to this general trend (Tsutsui, Muramatsu & Higashino 2013). This shift in filial responsibility may, in part, explain why elder abuse, neglect, and disrespect for older people and their communication (at least for those who are not wealthy) are becoming more prevalent (see Lin & Giles 2013), and also why older person suicides are rising. One study reports suicide rates among those aged 75 or older in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and China as 4–8 times higher than among those aged 15–24 (Ruzicka 1998). The suicide rate in Japan among elderly people is the second highest in the world, and family conflict is reported as a fundamental cause of these suicides. In a 2008 BBC News (2008) article on suicide in Japan, the author notes that “as the traditional family structure has changed, some elderly people are worried that there will be no family members to care for them in their old age.” In addition to the negative future outlook, their sense of burden to the family may cause older adults to have suicidal ideation and actually choose to carry it out (Traphagan 2004). Examining more closely the concept of “respect” (which represents a core element of filial piety), while it still plays an important role in communication between younger and older adults, respect too seems to have undergone some degree of transformation. In a study conducted among older and middle aged respondents in Singapore, the meaning of “respect” was found to have shifted from obedience to courteous behavior (Mehta & Ko 2004), a finding echoed among similarly-aged respondents in the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand in other research (Ingersoll-Dayton & Saengtienchai 1999). Moreover, in a study by Ota, McCann, and Honeycutt (2012), young adults in Thailand − just like their counterparts in South Africa and Ghana in prior research (Giles, Makoni & Dailey 2005) − found conversation with older adults more enjoyable and satisfying when conducted in

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a respectful manner. In other words, using polite language and adjusting conversation to please older adults, rather than obeying to older adults in communication, conveys a sense of respect to them, and holds an important key to successful conversation Still, communicative respect does not necessarily lead to satisfying intergenerational conversations and interactions. For example, in research by Ota et al. (2012), no significant relationship was found between respectful communication and conversational satisfaction among young Japanese adult respondents; similar results were found for young American adults (McCann et al. 2005) and in South Africa and Ghana (Giles et al. 2005) and Mongolia (Choi, Giles & Hajek 2012). Findings such as these illustrate the complexity associated with the meaning of respect toward older adults in the contemporary world. Respect is a multifarious and multidimensional construct, and as one core aspect of filial piety, we call for gerontologically-focused researchers to continue to examine the nuances and contexts of the meaning of respect in cultures around the globe.

4 Intra and intergenerational communication perceptions across cultures in general and in the workplace The social psychology of intergroup relations has been used as a framework for many studies of communication between members of different age groups (Harwood et al. 1995; Hummert 2012), drawing as it has upon social identity theory (SIT: Tajfel & Turner 1986). According to SIT, an “ingroup positivity bias” forms the basis of people’s psychological and communicative approaches to members of other groups, and the strategies they may employ to change the relationship involving the groups in contact. In this regard, communication accommodation theory (CAT: Giles in press; Soliz & Giles 2014) expanded SIT into the domain of communication, positing that individuals adjust their verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors in ways that reflect their desire to belong to, or differentiate themselves from, various groups, and also as a means to facilitate or even impede interaction with relevant others (Coupland, Giles & Henwood 1988). Inappropriate accommodation, such as under- or over-accommodation (or even reluctant accommodation) may result in negative consequences for communicators, such as lowered self-esteem and sense of coherence (Barker et al. 2004; Ryan et al. 1986).

4.1 Research on younger adults’ communication with older adults in Eastern and Western cultures From the above body of cross-research on stereotypes and filial piety, it is perhaps of no surprise that research over the past few decades suggests that young people’s

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perceptions of intergenerational communication may be more problematic in several Asian cultures/countries than in Western countries. For instance, Williams et al. (1997) explored young people’s perceptions of their communicative interactions with older people who were not family members in four Western countries (the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and in five East Asian countries (The Philippines, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China [PRC], South Korea, and Japan), finding that communicating with older people may be a more positive experience in the West than in the East. More specifically, it was found that: older adults were viewed as less accommodating; interactions with older people were viewed as largely dissatisfying; age “mattered more” in Eastern cultures than it did in the Western cultures (i.e., via respectful language); and perceptions of intergenerational communication experiences were, in general, less favorable in the East than in the West. Importantly, there was some important variability within the Eastern cultures, particularly in the non-Confucian influenced, predominantly Catholic, Southeast Asian nation of The Philippines, whose young respondents reported positive intergenerational communication perceptions more in line with those in Western nations (see Ota, Giles & Somera 2007). Korean younger adults reported a high level of non-accommodation from older adults and also respect-obligation to them compared to the other Asian respondents. The importance of age in communication was underscored in another study by Lim and Giles (2007) where it was found that only a one year difference in the age of the interactant can make a significant difference in how younger adults communicate to one another. In three follow-up studies, researchers contrasted the views of Euro-Americans versus Taiwanese, Anglo-Australian versus Hong Kong, and Euro-Americans versus Japanese young respondents (Giles et al. 2002; Giles et al. 2003; Noels, Giles, Gallois & Ng 2001). This time, however, respondents were asked to evaluate their conversations with their same-aged peers as well. Lending support for the basic tenets of CAT and SIT, it was found that people of different adult generations often regard others and behave in ways that are biased in favor of one’s own age group along many dimensions and, again, the same intercultural pattern emerged. That is, the Eastern samples reported less favorable intergenerational experiences of communication, despite the fact that they felt more obligation to be respectful to older than younger people. Although there was some empirical variation across studies, young people found their elderly counterparts to be more non-accommodating than their same-aged peers, and younger adults tended to close off or avoid intergenerational interaction – tendencies that were accentuated by Eastern respondents. This evaluative pattern, where ingroup and outgroups are communicatively differentiated, is often referred to as the “staircase pattern” (McCann et al. 2005). In the third of these three cross cultural studies (Giles et al. 2003), this pattern held true even when family elders were also included into the evaluative frame. Although the conversations with these family elderly were more favorably

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construed than non-family “targets” (but less so, again, by Eastern than Western respondents), they were, nonetheless, regarded as more non-accommodating compared to interactions with their peers. Interestingly, young adult Westerners (i.e., Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans) even reported more positive communication experiences with family elders than did young adult Korean, Filipino, and Japanese.

4.2 The Pacific Rim and beyond Research on communication between different age groups was further conducted in many Pacific Rim countries, as well as in countries in other parts of the world, to explore the status of intergenerational communication more comprehensively. Findings of inter-Asian variability in communication emerged in many of these studies, particularly in Southeast Asia, a region of the Pacific Rim that differs from both the West and much of East Asia (e.g., Japan, China, Korea) in that its views on aging derive from different social and religio-philosophical traditions (e.g., Theravada Buddhism in Thailand). For example, McCann, Ota, Giles and Caraker (2003) investigated inter-Asian variability in intra- and intergenerational communication in the USA, Japan, and Thailand. When comparing perceptions of their own communication behaviors with that of young adults, conspicuous inter-Asian variability in responses emerged. While young Thai adults reported the highest levels of both respect/obligation and avoidant communication, what was especially fascinating was that the Thais were also particularly respectful of same-age peers, as well as more avoidant in their communication of both young and old Thai adults. This was not the case for the Japanese. Similar results have emerged in other Thailand-based studies (McCann & Giles 2006, 2007), possibly due to the unique Thai cultural precept of “kreng jai” (deference and respect) that often occurs not only to those of superior status (e.g., due to age, rank), but also to those of equal or even inferior status as well. Later research continued to explore the Thai and Japanese cultural contexts, not only for the religio-cultural differences between the two countries, but also because of their significant economic relationship and major flows of tourism. One study compared Japanese and Thai younger adults’ intra- and intergenerational communication (Ota et al. 2012), with results revealing that both groups linearly, in a staircase fashion, increased communicative respect and avoidance, beliefs about politeness, and deference norms as interlocutors got older (from young to middle aged to older adult). Cross-culturally, the Thais again reported more respectful communication to younger adults than did the Japanese, while the Japanese were more likely to be avoidant of communication with middle-aged adults. Both politeness and deference norms were more strongly endorsed by the Thais than Japanese, but the deference norm positively predicted respectful communication to

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middle-aged and older adults in Japan, and for young and middle-aged targets in Thailand. Within-country differences in communication have also emerged. For example, significant in-country (North Vietnam/South Vietnam) differences were found in reports of communication perceptions among young adults in Vietnam (McCann, Cargile, Giles & Bui 2004). When reflecting on their own communication behaviors, young American and North Vietnamese adults felt comparatively less need to be respectful in their communication to other people, in general, than did the South Vietnamese. The authors speculated that these findings may derive, in part, from confusion that young people in the North may feel over traditional ideals (e.g., veneration of older people) clashing with the realities that they presently face. Researchers examining younger adults’ communication with older adults later moved their work into India (Giles et al. 2007), Mongolia (Choi et al. 2013), Iran (Giles, Khajavy & Choi 2012), Ghana and South Africa (Giles et al. 2005), and Bulgaria (Giles et al. 2010). Despite the geographically dispersed nature of these countries, a remarkable degree of cross-cultural consistency stands out in the findings from these studies. For example, younger adults communicatively differentiated members of their own age groups from others, with all studies confirming the presence of a clear “stair-case pattern” where older communication targets required greater respectful communication and induce greater avoidant communication. This staircase pattern also characterized younger people’s beliefs about respect and deference norms to different age group members, and stereotype perceptions to them. Finally, respect and deference norms, as well as perceived benevolence, were found to incrementally increase as the age of communication increased, while traits of personal vitality (e.g., attractive and strong) decreased.

4.3 Research with older respondents Researchers have also investigated elderly people’s (e.g., 70–80 year olds’) views of their intra- and intergenerational communication experiences (Cai, Giles & Noels 1998; Keaton, McCann & Giles in press; Noels, Giles, Cai & Turay 1999; Ota et al. 2007). A number of compelling findings emerged from these studies. First, elderly people, too, have some negative intergenerational experiences to report, irrespective of their cultural origins. For them, the communication gap is reciprocally felt to the extent that both age groups perceived their own age peers were more accommodating to them than the other age group. Second, and somewhat surprisingly, a number of the elderly respondents reported communication problems with people of their same (elderly) age group. More specifically, they found other older people as more non-accommodating (talked as if they knew more than me, did not listen to what I had to say, were closed minded, etc.) than young people. Such nonaccommodation can sometimes be in the form of complaining and disclosure of painful information, such as “oh, my aches and pains,” and “my hip hurts.” This

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tendency was especially acute among Hong Kong, PRC, and Japanese informants. Put another way, for older people in these three Asian cultures, same-age group communication was actually as dissatisfactory as was intergenerational contact. As we will describe in greater detail later in this chapter, the managing of in-group relationships − especially non-accommodation from other older adults and one’s own reluctant and avoidant communication to their age peers – can play a key role in the maintenance of the psychological health of older adults. The fact that communication with younger adults may be comparatively “less problematic” than with same age (older peers) does not suggest that intergenerational communication takes place more often, or even helps an older person’s sense of positivity.

4.4 Communication at work Cross cultural comparisons of communication between the generations in the workplace has begun to witness increasing attention (see McCann 2012; McCann & Giles 2002). Just as was the case in non-workplace settings, it has been found that young people communicatively favor their age-in-group over age-outgroups at work (McCann & Giles 2006, 2007; McCann & Keaton 2013). More importantly though, these studies extended findings to a “younger” older target (i.e., those aged 50 and above vs. 65 and above). Young workers thus show age in/out distinctions at a far young age than we have seen in most prior studies (see, however, Harwood & Giles 1993). Results such as those found above provide a strong piece of evidence that ageist discourse, expressed ageist attitudes, and discriminatory practices based on age are occurring even earlier in the lifespan than originally thought. Certain older worker stereotypes may too be relevant at earlier ages (i.e., 50 +) than previously considered (McCann & Keaton 2013). Another interesting finding from the intergenerational workplace communication literature can be found in a study conducted at banks in the USA and Thailand. In this research, there were no age-by-nation (and rank-by-nation) interactions found (McCann & Giles 2006). In other words, the Thai and American banker samples did not differ from each other regarding their views of young/older bankers. These novel results were in stark contrast to virtually every cross-cultural intergenerational communication study conducted in non-organizational settings, leading McCann and Giles (2006) to suggest that cultural work convergence could be an organizational dynamic which may help explain these findings. As the winds of cultural change whip through developing countries such as Thailand, their effects may be particularly salient in industries such as banking, where international transactions, foreign customers, foreign consultants, direct capital investments, currency fluctuations, and world trade patterns are a part of many Thai bankers’ daily lives at work. Environmental changes, and their subsequent impact on societal norms and values, could potentially hasten the blurring of certain cultural boundaries (e.g., certain ages) and create a scenario whereby Thailand and the

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United States, at least in the banking context, are somewhat alike in their “Westernization.”

5 Health implications of aging and communication (including cultural considerations) Communication is tied to one’s well-being, how one perceives aging, and to some degree perhaps even how long one lives. In a groundbreaking study on longevity and positive self-perceptions of aging, Levy, Slade, and Kunkel (2002) found that older people who were exposed to negative images of aging, including words like “forgetful,” “feeble” and “shaky,” performed significantly worse on memory and balance tests. Additionally, this work revealed that older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging measured up to 23 years earlier and lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perceptions of aging. The communication predicament model (CPA) of aging illustrates the manner in which negative age stereotypes constrain older adults’ communicative behaviors in intergenerational interaction. According to the CPA (Ryan et al. 1986) and other elaborations of the model (see Barker et al. 2004; Giles, Khajavy & Choi 2012), there are two possible routes towards psycho-social changes arising from intergenerational communication. First, the process may proceed in a negative direction. Older adults may collude and act out unfavorable older adult stereotypes (Hummert 2010) when receiving age-alerting messages, the consequences of which can lower elder esteem and even life satisfaction. Second, the negative spiral of aging may be impeded or counteracted, whereby positive change might be anticipated when older adults successfully defy younger adults’ stereotype-based communication, and/or the interaction is underpinned by shared beliefs regarding elder deference and respect (Levy & Langer 1994). For the latter case, young adults’ communicative accommodations (e.g., respectful language) may send favorable, supportive messages to older adults. In fact, Ryan et al. (1995) subsequently crafted a separate communicative enhancement of aging model to map out these pathways (see also, Giles, Khajavy & Choi 2012). Awareness of positive meanings may work to safeguard against the loss of psychological and physical health, while attention to norms of politeness and deference for intergenerational encounters may bring about greater communicative satisfaction for younger adults (McCann et al. 2005). Given this theoretical backdrop, the predictors (for young people) of satisfaction when talking with older adults have been investigated. This work was originally conducted in the USA (McCann et al. 2005), and was subsequently embraced (in studies cited above) in data from South Africa, Ghana, India, Bulgaria, Japan, Thailand, Iran and Mongolia (also Mongolia and USA; Choi et al. 2013). While, for young adults, communicative avoidance has been a strong predictor of intergener-

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ational dissatisfaction, and communeicative respect, correspondingly, for satisfaction, across virtually all cultural contexts studied to date, other predictors varied uniquely by location. Although the origins of this variation remain interpretively elusive, all this suggests that culture, an enormously broad and contested concept, can be a critical component as to what constitutes intergenerational satisfaction. Research guided by the CPA led some researchers to suggest that it fares better in Western than Eastern countries. For instance, when referring to findings from their own and prior studies, Noels et al. (1999: 132) state that “these findings suggest that the CPA model may be culturally specific to the North American context, and future research might well attempt to delineate the cultural contexts in which this model applies” (see also Barker et al. 2004). Other research has begun to question this argument (e.g., Filipino data provided the best fit for the CPA in work by Ota et al. 2007; Thai and American data also provided fit; Keaton et al. in press).

6 Conclusion Many studies conjointly suggest elder denigration is more pronounced in Eastern than Western cultures. Rapid population aging and societal industrialization joined by the erosion of cultural traditions (e.g., collectivism, filial piety) may hold countable for such results as North and Fiske (in press) indicate. Long-term research involving many more cultures including Latin America is indeed important to determine how various dimensions of social change, including globalization, are reflected in age stereotypes, norms of filial piety, perceived vitality of different age groups, and in turn, communication. The workplace is one highly important context that needs further investigation. Older workers often find themselves in a paradoxical position where they are at once discriminated against and also needed as a valuable resource and transmitter of culture. Inviting older adults into the workplace has a theoretical and practical importance, and Bowen and Skirbekk (2013) suggested that older people are perceived as more competent in countries where they actively engage in paid work or volunteer activities (see Gasiorek & Giles 2013). Further, continuing to work may lead to identification of ikigai in Japanese, or “something to live for, to experiencing the joy of goals and a life worth living” (Ryff et al. 2015: 668). People, regardless of age, need ikigai to live a healthy life. Creating work and giving proper roles to older adults there should help them find ikigai and thereby boost their sense of worth. Managing the effects of demographic changes and industrialization requires a large scale concerted effort, involving government and community. What each of us can do is to pay attention to our communication practices (Giles et al. 2013). Talking about aging and care in older age play important roles in the way they prepare for the future and maintain their health (Gasiorek, Fowler & Giles 2015).

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Communication accommodation, listening, and understanding the meanings implied in the used communication strategies (e.g., jokes) and “competent” (effective and appropriate) use of verbal and nonverbal communication will be a step toward building mutually respectful relationships, desired particularly in so-called Eastern cultures.

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Soliz, Jordan & Howard Giles. 2014. Relational and identity processes in communication: A contextual and meta-analytical review of Communication Accommodation Theory. In Elisia Cohen (ed.), Communication yearbook 38, 106–143. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tajfel, Henri & John C. Turner. 1986. The social identity theory of inter-group behavior. In William G. Austin & Stephen Worchel (eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations, 7–24. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall. Tobin, Joseph J. 1987. The American idealization of old age in Japan. The Gerontologist 27(1). 53– 58. Traphagan, John W. 2004. Curse of the successor: Filial piety vs. marriage among rural Japanese. In Charlotte Ikels (ed.), Filial piety: Practice and discourse in contemporary East Asia, 198– 216. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Triandis, Harry C. 1995. Individualism & collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tsutsui, Takako, Naoko Muramatsu & Sadanori Higashino. 2013. Changes in perceived filial obligation norms among co-resident family caregivers in Japan. Gerontologist 54(5). 797– 807. Williams, Angie, Hiroshi Ota, Howard Giles, Herbert D. Pierson, Cindy Gallois, Sik Hung Ng, Tae Seop Lim, Ellen B. Ryan, Lilnabeth Somera, John Maher, Deborah Cai & Jake Harwood. 1997. Young people’s beliefs about intergenerational communication: An initial cross-cultural analysis. Communication Research 24(4). 370–393. World Health Organization. 2014, September 30. Facts about Aging. Retrieved October 15, 2016 from: http://www.who.int/ageing/about/facts/en/ Yeh, Kuang Hui. 2003. The beneficial and harmful effects of filial piety: An integrative analysis. In Kuo Shu Yang, Kwang Kuo Hwang, Paul. B. Pedersen & Ikuo Diabo (eds.), Progress in Asian social psychology, 67–82. Westport, CT: Prager. Yum, June Ock. 1988. The impact of Confucianism on interpersonal relationships and communication patterns in East Asia. Communications Monographs 55(4). 374–388.

Mohan J. Dutta

14 Culture-centered communication and social change: Listening and participation to transform communication inequalities Abstract: The culture-centered approach (CCA) offers an overarching framework for listening to the voices of those at the margins whose voices have hitherto been erased by the dominant narratives of social change couched in the language of development. Through listening and participation, infrastructures of recognition and representation are co-created, fostering new imaginations that are grounded in the lived experiences of those living at the margins. Essential to the conceptual framework of the CCA is a tentative notion of community-based solidarity that seeks to invert the overarching structures that produce and reproduce global inequalities. Keywords: culture-centered approach; social change; activism; globalization; resistance; neoliberalism

1 Introduction In this essay, I will outline the framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) as a conceptual map for examining the role of communication in processes of social change globally, as a methodological framework for developing academic-community partnerships, and as a practical tool for developing and carrying out community-grounded solutions rooted in the aspirations of local communities (Basu & Dutta 2009; Dutta 2008, 2011, 2015). Noting the unequal patterns of resource distribution intertwined with unequal distribution of opportunities to communicate, the CCA foregrounds the co-creation of communicative spaces and infrastructures for voices that have hitherto been erased from dominant discursive spaces (Dutta 2008, 2009, 2011). Putting forth the argument that communication for social change in the mainstream is rooted in the imperial agendas of Euro/US-centric knowledge production, capitalist agendas of expansion, and extractive purposes served by the dominant development institutions (Harvey 2001, 2005), the CCA explores the possibilities for listening to subaltern voices at the global margins (Dutta 2008, 2011, 2015). Integral to the framework is a theoretical commitment to co-constructing interpretations of change grounded in the lived experiences of cultural communities at the global margins/South, a methodological commitment to undoing the silences built into the dominant structures and forms of social change, and a praxis-driven commitment to collaborating with communities at the margins on transDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-014

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formative projects of social change grounded in the agentic capacity of the margins to make sense of social structures, co-construct visions of change, and carry out transformative projects through participation. Broadly, the CCA is envisioned as an oppositional space to the dominant concept of social change rooted in US-centric agendas of development, mapping development as a linear progression (Dutta 2011; Melkote 1991; Melkote & Steeves 2001). In the dominant framework, culture is understood as a barrier, conceptualized as a static set of values and beliefs that get in the way of development. The emphasis of planned social change communication thus is on changing the cultural practices to enable the pathway for development. Communication technologies, along with technologies of development, are seen as instruments for bringing about development through efforts of planned social change. A critical interrogation of the dominant notion of social change in the mainstream communication literature disrupts the stage-driven evolutionary mapping of new communication technologies that are conceptualized as the harbingers of development, defined in the dominant literature as social change. Social change is understood in this mainstream framework as the dissemination of secular value-free communication channels that would bring about progress and modernity. The mainstream model of social change operates on the basis of a deficit-based framework, marking target audiences as backward and in need for uplifting interventions created and disseminated by global experts located at the metropole (universities, think tanks, policy bodies, implementers, administrators, and evaluators). The emphasis is on the individual in the “other” space, marked as “Third,” “undeveloped,” or “under-developed,” targeting him/her with messages of individual behavior change. Based on the understanding that technology lies at the heart of development processes globally, the mainstream model of development communication is rooted in the diffusion of agenda paradigm predicated on the conceptualization of lack of agency among the margins that must therefore be targeted through top-down interventions originating from the global North (and corresponding elite sites of knowledge production in North spaces of the global South) (Dutta 2011, 2015; Melkote & Steeves 2001). The CCA is situated within the critique that the erasure of agency of the margins is integral to the formation and circulation of social change projects that seek to expand the reach of the market built on the expertise of senders at global sites of knowledge production (Dutta 2004). The concept of culture is re-articulated in the ambits of the CCA, situated in relationship to local contexts that are both shifting and dynamic, and constituted through everyday meanings, interactions, and participation of local community members in change processes. Moreover, critiquing the new turns in global development communication toward the incorporation of culture and participation as tools for disseminating the dominant development agenda rooted in an overarching neoliberal framework of promoting the free market, the CCA interrogates the logics of empowerment and self-efficacy that serve as tools for consolidating the reach of the market at the global margins (Dutta

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2015). Rooted in the principles of listening to the margins as entry points to structural transformation and inviting the democratic participation of the margins in processes of social change emanating from the global South, the CCA examines communicative erasures and co-constructs constitutive processes that co-produce communicative resources of participation of the global margins, generating alternative rationalities for imagining human relationships and practices (Dutta 2015). The emphasis of the CCA thus is on co-creating infrastructures of communication working in solidarity with the margins, with special attention to the creation of possibilities of listening to the voices of subaltern communities that have hitherto been erased from the dominant discursive spaces in the mainstream (Basu & Dutta 2009; Dutta 2008, 2015).

2 Social change communication: Dominant framework The dominant framework of social change communication defines social change in a technology deficit framework, with the conceptualization of social change rooted in the absence of technologies of development in targeted communities (see for instance Lerner 1967, 1968; Rogers 1962, 1971, 1973, 1974; Schramm 1964; Schramm & Lerner 1976). Societies are defined in terms of absence of new technologies, thus necessitating the introduction of new technologies as solutions to these deficits and thus forming the basis for efforts of social change. For instance, the introduction of television was earlier conceptualized as the vehicle of development in target communities in the under-developed or developing world (Schramm & Lerner 1976). From the early framework of state-led development to more recent neoliberal 1 conceptualization of development, technology and expertise have been at the heart of social change efforts, with the goal of social change communication being the dissemination of new technologies of development that are conceptualized as instruments of economic growth and progress. This technology-driven framework has accelerated the speed of capitalist accumulation, enabling on one hand the extraction of labour and natural resources that can be commoditized and turned into profit, and on the other hand, constituting the displacement of the global poor from their sources of livelihood. Global inequalities have increased as

1 Neoliberalism refers to the opening up of nation states to transnational capital, pushing the agenda of open markets as a solution to poverty. Based on the trickle-down logic of flow of economic resources, neoliberal governmentality emphasizes the generation of profits through the reduction of taxes and tariffs, minimization of trade barriers, and minimization of subsidies and public investments in resources and welfare programs (Harvey, 2005).

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technologies of development have been unequally directed toward consolidating the power of transnational elite. Moreover, the diffusion of technologies is seen as essential to the opening up of markets globally, often accompanied by programs of economic reform imposed upon the south in the form of development aid directed at promoting the adoption of these new technologies. A consistent theme therefore in the dominant framework of social change communication is the promotion of the free market as a marker of development, based on the assumption of trickle-down economics, suggesting that national economic growth would lead to the alleviation of poverty (Lerner 1967, 1968). The early development efforts funded by dominant development agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) diffused an actively pro-market agenda rooted in the belief that opening up nation states to international trade and foreign investment offer the frameworks of development. Efforts of development such as diffusion of population control innovations or diffusion of seed technologies were married to the broader agenda of opening up economies and creating new markets for US-based transnational corporations (TNCs). Since the 1980s and into the 1990s, the early development agenda transformed into a more aggressive and overt neoliberal agenda that married the strategies of market diffusion with structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that sought to minimize the role of the state, remove state subsidies and welfare programs, and perpetuate the hegemonic logic of the individual entrepreneur who achieves empowerment through her/his participation in the market. The diffusion of innovations logic was now rearticulated in the language of cultural sensitivity and participation (Dutta 2015), identifying pathways for co-opting subaltern communities through manipulative tools situated in the agendas of the dominant structures.

2.1 Diffusion of innovations The diffusion of innovations framework dominates the conceptualization of social change (Rogers 1962, 1971, 1974). Inherent in the framework is the conceptualization and categorization of societies on a linear pathway of development, the framework being driven on the mapping of innovations (Schramm 1964). Based on the logic that innovations (technology-driven, mostly originating in the global west/North) lie at the heart of the development process, the framework a) maps out the processes through which an innovation diffuses in a targeted community; and b) offers a recipe for communication solutions that are directed at diffusing the innovation. The role of communication therefore is in researching and creating messaging strategies for the effective diffusion of the innovation. The diffusion of innovations framework places the onus of development in the realm of innovations, depicting a pro-innovation bias. Moreover, in offering innovations that are often alien to the lived experiences of communities at the margins, the framework does not take local culture into account.

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Responding to critiques that the diffusion of innovations framework does not take local cultures into account, imposes top-down frameworks, and potentially contributes to inequalities within societies, the framework adapted to take community participation and culture into account in its modifications. Later versions of the diffusion of innovations framework have been offered in mapping out cultures in order to render the messaging strategies more culturally sensitive and in order to situate campaigns amid local cultural values. Plethora of culturally sensitive communication for social change efforts have been carried out on the basis of the notion that conducting adequate research on the culture offers guiding lessons into more effective ways of diffusing the innovation. Implicit in these efforts is the theorizing of culture as a static set of values and beliefs that can help guide effective persuasion strategies. The role of the expert communication here is one of mapping out the culture and developing culturally targeted communication strategies for diffusing the innovation in the target communities. Formative research is one such strategy guided by the concept that conducting adequate formative research equips researchers with effective tools of culturally sensitive persuasion. On a similar note, later versions of diffusion of innovations have taken communities into account, developing participatory mechanisms for communities to serve as instruments for diffusing the innovation. Moreover, community participatory tools have emerged as instruments of data gathering to generate effective campaigns. Community-based meetings in these instances emerge as instruments for data gathering, generating local intelligence that can then be packaged and fed into the strategies for the diffusion of the innovation. In these later versions of diffusion of innovations, the effectiveness of diffusion campaigns in spreading the innovation is tied to generating community-based strategies. Later incarnations of development communication such as information communication technologies for development (ICT4D) perpetuate the top-down technocentric concepts of the diffusions of innovations framework. Essential to the ICT4D literature and ICT4D initiatives is the emphasis on technology as solution to development. Investments are therefore made on building technology infrastructures without really addressing the underlying structural causes of population-level inequalities. Technologies are seen as solutions for the empowerment of communities at the margins, bringing forth an empowerment-based framework that places the ownership in the hands of individuals and communities while simultaneously leaving un-interrogated the role of the state and the larger inequities in distributions of resources.

2.2 Culture as Euro/West-centric tool As noted earlier, the conceptualization of culture as barrier to development is based on the treatment of culture as a static set of values, beliefs, and attitudes (Dutta 2008). Even when conversations on cultural values therefore are introduced

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into the social change communication discourse, the approach to culture is one of incorporating it into the dissemination of top-down development efforts conceptualized at cosmopolitan centers in the global North working in collaboration with local elites located in Northern spaces within the global South. The agenda of culture thus is the agenda of technology dissemination and opening up of markets to transnational capital. The creation of frameworks such as individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity-femininity is tied to West-centric ontologies of culture, rooting the concepts in West-centric frameworks of culture. Moreover, the conceptualization of culture as static sets of values is incorporated into planned social change communication efforts in generating culturally sensitive or culturally adaptive messages rather than listening to the voices of cultural members in developing radical transformative solutions that are rooted in alternative cultural imaginations. The hegemony of neoliberalism in other words is achieved through the deployment of culture, applying multicultural and culturally sensitive tools for the dissemination of the neoliberal agenda (Dutta 2015). Culture, constituted within the parameters of the Eurocentric framework, becomes a tool of surveillance, offering a map for developing culturally sensitive top-down solutions designed by expert teams.

2.3 Communication inequalities Communication inequalities refer to the absence of communicative spaces in communities at the margins. In the mainstream framework of communication theorizing, communication inequalities are conceptualized as the absence of access to communication technologies of information dissemination among communities at the margins. For instance, drawing upon findings from the knowledge gap hypothesis – a hyposthesis that points toward the increasing gaps between the haves and have-nots as a result of directed social change communication interventions, experts in the mainstream framework propose the diffusion of communication technologies – those are proposed as levelers. Inherent in mainstream notions of communication inequality are monolithic constructions of communication technologies as instruments for disseminating new innovations, embodied in ideas of building information superhighways and communication networks. Simultaneously erased are questions of ownership. Erased are questions such as: Who owns communication channels? How are the messages placed in the communication channels related to the broader agendas of power? Who gets to participate in defining the innovations and new technologies of development that are disseminated through the new communication technologies? What are the broader overarching ideologies underlying the definition of development as the absence of access to information and access to new technologies? For instance, the technodeterminism of the dominant framework of development fails to account for the underlying structural inequities. Structures, here, refer to patterns of organizing of

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local, national, and global resources. These patterns remain intact as communication efforts focus on building technologies while at the same time leaving intact the patterns of ownership of these technologies. Complicit with the agendas of neoliberal capitalism, the building of new technologies expands and catalyzes the access of transnational capital to subaltern communities, incorporating subaltern communities as sources of labour and commodities and as participants in the market. Against the background of all this, the CCA is offered as an alternative framework that interrogates the large-scale exploitation of subaltern communities through the evolving methods of neoliberal capitalism, thus seeking to co-create spaces for participation that seek to radically alter existing modes of resource extraction and power distribution (Harvey 2005).

3 Culture-centered approach Drawing upon the meta-theoretical commitments of postcolonial and Subaltern Studies theories (Beverly 2004a, 2004b), the culture-centered approach (CCA) examines the communicative processes through which marginalization takes place, and seeks to resist the marginalization of the subaltern2 sectors through the foregrounding of opportunities for local grassroots participation in the definition of problem configurations and in the corresponding articulations of locally meaningful solutions (Dutta 2008, 2011). Subalternity refers to the condition of being erased from mainstream discursive spaces and is constituted in raced, classed, gendered, colonial, and other forms of oppression (Guha 1988), carried out through the logics of the mainstream. In this sense then, the culture-centered approach understands subalternity as communicative erasure, produced through the procedures, rules, and logics in mainstream discursive processes and spaces that limit the opportunities for participation, representation, and recognition of the margins (Dutta 2015). In culturally-centered social change communication, deconstruction attends to the taken-forgranted assumptions in the mainstream, interrogating the cultural values underlying mainstream logics of social change, questioning the communicative processes through which these culturally rooted logics are turned into universal claims about society and communication, and challenging the agendas of power that are served through dominant logics of social change communication (Dutta 2011, 2015). Social change is understood through the lived experiences of communities at the margins and the localized meaning frameworks offer entry points for theoretical development, for the creation of methods of engagement, as well as for the cocreation of localized social change solutions that are grounded in the everyday

2 Subalternity refers to the condition of being erased from dominant discursive spaces of knowledge production, being cut off from capitalist systems and logics of production (Guha, 1988).

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lived experiences of the subaltern sectors (Basu & Dutta 2009). Because subalternity is marked in the absence of voices from the margins in dominant discursive spaces, the emphasis of culture-centered scholarship is in interrogating the erasures that are implicit in dominant theories of social change communication. Furthermore, culturally-centered deconstruction attends to the political and economic interests that are served through the depiction of subaltern cultures as devoid of agency. Noting that the economic marginalization of the subaltern sectors is intrinsically intertwined with the communicative marginalization, the CCA emphasizes the role of resistance in rendering impure the conceptual categories that inhabit, using an example of social change communication, mainstream health policies, health campaigns, and theories of health communication (although health is one area of intervention, other sites of intervention include environment, access to food, education, and broad definitions of development etc.). Therefore, deconstruction serves as the basis for narrative co-construction with subaltern communities. Noting at the onset the impossibility of listening to an authentic subaltern voice, the CCA seeks to work out locally-based communicative processes through academiccommunity partnerships in fostering locally meaningful and locally-run solutions. These local solutions therefore are imagined through participation of local community members in dialogues and conversations, not limited by the narrow realm of policies and programs preconfigured by top-down health programs. With the acknowledgment of the economic marginalization of the margins, emphasis is placed on structure, referring to the systems of organizing that constrain and enable access to resources (Marx 1970, 1975, 2007). Noting the role of structures attends to the organizational relationships which define the interpretations and the actions taken by individuals, families, groups, and communities. The emphasis on structures also explicitly interrogates the mainstream individual behavior change theories in mainstream communication scholarship, noting actively the economic contexts of disenfranchisement and the role of communication in actively perpetuating disenfranchisement through the devaluation of subaltern agency and through the omission of structurally based material realities.

3.1 Structures and disenfranchisement Structures, as noted earlier, reflect the patterns of distribution of economic resources, tied to positions of power, reflected in institutional formations that constrain and enable access to resources (Dutta 2008). Structures are economically rooted and are tied to positions of power (Marx 1970, 1975, 2007). Those with access to power determine the policy frameworks, which in turn shape how resources will be distributed societally. Those with economic resources have the power to determine the discursive space, shaping the nature of communication and the ways in which communication is deployed to maintain the status quo (Dutta 2008, 2011, 2015). The marginalization of subaltern communities from discursive spaces is sym-

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bolic, reproducing the economic disenfranchisement through unequal access to discursive spaces and resources. For instance, in the US, the presence of lobbying groups in the US political context shapes the nature of policymaking, with policies often intertwined with the agendas of those with economic resources. Dominant institutions and organizational structures push the agendas of transnational capital, seeking to create more resources for TNCs, precarious sources of cheap labour, and new markets for commodities manufactured by TNCs (Dutta 2015). Attending to structures thus creates bases for social change efforts, identifying spaces and sites of transformation.

3.2 Cultures as anchors of transformation Culture refers to the local contexts and the dynamic web of meanings through which individuals, families, and their communities negotiate the structures that they find themselves amid. Culture is the local script that is intertwined with structure, on one hand reflecting structure and on the other hand offering narrative resources that potentially challenge structure. Culture is both continuous and emergent, drawing upon existing cultural logics that are passed on through generations, and simultaneously shifting these logics through the participation of community members in cultural processes. Culture offers the template through which meaning is constructed and action is understood in the realm of the local community. Meanings are intertwined with context, the localized features of the environment that anchor meanings. Communication draws upon the cultural template and at the same time imagines new meanings and values that shift these existing templates. Culture therefore comes to be expressed in the agency of community members. Culture is also the repository of knowledge and is a resource in pathways of healing and wellbeing. Thus, culturally centering communication theories foregrounds the cultural logics embodied in dominant conceptualizations of communication and places these understandings alongside the localized understandings of communication in communities at the margins. The culture-centered approach decenters communication theorizing by opening up the conversational space to multiple ways of knowing, healing, and health communication practice. Voices from the margins emerge in the discursive spaces of knowledge through conversations between researchers, community members, and various stakeholders who are invited to the table. Agency refers to the intrinsic ability of cultural members and their families and communities to make sense of structures and contexts and to chart out courses of action that are meaningful to them. Agency is expressed in the everyday negotiations of cultural members, as well as in the transformative opportunities that are created in their interactions and collective organizing. Cultural members share and circulate stories, which in turn emerge as opportunities for imagining alternative forms of organizing and for constituting relationships. Agency is expressed in the everyday participation of cultural members in meaning making, in negotiating

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their health, in negotiating structures, and in actively working collectively to transform the unequal structures of health. The culture-centered approach notes that agency of the subaltern sectors is undermined through racist discourses of health in the mainstream that depict the subaltern sectors as devoid of agency. Therefore, the role of the researcher is one of respecting the agency of local communities through humility and simultaneously foregrounding the complexities in health communication projects that seek to recognize and represent subaltern agency. For instance, localized understandings of food insecurity are often expressed in the individual accounts of the resources that community members use to seek food, and are simultaneously shaped by the stories of collective organizing through which they seek to change the underlying structures. Agency is recognized and represented in the dialogues between the researcher and the community members, and in the dialogues among community members in the various discursive sites that are fostered through culture-centered projects of social change. However, culturally-centered dialogues with communities at the margins note the impossibilities of dialogues amid the efforts of exploring dialogic opportunities. Acknowledging the politics inherent in the production of knowledge, culturally-centered projects of health communication, for example, note that any effort to represent the subaltern displaces subaltern agency. Therefore, to speak for the subaltern is to co-opt subaltern agency. Instead, the role of the researcher ought to examine the role that he/she plays in co-constructing certain realities in conversations with communities. The emphasis therefore is on continually interrogating the taken-for-granted assumptions that emerge throughout the conversations with and representations of local communities at the margins. The emergent concepts are channeled back to communities at various steps of culturally-centered processes so communities can participate actively in making sense of knowledge claims and in actively shaping these knowledge claims through participation. Shifting authorship into the hands of communities is intrinsically tied to the privilege through which the researcher engages the community. In addition to academic platforms in which the emergent concepts are presented, white papers, policy briefs, community forums, PhotoVoice exhibits, art and performance emerge as avenues for sharing stories that emerge from within communities. Also, the culture-centered approach draws upon listening as an entry point for engaging with stories that emerge from the subaltern sectors. Shifting the stance of the researcher from an interventionist to a listener works toward the notion that rather than applying pre-formulated theories of communication that are out of touch with the lived experiences in local contexts, the role of the researcher becomes one of recognizing and representing locally-derived understandings that respect local cultural logics. Listening challenges the hegemonic message-based framework of communication that pre-configures solutions and then applies them to communities. Instead, it fundamentally suggests that communities know best the problems that are of importance to them and the corresponding solutions that need to be developed in addressing these problems. Take for instance the various commu-

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nities in the global South that are preconfigured as targets of campaigns. Culturecentered conversations with these communities point toward other more meaningful and relevant problems such as lack of access to food, hunger, lack of access to medical supplies, unequal distributions of resources, and unequal structures etc. Beginning from a culturally-centered entry point would suggest that social change projects grounded in local conversations focus on addressing issues of food insecurity, or securing access to medical supplies etc. as identified by the members of communities. Listening puts the scholarship of social change communication in partnership with local communities, shifting the realm of research methodology into the hands of the partnership, and inviting community members as co-authors in scripting goals, objectives, and strategies of change. Therefore, the agenda of the research design, the method to be applied, the analysis of the data, the interpretation of the data, and the articulation of possible policies and programs are all constituted through the partnerships between the academic team and community members. Simultaneously, a culturally-centered reading of social change communication has to retain the reflexive stance, interrogating the power and position of privilege from which the researcher sends out the invitation and makes the privileged choice to listen to community members at the margins.

4 Culture-centered methodology: Listening to subaltern voices Culture-centered methodology is grounded in the overarching position that the symbolic erasure of subaltern communities from sites of representation, recognition, and knowledge production is tied to both the material erasure of the subaltern from overarching structures of capitalist production and profiteering, and the simultaneous co-optation of the subaltern within these structures as the site of profiteering (Dutta 2015). The impossibilities of listening to subaltern voices and the erasure of the subaltern from pathways of mobility are constituted by the dominant frameworks of knowledge production situated in the ambits of capitalist production, embodied in frameworks and processes of communication that remain beyond the subaltern’s realm of access. The subaltern is cut-off from the spaces of capitalist production and is simultaneously introduced into these spaces as the object of profiteering; at the same time, voices of subaltern communities are erased from these dominant spaces of knowledge and capitalist production. As one example, indigenous knowledge of healing is erased from discursive sites of capitalist production, having been marked as primitive; simultaneously, capitalist piracy of indigenous knowledge introduces indigenous knowledge as a site of profiteering through the large scale production of products that have been derived from indigenous knowledge. Simultaneously, the rights of indigenous communities to be recognized and to make claims to such knowledge are erased from discursive sites of global capital movement.

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Methodology in the dominant framework thus is a site of erasure that reproduces the impossibilities of listening to subaltern voices through the circulation of ontological categories that reflect elite articulations and commoditize subaltern knowledge into circuits of profit. Cultural knowledge thus is reduced within the overarching structures of knowledge production as knowledge about cultures that can then be exploited toward serving colonial agendas and the profiteering goals of the market. For instance, the location of knowledge about culture within Cold War social sciences is tied to the imperial agendas served by scripts about cultures. Within neoliberal modes of knowledge production, the mapping of cultures as essence is intrinsic to the reproduction of neocolonial interests. For instance, the mapping of Iraqi tribal communities forms the crux of US expansion efforts in Iraq and the employment of anthropologists to script Iraqi cultures is constituted within the agenda of expanding market opportunities for transnational capital through the economic restructuring of Iraq. Similarly, the knowledge of indigenous plant varieties such as Neem, turmeric, and basmati is integral to the patenting of these plant resources as privatized objects that can lead to profit-making. Based on the critique of method in dominant spheres of knowledge production, the CCA emphasizes the role of community spaces as infrastructures for participation of subaltern communities. Amid the large-scale co-optation of subaltern knowledge and subaltern resources, listening offers an entry point for co-creating spaces and infrastructures for the recognition of subaltern voices and for the participation of subaltern communities. In the example of indigenous knowledge for instance, culture-centered processes of building community infrastructures of recognition and representation work through solidarity on laying claims to forms of knowledge that belong historically to communities. The role of infrastructures in this instance is in offering legitimate spaces for subaltern claims to knowledge and ownership, resisting the neoliberal structures of resource extraction and exploitation of subaltern knowledge.

4.1 Listening Listening begins with the acknowledgment of the agentic capacity of subaltern communities to voice alternative rationalities. These alternative rationalities, cut off from the logics of capital and simultaneously in relationship with the logics of capital amid large-scale neoliberal policy implementations across global spaces (in multiple instances either being displaced or being co-opted), offer transformative entry points for global social change. Moreover, these alternative rationalities rooted in the lived experiences and knowledge of subaltern communities offer frameworks for disrupting the profit-driven, property-based notions of livelihood and life. For instance, in the organizing of rural farmers in the Singur and Nandigram regions of West Bengal, the alternative rationality “land is our mother,” creates the entry point for resisting neoliberal land acquisition initiatives to set up manufactur-

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ing units and special economic zones, offering an alternative rationality of land as a relationship that can’t be exchanged or transacted. The centering of this narrative at global sites of capitalist exchange disrupts the notion of the self-centered, profitmaximizing rational individual (Pal & Dutta 2013). Neoliberal concepts of the market, cost-benefit analysis, and exchange are rendered incoherent in the realm of notions of collective ownership, selflessness, and sharing that emerge from subaltern narratives. For instance, movements of agrarian social change emerging from the global South articulate the concept of the seed as a collective resource that belongs in nature, thus interrogating the boundaries that are established around seeds or the privatization of seeds as commodities to be transacted in the market. The recognition and representation of the subaltern rationality of seeds and knowledge of agriculture as a community resource inverts the fundamentals of neoliberal economic organizing. The role of the scholar methodologically is shifted here from one of developing expert interventions, implementing and evaluating them on the basis of expertise to one of listening to the plural voices of communities and on creating sites of change in the neoliberal structures through the presence of hitherto erased voices. The method of the CCA develops community advisory boards, community-wide meetings, community dialogues, and community conversations as tools for listening. It is worth noting however that these tools of community-based listening and conversations reproduce their own erasures, erasing specific subject positions from the discursive space. The coming together of the community around an issue to foster a space of social change is an example of strategic essentialism, voicing a specific community identity around a collective anchor to access communicative structures of legitimacy and demand for specific rights. The notion of rights in this sense is rooted in community articulations in collective forms, and it is both fragmented and transient, attached to a community identity, and simultaneously open to re-interpretations through community participation.

4.2 Community participation Yet another aspect of culture-centered methodology is the emphasis on community participation with an emphasis on inverting the dominant methods of constructing knowledge. Theorizing the interplays of power at sites of participation, the CCA continually interrogates the erasures written into participatory methods, seeking to undo the sites of erasure even as it works through these sites to co-construct meaningful interpretations and conceptual nodes for change (Dutta & Pal 2010, 2011). Although it shares its roots with community-based participatory research (CBPR) and participatory action research (PAR) with emphasis on community and participation (Chambers 1983, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c), culturally centered social change communication departs from CBPR and PAR in interrogating the very definition and understanding of participation in the mainstream, attending to the era-

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sures in participatory processes when they are co-opted in the agendas of the mainstream or are deployed as tools of whitewashing for the mainstream (Dutta 2015). Participation as a method of knowledge production is interrogated even as methods of participation are co-constructed in the local contexts of communities. Rather than uncritically assuming that participation is a good thing, culturallycentered social change communication attends to the ways in which the agendas of participation can be co-opted within the logics of the dominant structures of the mainstream in order to diffuse top-down agendas of the status quo. It engages critically with the conceptualization of participation as a channel of dissemination, fitting into the broader diffusion framework of social change communication scholarship that deploys participation as a methodological tool. Simultaneously, the concept of community is opened up to questioning, acknowledging the heterogeneities, complexities, and tensions that exist within communities and attending to the politics of power that play out within community settings. The acknowledgment of the community as a politically contested space also opens up possibilities for critically engaging with diverse community members, in asking questions about what communication and participation mean to them, and in working through the grassroots on developing the communication strategies and processes for participation (Basu & Dutta 2009). Simultaneously salient are the interrogation of participatory techniques in communities as sites of erasure, asking questions such as: What voices are missing? Whose voices are missing? What are the impossibilities constituted in the very methods and techniques of participation? In this sense, the concepts of communication (such as participation, listening, organizing) are opened up to communities, being defined through contextually situated community processes. Voices of community members co-construct meanings of communication. It is also worth noting here that community participation is often used by neoliberal policies in shifting the onus of delivery of basic services into the hands of individual communities through the emphasis on individual behaviors. With its emphasis on structures, the CCA is positioned in resistance to such discourses of individual choice, entrepreneurship, and public-private partnerships, instead locating participation in community processes negotiating structures. Salient in the framework of participation in the CCA is the articulation of structures, locating participation in relationship to material distribution of resources, naming sites of power, and seeking to transform these sites of power. Participation is thus transformative in its conceptualization of social change. Participatory processes in community contexts serve as sites for voicing alternative rationalities to neoliberal market logics.

4.3 Reflexivity An understanding of the complexity of engaging with subaltern agency suggests that methodologically, the CCA works closely on the relationship between decon-

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struction and co-construction, collaborating with community voices to render impure the ontologies of the mainstream (Dutta 2013, 2015). Whereas deconstruction interrogates the erasures in mainstream discourses, working with the traces that are marked absent in the very articulation of categories in the mainstream, coconstruction seeks to disrupt these erasures through the presence of the voices of subaltern communities in dominant discursive spaces, at key moments of struggles where these identities cohere around collectivities (Dutta 2015). Co-construction refers to the mutually meaningful participation through which researchers, activists, and communities at the margins work together to develop frameworks of action, interrogating collaboratively the taken-for-granted assumptions that constitute the organizing structures of the mainstream, inserting into these structures alternative rationalities rooted in the global South. Culture-centered methodology thus creates a recursive cycle of articulations emerging from the global margins that interrogate the dominant methods of knowing even as it deploys these methods toward serving alternative rationalities rooted in subaltern voices. This recursive movement of knowledge from the global margins to the sites of knowledge production at the center is embodied in the concept of reflexivity. Reflexivity in this sense returns the gaze on the researcher and the position of privilege that she occupies, continually questioning the ways in which she participates in the production of knowledge, the politics embodied in the production of such knowledge, and the specific instruments that she uses to co-construct knowledge, to evaluate it, and to report it. Through this process of interrogating the dominant methods accepted in the mainstream, pathways are co-created for ways of knowing that recognize subaltern voices in the mainstream. A reflexive stance is embodied in continual journaling, reflecting upon the experiences of the personal and the ways in which these experiences are politically shaped through one’s position of access to power as a researcher. A reflexive stance is performed through note taking, memo-ing, journaling, thus foregrounding the personal stories of the researcher performed in conversations with the stories shared by participants in local communities at the margins. However, the reflection of the personal is also a reflection on methodology and the assumptions of dominant methodology. Reflexivity in this sense is a communicative inversion on dominant methodologies of data gathering while at the same time rendering the researcher visible in the discursive space as a co-creator of stories. The postcolonial threads in culture-centered scholarship work toward imagining a postcolonial politics of social science that seeks to disrupt the monolithic Enlightenment narratives of development and social change communication by depicting the incomplete, partial, and open narratives that emerge through academicactivist-community partnerships (Dutta, Thaker & Sun 2014). Reflexivity opens up an opportunity for interrogating the dominant theories that emerge through the dominant ways of knowing, depicting the limits of the conceptual frameworks in the mainstream and the erasures constituted in their taken-for-granted assumption.

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The very notion of culture and static cultural values in the mainstream is disrupted by the presence of subaltern voices situated in contexts and voices in negotiated relationships with structures. Also, reflecting upon the practice of research returns the gaze on the researcher, questioning the culture of “academic tourism” that is widespread in culturally sensitive communication work where researchers directing large teams removed from communities send out workers to gather data on cultures located elsewhere, run interventions on the basis of culturally characteristics, and then report results without themselves immersing within the communities (Dutta 2007). The co-optation of culture as an economic resource to service neoliberal rationalities of efficiency and profiteering is resisted through the articulation of culture as a transformative site for new imaginations rooted in the everyday lived experiences of subaltern communities in the global South (Dutta 2015). Culture-centered social change communication raises questions regarding authenticity, integrity, meaningfulness and relevance of scholarship that is conducted without real interactions with communities at the margins.

5 Praxis: Culture as a transformative site In the realm of practice, culturally-centered health communication projects fosters opportunities for community participation in the development of problems and meaningful solutions as understood through lived experiences locally (Basu & Dutta 2009; Jones 2015). Local lived experiences become entry points for defining what problems need to be solved, what data are needed, and what role researchers need to play in data gathering, data analysis, and in the articulation of solutions. Take for instance the experiences of heart health in a disenfranchised African American community in an economically underserved county. In this instance, when community members come together to identify heart disease as a problem they want to work on because of their everyday experiences with heart attack and stroke, they define the specific problems that relate to heart disease (lack of places to walk, lack of healthy food, and stress experienced in everyday living). The solutions that community members co-create, such as developing advocacy efforts to build walkways and developing community initiatives for securing healthy food at affordable prices, are engaged through the academic-community partnership. The role of the academic partner becomes one of identifying knowledge resources because of their access to structures of knowledge production and working through these resources in conversations with communities. Examples of such knowledge resources might include information on the number of walkways in the community, information form the published literature on the relationship of walkways to health outcomes, or information from the published literature on the role of healthy food in the context of heart health. These pieces of information then are offered in community meetings for community member interpretation and for

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the configuring of action. In other instances, the role of the academic partner in publishing white papers and policy briefs works complementarily with the work of the local communities in developing solutions. The everyday lived experiences of community members guide the realm of data gathering, data analysis, and co-constructive participation. Policies and programs that emerge out of such academiccommunity partnerships are responsive to the needs of community members. Culturally-centered programs that are owned by communities shift the terrains of health through the location of decision-making power into the hands of the community. The researcher in this sense has to be accountable and answerable to the community and the terms of engagement that are articulated by the community. The research methodology, design, and frameworks of evaluation are directed by community members in conversation with the research team.

6 Conclusion In summary, the CCA foregrounds the local capacity of communities at the margins as the legitimate co-constructors of knowledge through their participation in communication infrastructures that serve as sites for counter-hegemonic articulations. With the increasing consolidation of health, for example, in the hands of experts amid neoliberalism, the participation of local communities is essential to achieving health justice and social change locally, nationally, and globally. As health services have become increasingly privatized and commoditized and public health services have been minimized, the participation of communities in culture-centered projects shifts the realm of health communication toward identifying the injustices written into global-national-local change policies and toward actively working to shift them through projects of activism and advocacy. The ownership of localized agency as an entry point to theory building, methodology development, and development of praxis shifts, the power imbalance from the dominant structures of social change, communication theorizing, to the subaltern sectors that have hitherto been marginalized through their portrayal as primitive, traditional, and incapable of participation. Participation emerges as a framework for engaging the science in social change communication and doing so by holding the knowledge generated accountable to the standards, needs, and voices of local communities at the margins.

Further Readings Dutta, Mohan J. 2008. Communicating health: A culture-centered approach. London: Polity. Dutta, Mohan J. 2015. Decolonizing communication for social change: A culture‐ centered approach. Communication Theory. 25(2). 123–143.

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7 References Basu, Ambar & Mohan J. Dutta. 2009. Sex workers and HIV/AIDS: Analyzing participatory culture‐ centered health communication strategies. Human Communication Research 35(1). 86–114. Beverly, John. 2004a. Subalternity and representation: Arguments in cultural theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beverly, John. 2004b. Testimonio: On the politics of truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chambers, Robert. 1983. Rural development: Putting the last first. Lagos: Longman. Chambers, Robert. 1994a. Participatory rural appraisal: Challenges, potentials, and paradigms. World Development 22. 1437–1454. Chambers, Robert. 1994b. Participatory rural appraisal (PRA): Analysis and experience. World Development 22. 1253–1268. Chambers, Robert. 1994c. The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development 22. 953–969. Dutta, Mohan J. 2004. The unheard voices of Santalis: Communicating about health from the margins of India. Communication Theory 14(3). 237–263. Dutta, Mohan J. 2007. Communicating about culture and health: Theorizing culture‐centered and cultural sensitivity Approaches. Communication Theory 17(3). 304–328. Dutta, Mohan J. 2008. Communicating health: A culture-centered approach. London: Polity. Dutta, Mohan J. 2009 On Spivak: Theorizing resistance – Applying Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in public relations. In Oyvind Ihlen, Betteke van Ruler & Magnus Fredriksson (eds.), Public relations and social theory, 278–300. New York: Routledge. Dutta, Mohan J. 2011. Communicating social change: Structure, culture, agency. Routledge. Dutta, Mohan J. 2013. Voices of resistance. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Dutta, Mohan J. 2015. Decolonizing communication for social change: A culture‐centered approach. Communication Theory 25(2). 123–143. Dutta, Mohan J. & Mahuya Pal. 2010. Dialog theory in marginalized settings: A subaltern studies approach. Communication Theory 20(4). 363–386. Dutta, Mohan J. & Mahuya Pal. 2011. Public relations and marginalization in a global context: A postcolonial critique. In Nilanjana Bardhan & C. Kay Weaver (eds.), Public relations in global cultural contexts: Multi-paradigmatic perspectives, 195–225. New York: Routledge. Dutta, Mohan J., Jagadish Thaker & Kang Sun. 2014. Neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and communication for social change: A culture-centered agenda for the social sciences. Global Media Journal. 1–13. Retrieved June 17, 2016 from http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 1683322507?accountid=13876. Guha, Ranajit. 1988. On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India. In Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected subaltern studies, 37–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2001. City and justice: Social movements in the city. In Harvey, David, Spaces of capital: Towards a critical geography, 188–207. London: Routledge. Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. London: Oxford University Press. Jones, Christina L. 2015. Exploring community food insecurity through a culture-centered lens: Conflict and tensions in ‘Voices of Hunger’. Journal of Community Practice 23(3–4). 508–528. Lerner, Daniel. 1967. International cooperation and communication in national development. In Daniel Lerner & Wibur Lang Schramm (eds.), Communication and change in the developing countries, 103–125. Honolulu, HI: East-West Center Press. Lerner, Daniel. 1968. The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: The Free Press. Marx, Karl. 1970. Critique of the Gotha program. New York: International.

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Marx, Karl. 1975. Early writings. London: Penguin. Marx, Karl. 2007. Das Kapital. Chicago, IL: Synergy International of the Americas. Melkote, Srinivas R. 1991. Communication for development in the ‘Third World’: Theory and practice. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Melkote, Srinivas R. & H. Leslie Steeves. 2001. Communication for development in the Third World. New Delhi: Sage. Rogers, Everett M. 1962. Diffusion of innovations. New York: Free Press. Rogers, Everett M. 1971. Social change in rural society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Rogers, Everett M. 1973. Communication strategies for family planning. New York: Free Press. Rogers, Everett M. 1974. Communication in development. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 412. 44–54. Schramm, Wilbur. 1964. Mass media and national development. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schramm, Wilbur & Lerner, Daniel. 1976. Communication and change: The last ten years and the next. Honolulu, HI: The University Press of Hawaii. Shiva, Vandana. 2002. Seeds of suicide: The ecological and human cost of globalization of agriculture. In Vandana Shiva & Gitanjali Bedi (eds.), Sustainable agriculture and food security: The impact of globalization, 169–183. New Delhi: Sage. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The capitalist world economy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Part III. Intercultural encounter

James W. Neuliep

15 Ethnocentrism and intercultural communication Abstract: This chapter points out that a central theoretical concept in understanding intergroup relations and intercultural communication is ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is defined as the degree to which persons use the customs and values of their native culture as the barometer to evaluate and judge other cultures. Ethnocentric persons hold attitudes and behaviors toward ingroups that are biased in favor of the ingroup, often at the expense of the outgroup. Attitudinally, ethnocentric persons see the ingroup as superior to outgroups. Behaviorally, ethnocentric persons foster cooperative relations with ingroup members while competing with, and perhaps even battling, with outgroup members. Although ethnocentrism is generally thought to be a negative trait, ethnocentrism fosters ingroup survival, solidarity, conformity, cooperation, loyalty, and effectiveness. This chapter traces the history of the research associated with ethnocentrism, the measurement of ethnocentrism, current theory and research trends in the area, and the challenges associated with studying ethnocentrism. Keywords: ingroup, outgroup, prejudice, Social Identity Theory

1 Introduction Nearly 70 years ago, the painter and author Wyndham Lewis described a global village in his book titled America and Cosmic Man (Lewis 1948). Several years later, his friend Marshall McLuhan also used the term to describe how technological advances of mass media would eventually disintegrate the natural time and space barriers inherent in human communication. To be sure, technological changes have made the world a smaller planet to inhabit. The technological feasibility of mass media and the Internet to bring events from across the globe into the homes, businesses, and schools across the planet dramatically reduces the distance between people of different cultures and societies. Telecommunication systems, email, texting, Skype, and social networking sites connect people in milliseconds throughout the world via satellites and fiber optics. One of the essential effects of this technology is its decentralizing role in disseminating information across local, regional, national, and international borders. This means that billions of people across the planet now have access to information that was not available to them only a few years ago. Information empowers people. The ease and speed with which people of differing cultures can now communicate DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-015

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is stunning. Technology has linked the world (Neuliep 2015). Although technological advances facilitate the initiation and maintenance of cross-cultural relationships, decades ago the late noted historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Schlesinger (1993) warned us that history tells an ugly story of what happens when people of diverse cultural, ethnic, religious, or linguistic backgrounds converge in one place. Schlesinger argued that the hostility of one group of people against another, different group of people is among the most instinctive of human drives. Xenophobia, the fear or contempt of that which is foreign or unknown, especially of strangers or those perceived as foreigners, is believed by many to be an innate biological response to intergroup competition. Indeed, Schlesinger (1993) argued that unless a common goal binds diverse people together, tribal hostilities will drive them apart.

1.1 Ethnocentrism One of the central concepts in understanding outgroup attitudes, intergroup relations, and intercultural communication is ethnocentrism (Neuliep & McCroskey 1997). The term stems from the Greek words ethnos, which refers to nation, and kentron, which refers to center. Over a hundred years ago Sumner (1906) defined ethnocentrism as “the technical name for this view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it” (p. 13). Sumner (1906) argued that ethnocentrism nourished a group's pride and vanity while looking on outsiders, or outgroups, with contempt. Franz Boas, who by many is considered the founder of modern anthropology, believed that humans are necessarily ethnocentric and that observations of other cultures are necessarily biased in favor of one’s own native cultural background (Boas 1932). For example, people raised in Culture A are taught that their cultural traditions, values, and customs are the preferred and accepted standards by which they should conduct their lives. Consequently, individuals from Culture A cannot draw conclusions about some other Culture B’s traditions, values, and customs without some inherent bias. Hence, everyone is ethnocentric. In fact, Teo and Febbraro (2003) maintain that ethnocentrism is a universal form of human intuition; that all of human knowledge is culturally situated and biased and does not accurately reflect the natural world. Moreover, they warn of a hidden ethnocentrism, especially among academicians, which is not necessarily a cultural prejudice, but is expressed as a sincere effort to explain human phenomena assumed to be universal but is, in fact, culturally driven. As Teo and Febbraro (2003) point out, both Western and Eastern approaches to academic and scientific theory stem from epistemologically specific cultural traditions. Adams and Hanna (2012) provide evidence that this idea of a hidden ethnocentrism has plagued research in cross-cultural personality research. They argue that research motivated by the desire to discover the cross-cultural universality or cultural specificity of personality traits, utilizing

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the well known Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality, has made a number of mistaken claims about the salient dimensions of personality traits across cultures. Hidden or not, Neuliep and McCroskey (1997) have noted that ethnocentric persons hold attitudes and behaviors toward ingroups that are biased in favor of the ingroup, often at the expense of the outgroup. Attitudinally, ethnocentric persons see the ingroup as superior to outgroups. Behaviorally, ethnocentric persons foster cooperative relations with ingroup members while competing with, and perhaps even battling, with outgroup members. Although ethnocentrism is generally thought to be a negative trait, ethnocentrism fosters ingroup survival, solidarity, conformity, cooperation, loyalty, and effectiveness. In their seminal research, Taylor and Jaggi (1974) introduced the phenomenon of ethnocentric attributional bias. According to this theory, ethnocentrics construct internal attributions for the positive behavior of ingroup members while making external attributions for their negative behavior. When ingroup members perform well on some task, the attribution is that they possess the essential ingredients to accomplish such a task (e.g., “we’re smart,” “we’re hard workers,” etc.). If ingroup members perform marginally on some task, the fault lies elsewhere (e.g., “the exam had trick questions,” “we lost because the umpires were horrible,” etc.). On the other hand, external attributions are made for the positive behavior of outgroup members (e.g.,“they got lucky”) while internal attributions are made for their negative behavior (e.g., “they’re born liars”).

2 The study of ethnocentrism in the social sciences The first systemic social scientific research on ethnocentrism began some 70 years ago with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson & Sanford 1950). In the wake of World War II, Adorno and his colleagues focused on the psychology of fascism, anti-Semitism, and what they labeled the antidemocratic personality. They collected data from thousands of questionnaires and clinical interviews and concluded that a) nationalism is a species of ethnocentrism, b) ethnocentrism is an expression of authoritarianism, and c) authoritarianism is a personality defect. Refining and extending Sumner’s original definition of ethnocentrism, Levinson (1950: 150) argued that ethnocentrism is: … based on a pervasive and rigid ingroup-outgroup distinction; it involves stereotyped, negative imagery and hostile attitudes regarding outgroups, stereotyped positive imagery and submissive attitudes regarding ingroups, and a hierarchical, authoritarian view of group interaction in which ingroups are rightly dominant, outgroups subordinate.

Adorno and his colleagues forwarded the argument that prejudices against outgroups was a generalized personality profile and that such prejudices should not be studied in isolation. They maintained that an individual’s prejudice toward any

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specific outgroup is representative of an overall cognitive orientation of negative attitudes about all outgroups. They labeled this generalized attitude profile ethnocentrism. In the decades following their ground breaking work, Adorno and his colleagues were criticized for their methodology and conclusions but many researchers today agree that prejudices against outgroups (i.e., ethnocentrism) constitute a general attitudinal profile (c.f., Bierly 1985; Murphy & Likert 1983; Ray & Lovejoy 1986; Rubinstein 1996). In their contemporary conceptualization of ethnocentrism, Neuliep and his associates argue that ethnocentrism should be viewed along a continuum and that not all ethnocentrism is necessarily negative (cf., Neuliep 2015; Neuliep 2010b; Neuliep 2010a; Neuliep 2002; Neuliep, Chaudior & McCroskey 2001; Neuliep, Hintz & McCroskey 2005; Neuliep & McCroskey 1997). Along the lines of with the work of Boaz (1932) and Teo and Febbraro (2003), Neuliep and McCroskey (1997) argued that as newborns, humans are entirely, and naturally, egocentric. In the first few months of life, infants are essentially asocial. Soon thereafter, infants develop a rudimentary awareness of others around them. By age two or three children engage in social perspective taking of those most central to their social context, presumably their biological or adopted families. As children become further socialized, they observe that their families coexist with other families, and that this culmination of people constitutes some form of neighborhood, clan, tribe, community, city, society, and finally culture. By the time they realize that they are a part of some much larger whole, children are enculturated and essentially ethnocentric. Throughout this socialization process they have been taught the correct (i.e., cultural) way to think, feel, and behave. Their cognitions, motivations, and behaviors are conditioned culturally. As Neuliep (2015) maintains, culture teaches one how to think, conditions one how to feel, and instructs one how to act; especially how to inter-act with others; that is, communication. Neuliep and McCroskey (1997) also argued that because ethnocentrism is a natural outcome of enculturation, it is essentially descriptive, and not necessarily pejorative. On one end of the ethnocentrism continuum, ethnocentrism may serve a very valuable function when one’s central ingroup is under actual or threat of attack. Ethnocentrism forms the basis for patriotism and the willingness to sacrifice for one’s central ingroup. On the other end of the continuum, the tendency for people to see their own way as the only right way can be dangerous and lead to pathological forms of ethnocentrism that result in prejudice, discrimination, and even ethnic cleansing. Another theoretical explanation for ethnocentrism is Social Identity Theory (SIT). The origins of SIT can be found in the seminal work of Henri Tajfel (1959, 1969, 1972, 1974). Tajfel (1972) defined social identity as an individual’s awareness that he/she holds membership in certain social groups and that such group memberships are of value to the individual. Tajfel (1972) argued that myriad social groups compete against each other for prestige and stature. Members of the same

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social groups relate to, compete with, and differentiate themselves from outgroups. The central concept of SIT is social categorization (Hogg 2006; Hogg & Abrams 1988; Hogg, Abrams, Otten & Hinkle 2004; Rubin & Hewstone 1998; Tajfel 1972; Tajfel & Turner 1979). Social categorization is a cognitive process where people represent ingroups and outgroups in imprecise sets of interrelated characteristic that describe and evaluate dimensions of ingroup homophily and outgroup heterophily. Social categorization maximizes ingroup similarities and outgroup differences. An outcome of social categorization is that when people categorize others they tend to see them according to their group memberships rather than as individuals (Hogg 2006; Hogg et al. 2004). As SIT developed, Tajfel’s central focus was to explain the effects of group membership on prejudice, discrimination, and group conflict (Hogg et al. 2004). In some of his earliest writings, where he forwarded the fundamental assumptions of SIT, Tajfel (1974: 66) wrote: … in order for the members of an ingroup to be able to hate or dislike an outgroup, or to discriminate against it, they must first have acquired a sense of belonging to a group which is clearly distinct from the one they hate, dislike or discriminate against.

While an individual’s ingroup identification may be strong or weak, Gagnon and Bourhis (1996) found that individuals who identified strongly with their ingroup discriminated against outgroups whereas those individuals who identified weakly with the ingroup did not. They point to research that demonstrates that one’s degree of ingroup identification leads to ingroup bias (i.e., ethnocentrism), outgroup derogation, and outgroup discrimination. Thus, a fundamental tenet of SIT is that outgroup discrimination is directly related to an individual’s ingroup identification (Perrault & Bourhis 1999). Why some individuals develop strong ingroup identification while others do not has been the focus of several studies. One intrapersonal variable theoretically linked to a strong ingroup identification is ethnocentrism. To be sure, Perreault and Bourhis (1999) studied ethnocentrism and observed that an individual’s ethnocentrism predicted ingroup identification and outgroup discrimination.

3 Ethnocentrism and racism Although the terms racism and ethnocentrism are not synonymous, they are often related. As mentioned above, ethnocentrism refers to the degree to which one sees his or her culture as superior and the standard by which other cultures should be judged. As de Benoist (1999) notes, racism refers to a belief that one’s racial group is superior to other racial groups. To be ethnocentric but not racist may be possible. To be racist and not ethnocentric is unlikely. Individuals may believe their culture is superior to other cultures but not necessarily believe that their race is superior

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to other races. However, if people believe their race is superior, chances are good that they also believe their culture is superior. Racist ideology is a belief in the moral or intellectual superiority of one race over the others. This probably translates into cultural or social superiority. Hence, to the racist, a superior race produces a superior culture. Racism and ethnocentrism have different origins. As mentioned previously, many scholars believe that ethnocentrism is a universal phenomenon that reflects a biologically rooted survival instinct experienced, to some degree, by all people in all cultures. Hence, it is thought that ethnocentrism is innately human; that is, we are born ethnocentric. Racism, on the other hand, is not universal and is thought to be learned. Wolfe and Spencer (1996) point out that racism, stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are often linked (see Chapter 24, this volume, on stereotyping). When a racial group is labeled inferior, stereotypes emerge. Because racial stereotypes are often negative, people become prejudiced toward the racial group and discriminate against it. Prejudice determines how people feel or think about a particular group, and discrimination is the behavioral outcome – that is, action against that group.

4 The measurement of ethnocentrism In both the natural and social sciences, whenever some new phenomena or concept has been discovered great amounts of time and energy are spent trying to measure and operationalize it. Historically, there have been two significant attempts to develop a scale that measures and operationalizes ethnocentrism. In their influential work, Adorno and his colleagues designed and constructed a scale labeled the E scale. The scale is a series of 34 Likert like items that were subdivided into three subscales, including the Negro subscale, the minority subscale, and the patriotism subscale. Upon extensive reliability and item analyses, a 20-item final version of the E scale was constructed that included a 6-item Jew subscale, a 6item Negro subscale, and an 8-item other minority and patriotism subscale. Adorno et al. (1950) treated the combined scores from the three subscales as a global measure of ethnocentrism. Representative items from the Jew subscale included “To end prejudice against Jews, the first step is for Jews to try sincerely to get rid of their harmful and irritating faults,” “There may be exceptions, but in general, Jews are pretty much alike,” and “I can hardly imagine myself marrying a Jew.” Representative items from the Negro subscale include “Negroes have their rights, but it is best to keep them in their own districts and schools and to prevent too much contact with whites,” “Negro musicians may sometimes be as good as white musicians, but it is a mistake to have mixed Negro-white bands,” and “It would be a mistake to have Negroes for foreman and leaders over whites.” Finally, representative items from the other minority and patriotism scale include “Filipinos are all right in their place, but they carry it too far when they dress lavishly and go around with white

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girls,” “Zootsuiters prove that when people of their type have too much money and freedom, they just take advantage and cause trouble,” and “Certain religious sects who refuse to salute the flag should be forced to conform to such a patriotic action or else be abolished.” As Neuliep and McCroskey (1997) pointed out, because the E scale was designed for white populations in the United States nearly 50 years ago, it is outdated and ironically ethnocentric. The second effort to measure and operationalize ethnocentrism was initiated by Neuliep and McCroskey (1997) and refined by Neuliep (2002). The GENE scale is a series of 22 items concerning attitudes about one’s own and other cultures. The GENE has been used extensively in the United States and abroad and has documented reliability and validity (Neuliep 2002). The GENE scale, its instructions, and coding scheme appear below. * * * The GENE scale is composed of 22 statements concerning your feelings about you culture and other cultures. In the space provided to the left of each item indicate the degree to which the statement applies to you by marking whether you (5) strongly agree, (4) agree, (3) are neutral, (2) disagree, or (1) strongly disagree with the statement. There are no right or wrong answers. Some of the statements are similar. Be Honest! Work quickly and record your first response. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____

Most other cultures are backward compared to my culture. My culture should be the role model for other cultures. People from other cultures act strange when they come into my culture. Lifestyles in other cultures are just as valid as those in my culture. Other cultures should try to be more like my culture. I’m not interested in the values and customs of other cultures. People in my culture could learn a lot from people of other cultures. Most people from other cultures just don’t know what’s good for them. I respect the values and customs of other cultures. Other cultures are smart to look up to our culture. Most people would be happier if they lived like people in my culture. I have many friends from other cultures. People in my culture have just about the best lifestyles of anywhere. Lifestyles in other cultures are not as valid as those in my culture. I’m very interested in the values and customs of other cultures. I apply my values when judging people who are different. I see people who are similar to me as virtuous. I do not cooperate with people who are different. Most people in my culture just don’t know what is good for them. I do not trust people who are different. I dislike interacting with people from different cultures. I have little respect for the values and customs of other cultures.

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To determine your ethnocentrism score, complete the following steps: Step 1: Add your responses to scale items 4, 7, and 9. Step 2: Add your responses to scale items 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18, 20, 21, and 22. Step 3: Subtract the sum from Step 1 from 18 (i.e., 18 minus Step 1 sum). Step 4: Add the results of Step 2 and Step 3. This sum is your generalized ethnocentrism score. Higher scores indicate higher ethnocentrism. Scores above 55 are considered high ethnocentrism. * * * The majority of the current research in the social sciences operationalizes ethnocentrism with the GENE scale. But other measures have been developed. For example, Navah, Heydary, and Kia (2010/1389) developed a measure of ethnocentrism within the socio-cultural context of Iran. Their scale is similar to the Scheepers, Felling and Peters (1992) scale that includes two 5-item subscales which measure in-group ethnocentrism (favorable attitude toward in-groups) and outgroup ethnocentrism (unfavorable attitude toward out-groups). In their study of the effects of stable personality traits and specific behavioral competencies, Shaffer, Harrison, Gregersen, Stewart Black, and Ferzandi (2006) developed their own six item scale of cultural ethnocentrism based on previous measures of cosmopolitanism. A sample item from their scale is “I like to meet foreigners and become friends.” Shaffer et al., report a coefficient reliability of .61, which is marginal.

5 Research trends in ethnocentrism Since the development of the GENE scale, research on ethnocentrism has taken many directions. Neuliep, Hintz, and McCroskey (2005) argued that the effects of ethnocentrism are manifest in any social context, including organizational environments where persons of different cultural backgrounds interact in the workplace. In an increasingly diverse workplace, managers and subordinates of different cultures and ethnicities are likely to find themselves interacting together. To the extent that such interactants are ethnocentric, interpersonal perceptions and communication will be influenced negatively. In cases where managers and subordinates are of different cultures or ethnicities, subordinate ethnocentrism may interfere with the interpretation of managerial appraisals. If ethnocentric subordinates perceive managers of different cultures/ethnicities to be less attractive, less competent, and less credible, they may be less likely to accept their appraisal and any of the recommendations contained therein. Moreover, the position of an effective manager is one that fosters a certain level of obedience and compliance by subordinates. To the extent that managers are perceived as credible, subordinates are more likely to comply with them. As Neuliep, Hintz, and McCroskey (2005) found, in manager-subordinate transactions, ethnocentrism interferes with percep-

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tions; that is, ethnocentric managers perceive outgroup subordinates as less attractive and/or credible. Similarly, ethnocentric subordinates may perceive outgroup managers as less credible and/or attractive. Another area of research has focused on correlates of ethnocentrism. For example, Wrench and his colleagues (2006) have found consistent, significant, and positive correlations between ethnocentrism, religious fundamentalism, and homonegativity. That is, ethnocentrism and religious fundamentalism are linked together, and ethnocentrism and homonegativity are linked together. They also report a negative relationship between ethnocentrism and tolerance for religious disagreement; that is, as ethnocentrism increases, one’s tolerance for religious disagreements decreases. A line of research has focused on ethnocentrism and health care delivery. People from diverse cultural backgrounds face different health issues and carry different assumptions about their health. Helman (2007) suggests that people from different cultures generally attribute illness to one of four causes, including: a) factors within the individual, such as bad eating and exercise habits; b) factors within the natural environment, such as air and water pollution; c) societal factors, such as intergroup conflict, poor health care facilities, etc.; or d) supernatural factors, including religious beliefs, fate, and indigenous beliefs. Helman notes that these attributions for health and illness reflect the particular culture’s general value orientations. For example, persons in Western cultures such as the United States, which are often individualistic, generally believe that the origins of illness are rooted in the individual patient. Typically, these cultures rely on a biomedical model of health care, where the fundamental assumption is that diagnosis and treatment of illness should be based on scientific data. Helman observes that in many nonWestern cultures, illness is often attributed to societal and/or supernatural conditions. Societal attributions are based on intergroup or interpersonal conflict within the culture. Supernatural conditions, such as religion, pure fate, and indigenous belief systems, are also thought among certain cultures to be the origin of illness. Helman is careful to point out that persons in many cultures make multicausal attributions for illness. So, while persons in Western cultures may rely on the biomedical approach for their health, they may also believe that a supernatural force is responsible in some way. In their research Capell, Dean, and Veenstra (2008) examined the relationship between cultural competence and ethnocentrism among health care workers including physical therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses. Capell and her colleagues argue that cultural and racial factors affect the relationships between health care professionals and patients including health care delivery and subsequent treatment outcomes. They define cultural competence as the ability to understand and work effectively with patients whose beliefs, values, and histories differ from one’s own. One established construct that may be closely associated with cultural competence is ethnocentrism. Capell and her colleagues point to research

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that shows that ethnocentrism among health care providers contributes to patient alienation, inadequate treatment, and misdiagnosis. In their study, a sample of several hundred physical therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses completed the Inventory to Assess the Process of Cultural Competence Among Healthcare Professionals–Revised (IAPCC-R) and Neuliep’s (2002) revised Generalized Ethnocentrism (GENE) scale. Results showed that cultural competence was moderately and negatively correlated with ethnocentrism, indicating a moderately strong inverse relationship between cultural competence and ethnocentrism; that is, as cultural competence increases, ethnocentrism decreases, or as ethnocentrism increases, cultural competence decreases. Capell, Dean and Veenstra, (2008) note that this information may be of use in the design of programs to improve the cultural competence of health care professionals and lead to more positive health care delivery. Although there is a fairly heated debate about whether playing violent video games increases aggression among those who play them, a recent study examined the idea that the effects of violent video game play are increased when the target is a member of an outgroup rather than an ingroup. In his recent study, Greitemeyer (2014) found that violent video game exposure was positively related to ethnocentrism. He noted that many researchers apply the General Aggression Model (GAM) to explain the effects of violent video games on aggression. Although a complete description of GAM is beyond the scope of this chapter, in brief, GAM proposes that violent video games affect a person’s internal state by evoking associations to cognitions, arousal, and affect related to aggression. This internal state then influences how social events are processed. Greitemeyer noted that on the basis of this decision process, the person then behaves more or less aggressively in social encounters. In conducting his research Greitemeyer questioned whether some individuals are more likely than others to be the target of increased aggression after playing violent video games. Greitemeyer pointed out that video games can be seen as sources of social learning that may trigger attitudes and perceptions of social groups. These cognitions may influence the player’s attitudes and behavior toward members of this social group. If the social group in the video game is portrayed with admirable qualities, game players make positive judgments about the group. On the other hand, if the social group is portrayed negatively, video player’s judgments about its members follow accordingly. Greitemeyer maintained that video game depictions of social groups can influence attitudes, feelings, and behavior toward members from those groups, especially if the group is an outgroup. Greitemeyer reasoned that because playing violent video games tend to elicit negative affective experiences, which have been shown to evoke intergroup bias, it was expected that the effects of violent video game play would be more pronounced when the target is an outgroup rather than an ingroup member. In his study, participants who were frequent players of violent video games completed a trait aggression scale and Neuliep and McCroskey’s (1997) Generalized Ethnocen-

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trism (GENE) scale. As predicted, violent video game exposure was positively related to ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism and trait aggression were also positively related. To examine whether violent video game exposure affects ethnocentrism even when controlling for trait aggression, a multiple regression analysis was performed. Violent video game exposure and trait aggression were used as predictors for ethnocentrism. The overall regression was significant. Most importantly, violent video game exposure was still significantly related to ethnocentrism. Trait aggression also significantly predicted ethnocentrism (Greitemeyer 2014). In another recent study, Neuliep and Speten-Hansen (2013) examined the relationship between ethnocentrism and perceptions of persons with nonnative accents. In their research they pointed out that the manner and style in which one speaks, including one's accent, plays a central role in creating and maintaining one's social makeup while communicating to others meaningful social data (cf. Giles 1970; Giles & Johnson 1987; Gluszek & Dovidio 2010). Moreover, they noted that a nonnative accent often stigmatizes a person as foreign born and one who does not apply the language competently (cf. Cargile & Giles 1997; Dixon, Mahoney & Cocks 2002; Edwards 1999; Giles 1970; Giles & Billings 2004; Gluszek & Dovidio 2010). Neuliep and Speten-Hansen asserted that accent differences often prompt social perceptions about others in that an accent is a cue to one's social origins and a powerful ingroup/outgroup indicator as it provides information about another's national and/or regional origins, ethic group membership, social standing, and class. People often use accent to deduce another’s intelligence, warmth, and height even for persons with whom they have never interacted or met. In their study, Neuliep and Speten-Hensen (2013) employed the matched guise technique where participants were exposed to recorded examples of two or more language varieties and then evaluated the speaker in the recording on a variety of character traits. The unique feature of the matched guise technique is that the participants did not know that the speaker in each recording is the same person using a different accent. In their study participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups, including an experimental group or a control group. Both groups were exposed to a video of the same male speaker delivering a 12 minute speech on the benefits of exercise. The videos were virtually identical in every way except that the speaker in the film viewed by the experimental group spoke with a nonnative accent while the speaker viewed by the control group did not. Prior to watching the video participants in both conditions completed the Generalized Ethnocentrism (GENE) scale developed by Neuliep and McCroskey (1997). After viewing the video, participants in each condition completed three social perception-based measures designed to assess their perception of the speaker’s credibility, attractiveness, and homophily. Results showed that in the experimental group, ethnocentrism was negatively and significantly correlated with perceptions of the speaker’s physical, social, and task attractiveness, his credibility, and perceived homophily. For the control group, none of the correlations between ethnocentrism and percep-

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tions of the speaker’s physical, social, and task attractiveness, his credibility, and perceived homophily were significant. The results of their study indicate that ethnocentrism plays a rather remarkable role in the negative perception of speakers with nonnative accents. Specifically, as one’s relative degree of ethnocentrism increases, perceptions of a nonnative accent speaker’s attractiveness, credibility, and homophily decrease. Moreover, as ethnocentrism increases, positive evaluations of the same speaker’s speech decreased proportionately. Yet when presented with a speaker with a native accent, ethnocentrism plays little to no role in the social perceptions of that speaker or evaluation of the speaker’s speech. Decades of research have shown that communicative approach-avoidance tendencies are influenced by perceived uncertainty. Uncertainty is cognitive; that is, the degree of predictability about another individual in an interactive context. During initial interaction with strangers, uncertainty is high. Uncertainty is associated with anxiety. Anxiety is the affective equivalent of uncertainty. As uncertainty and anxiety fluctuate (i.e., increase & decrease), one’s communicative behavior oscillates accordingly. Generally, lower uncertainty leads to approach tendencies while higher uncertainty leads to avoidance. Interacting with a person from a different culture typically involves more uncertainty than when interacting with a stranger from one’s native culture (Neuliep & Ryan 1998). Therefore interacting with someone from a different culture may be disproportionately anxiety producing and trigger avoidance tendencies and an unwillingness to communicate. As uncertainty and anxiety vary, communication behaviors vary as well. In an attempt to explain communication behavior during initial encounters with others, Berger and Calabrese (1975) developed uncertainty reduction theory (URT). The major premise of this theory is that when strangers first meet, their primary goal is to reduce uncertainty and increase predictability of their own and the other person’s behavior. In order to accomplish this, they use specific communication strategies. Ethnocentrism negatively influences intercultural communication and especially one’s motivation to interactant with person from different cultures. Lin, Rancer, and Trimbitas (2005) argue that one’s intercultural willingness-to-communicate is linked to ethnocentrism. In their study they report a negative relationship between Romanian students’ ethnocentrism and their intercultural willingness-tocommunicate. As ethnocentrism increased, intercultural willing to communicate decreased. Australian researchers Logan, Steel, and Hunt (2015) recently investigated the link between anxiety, uncertainty, and ethnocentrism on one’s willingness to interact interculturally. Following the research of Neuliep and Ryan (1998), Logan, Steel and Hunt (2015) noted that even when intercultural anxiety and uncertainty are low, intercultural communication may still be unproductive, due in part to the importance of other factors, such as ethnocentrism. Specifically, Logan and her colleagues investigated how differences in anxiety, both individual (i.e., trait anxiety) and intergroup (i.e., anxiety specifically related

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to an interaction), influenced one’s willingness to approach intercultural communication. In addition, they studied the influence of ethnocentrism on one’s willingness to interact. They noted that anxiety, uncertainty, and ethnocentrism are all important factors that negatively affect approach tendencies in intercultural communication. Participants in their study completed measures of trait anxiety, intergroup anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty, ethnocentrism, willingness to interact, and perceived predictability. Participants were informed that they were about to interact with an intercultural interaction partner named Yon over the Internet via live chat. Their results indicated that intergroup anxiety and perceived predictability significantly contributed toward one’s willingness to interact. They also found that ethnocentrism, trait anxiety, and intolerance of uncertainty contributed to one’s willingness to interact. Logan et al. noted that a unique aspect of their study was to investigate the contribution of ethnocentrism to willingness to interact in an intercultural interaction. After controlling for the effect of intergroup anxiety, ethnocentrism made a significant contribution to the model investigating willingness to interact, while both trait anxiety and intolerance of uncertainty did not. This finding is consistent with other studies that highlight the importance of ethnocentrism on approach-avoidance tendencies during intercultural communication.

6 Some final thoughts: Mediating ethnocentrism? As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, ethnocentrsim is one of the central concepts in understanding outgroup attitudes, intergroup relations, and intercultural communication and generally has a negative effect on intercultural relations. Moreover, as noted above, many believe that ethnocentrism is a natural human condition and therefore is unavoidable. However, perhaps increased intercultural interaction and the initiation and maintenance of intercultural relationships might mediate ethnocentrism because as people learn about the values, customs, and beliefs of other cultures they begin to understand and perhaps identify with their origins. But in their early research, Neuliep and McCroskey (1997) found a positive relationship between intercultural contact and ethnocentrism. Specifically, they found that as intercultural contact increased so did levels of ethnocentrism. But keep in mind that culture is learned and some recent research has shown that ethnocentrism can perhaps be mediated. In her research, Welch Borden (2007) had students who were enrolled in her intercultural communication class engage in a semester long service-learning project that offered students opportunities to interact with those from cultures different than their own. As described by Welch Borden (2007) service-learning projects are designed to give students the opportunity to put theories into practice in community settings among disadvantaged populations. She maintains that service-learning experiences go beyond the strictly academic environment and help students better understand persons who diverge from

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mainstream culture as well as to appreciate the structures of power and privilege that function in any dominant society. Moreover, Welch Borden (2007) argues that service-learning is distinct from other forms of experiential learning, such as volunteerism, community service, and internships because service learning benefits the provider and the recipient of the service equally. In her study participants included traditional undergraduate students enrolled in an intercultural communication class. At the beginning of the semester students completed Neuliep and McCroskey’s (1997) Generalized Ethnocentrism (GENE) scale as a pretest of ethnocentrism. At the conclusion of the semester, students again completed the GENE scale, which served as the posttest. Her results showed that posttest ethnocentrism scores were significantly lower than pretest scores. After having completed a course involving service-learning within a cultural group of which they were not members, on average, students exhibited lower levels of ethnocentrism than they did at the beginning of the course. But Welch Borden (2007) carefully points out that not every student’s ethnocentrism score changed in the same direction. In fact 46 percent of students experienced either no change in score or an increase in ethnocentrism. Therefore, just over half the students accounted for the declines in ethnocentrism measured by the posttest suggesting the nature of intercultural interaction a possible factor. Studied for over a century the concept of ethnocentrism continues to challenge and intrigue social scientists. Although the original conceptualization of ethnocentrism remains generally valid, the operationalization and methodological focus of research in this area has undergone significant advances. In the past decade, researchers have refined the definition of ethnocentrism to include the proposition that ethnocentrism is a universal and natural phenomena that is not necessarily negative, although the consequences often are. Ethnocentrism is the basis for ingroup loyalty and defense. Researchers have also refined and clarified the operationalization of ethnocentrism. Early instrumentation designed to measure ethnocentrism has been found to be hopelessly outdated. The contemporary measure, as developed by Neuliep and McCroskey, is regarded as reliable and valid, giving researchers a fundamental tool for understanding this complex concept. Finally, social scientists have refocused their research to studying the effects of ethnocentrism on intercultural communication. Given the importance of communication in the global society, understanding the role of ethnocentrism continues to be of vital significance.

7 References Adams, Matthew & Paul Hanna. 2012. Your past is not their present: Time, the other, and ethnocentrism in cross-cultural personality psychology. Theory & Psychology 22(4). 436–451. Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson & R. Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.

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Berger, Charles R. & Richard J. Calabrese. 1975. Some explorations in initial interactions and beyond: Toward a developmental theory of interpersonal communication. Human Communication Research 1. 99–112. Bierly, Margaret M. 1985. Prejudice toward contemporary outgroups as a generalized attitude. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 15. 255–260. Boas, Franz. 1932. Anthropology and modern life. New York: Norton. Borden, Amanda Welch. 2007. The impact of service-learning on ethnocentrism in an intercultural communication course. Journal of Experiential Education 30(2). 171–183. Capell, Jen, Elizabeth Dean & Gerry Veenstra. 2008. The relationship between cultural competence and ethnocentrism of health care professionals. Journal of Transcultural Nursing 19(2). 121–125. Cargile, Aaron Castelan & Howard Giles. 1997. Understanding language attitudes: Exploring listener affect and identity. Language & Communication 17. 195–217. de Benoist, Alain. 1999. What Is Racism? Telos 114. 11–49. Dixon, John A., Berenice Mahoney & Roger Cocks. 2002. Accent of guilt? Effects of regional accent, race, and crime type on attributions of guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21. 162–168. Edwards, John R. 1999. Refining our understanding of language attitudes. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18. 101–110. Gagnon, Andre & Richard Y. Bourhis. 1996. Discrimination in the minimal group paradigm: Social identity or self-interest? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22. 1289–1301. Giles, Howard. 1970. Evaluative reactions to accents. Educational Review 22. 211–27. Giles, Howard & Andrew C. Billings. 2004. Assessing language attitudes: Speaker evaluation studies. In Alan Davies & Catherine Elder (eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics, 187– 209. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Giles, Howard & Patricia Johnson. 1987. Ethnolinguistic identity theory: A social psychological approach to language maintenance. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 68. 69–99. Gluszek, Agata & John F. Dovidio. 2010. The way they speak: A social psychological perspective on the stigma of nonnative accents in communication. Personality and Social Psychology Review 14(2). 214–237. Greitemeyer, Tobias. 2014. Playing violent video games increases intergroup bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40(1). 70–78. Helman, Cecil G. 2007 [1984]. Culture, health, and illness, 5 th edition. London: Hodder Arnold. Hogg, Michael A. 2006. Social identity theory. In Peter J. Burke (ed.), Contemporary social psychological theories, 111–136. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hogg, Michael A. & Dominic Abrams. 1988. Social identifications: A social psychology of intergroup relations and group processes. London: Routledge. Hogg, Michael A., Dominic Abrams, Sabine Otten & Steve Hinkle. 2004. The social identity perspective: Intergroup relations, self-conception, and small groups. Small Group Research 35. 246–276. Levinson, Daniel J. 1950. Politico-Economic ideology and group memberships in relation to eEthnocentrism. In Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson & Nevitt Sanford (eds.), The authoritarian personality, 151–221. New York: Harper & Brothers. Lewis, Wyndham. 1948. America and cosmic man. London: Nicholson & Watson. Lin, Yang, Andrew S. Rancer & Oana Trimbitas. 2005. Ethnocentrism and intercultural-willingnessto-communicate: A cross-cultural comparison between Romanian and American college students. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 34. 138–151. Logan, Shanna, Zachary Steel & Caroline Hunt. 2015. Investigating the effect of anxiety, uncertainty and ethnocentrism on willingness to interact in an intercultural communication. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46(1). 39–52.

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Murphy, Gardner & Rensis Likert. 1983. Public opinion and the individual. New York: Harper & Brother. Navah, Abdolreza, Arash Heydary & Shahrouz Froutan Kia. 2010/1389. Investigating the effect of socio-economic status and authoritarianism on ethnocentrism. Human Development Quarterly 4. 85–106. Neuliep, James W. 2002. Assessing the reliability and validity of the generalized ethnocentrism scale. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 4. 201–216. Neuliep, James W. 2010a. A contemporary conceptualization of ethnocentrism. In Michael B. Hinner (ed.), Freiberger Beiträge zur Interkulturellen und Wirtschaftskommunikation (A forum for general and intercultural business communication), 47–62. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. Neuliep, James W. 2010b. Ethical and cultural relativism. In Ronald L. Jackson (ed.), Encyclopedia of identity, 252–253. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Neuliep, James W. 2015 [2006]. Intercultural communication: A contextual approach, 6 th edition. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. Neuliep, James W., Michelle Chaudoir & James C. McCroskey. 2001. A cross-cultural comparison of ethnocentrism among Japanese and United States college students. Communication Research Reports 18. 137–146. Neuliep, James W., Stephanie M. Hintz & James C. McCroskey. 2005. The influence of ethnocentrism in organizational contexts: Perceptions of interviewee and managerial attractiveness, credibility, and effectiveness. Communication Quarterly 53. 41–56. Neuliep, James W. & James C. McCroskey. 1997. The development of a US and generalized ethnocentrism scale. Communication Research Reports 14. 385–398. Neuliep, James W. & Daniel J. Ryan. 1998. The influence of intercultural communication apprehension and socio-communicative orientation on uncertainty reduction during initial cross-cultural interaction. Communication Quarterly 46. 88–99. Neuliep, James W. & Kendall M. Speten-Hansen. 2013. The influence of ethnocentrism on social perceptions of nonnative accents. Language & Communication 33. 167–176. Perreault, Stephane & Richard Y. Bourhis. 1999. Ethnocentrism, social identification, and discrimination. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25. 92–103. Ray, John J. & Frederick A. Lovejoy. 1986. The generality of racial prejudice. The Journal of Social Psychology 126. 563–564. Rubin, Mark & Miles Hewstone. 1998. Social identity theory’s self-esteem hypothesis: A review and some suggestions for clarification. Personality and Social Psychology Review 2. 40–62. Rubinstein, Gidi. 1996. Two peoples in one land: A validation study of Altmeyer's right wing authoritarianism scale in the Palestinian and Jewish societies in Israel. Journal of CrossCultural Psychology 27. 216–230. Scheepers, Peer, Albert Felling & Jan Peters. 1992. Anomie, authoritarianism and ethnocentrism: Update of a classic theme and an empirical test. Politics & the Individual 2. 43–59. Schlesinger, Arthur Meier. 1993. The disuniting of America: Reflections of a multicultural society. New York: Norton. Shaffer, Margaret. A., David A. Harrison, Hal Gregersen, J. Stewart Black, J. & Lori A. Ferzandi. 2006. You can take it with you: Individual differences and expatriate effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology 91. 109–125. Sumner, William G. 1906. Folkways. Boston, MA: Ginn. Tajfel, Henri. 1959. Quantitative judgement in social perception. British Journal of Psychology 50. 16–29. Tajfel, Henri. 1969. Cognitive aspects of prejudice. Journal of Social Issues 25. 79–97. Tajfel, Henri. 1972. Social categorization. In Serge Moscovici (ed.), Introduction a la psychologie sociale 1, 272–302. Paris: Lorousse.

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Guo-Ming Chen

16 Issues in the conceptualization of intercultural communication competence Abstract: Scholars from different disciplines have produced a large amount of studies on the concept of intercultural communication competence (ICC) since its beginning a half century ago. While agreement on the basic nature of ICC has been reached among scholars, more new problems regarding the conceptualization, operationalization, and application of the concept continue to arise because of the impact of technological development and globalization trend. This chapter attempts to address these problems by focusing on the conceptual issues for the study of ICC. Six conceptual issues in the study of ICC are examined: 1. the meaning of ICC, 2. trait vs. state, 3. effectiveness vs. appropriateness, 4. universal vs. culturally specific, 5. knowledge vs. performance, and 6. components and models of ICC. Suggestions for pending issues and directions for future research are also discussed. Keywords: intercultural communication competence, conceptualization, diverse approaches, new media

1 Introduction The scholarly study of the concept of competence can be traced back more than seventy years (e.g., Bradway 1937; Doll 1935), and it has been more than forty years since scholars began to apply the concept of competence to the intercultural communication context (e.g., Ruben 1976; Smith 1966). The first systematic collection of the study of intercultural communication competence (ICC) appeared in the 1989 special issue of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations (Martin 1989), and after twenty five years of the first special issue another special issue on ICC emerged again in the same journal (Arasaratnam & Deardorff 2015). Between 1989 and 2015 hundreds of papers on ICC have been published, including more comprehensive paper collections in different types of texts (e.g., Dai & Chen 2014; Deardorff 2009; Wiseman & Koester 1993) or under a different name of the concept, i.e., intercultural intelligence (e.g., Ang & Van Dyne 2015). After so many years’ research efforts with such a large volume of publications on ICC, one would naturally assume that the concept has been a mature one and agreement on the nature of the concept has been reached among scholars. In fact, certain basic issues, such as the essential elements, e.g., cultural knowledge, motivation, cultural sensitivity, and intercultural behavioral skills, have been commonDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-016

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ly accepted by scholars. However, because of the impact of technological development and the globalization trend, more problems regarding the study of the concept have arisen, which at the same time greatly enriches the literature through extending the depth and expanding the scope of the research on ICC (Chen 2012). Nevertheless, unresolved issues regarding the study of ICC continue to exist and emerge. Those issues surround three aspects: conceptualization, operationalization, and application of the concept. The three aspects respectively refer to the definition, nature, principle or theory of the concept, the assessment/measurement of the concept, and the education or training in ICC (Chen & Starosta 1996; Koester & Lustig 2015). The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the conceptual issues for the study of ICC. The discussion includes suggestions provided by the author for pending issues and directions for future research in the line of study.

2 The conceptualization of ICC The key issue for the conceptualization of ICC deals with the definition of the concept, and from the meaning of the concept other issues are derived. Together, six conceptual issues in the study of ICC are examined in the following sections: 1. the meaning of ICC, 2. trait vs. state, 3. effectiveness vs. appropriateness, 4. universal vs. culturally specific, 5. knowledge vs. performance, and 6. components and models of ICC.

2.1 The meaning of ICC What is the definition of ICC? This most basic question about ICC has challenged scholars since the early years when the area of intercultural communication study was developed to nowadays (e.g., Chen 1987; Hammer, Gudykunst & Wiseman 1978; Ruben 2015). However, the main disagreement on the definition arises from the concept of “competence” rather than ICC. “Intercultural communication” is only a context to which the concept of “competence” is applied. Thus, we can explore the concept of competence in different levels of human communication, e.g., interpersonal, organizational, and public communication, or in other contexts of human society, such as in religion (Yancey 2009), engineering (Buzzanell 2014; Grandin & Hedderich 2009), or social work (Fong 2009). The variations of a single context or the combination of different contexts can further produce a large array of diverse contexts. For instance, the study of intercultural communication can include five different contexts, namely, international, interracial, interethnic, and contra-cultural, in addition to intercultural communication (Rich 1974). The combination of different contexts can be the study of intercultural competence in, for example, business transactions (Hinner 2014) or volunteer overseas teaching (An

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2014). Thus, the continual debate among scholars, for example, on the difference between intercultural and cross-cultural communication competence, or the similarity between interpersonal and intercultural communication competence, is an issue regarding the meaning of the context where the concept of competence locates rather than an issue about the conceptualization of competence itself (Koester & Lustig 2015; Spitzberg 2015) – conceptualization is the focus of this chapter. There is a consensus among scholars to treat competence as an ability to act in the process of interaction. For example, White (1959: 297) defined competence as “an organism’s capacity to interact effectively with its environment”. That is, for human beings competence is a person’s ability to interact with the other in a specific context. The question is what is the nature of this ability? Is the ability a trait or state? Is it universal or culturally specific? Does it refer to knowledge or performance? Does it refer to effectiveness, appropriateness, or other concepts? To better answer these questions it is necessary to take a holistic view rather than to dichotomize the argument (Chen 2009a).

2.2 Trait vs. state Traditionally, competence was treated as a personality trait. However, as Foote and Cottrell (1955) argued, it is a misperception to treat competence as a completely inherent ability. Instead, competence is an acquired ability that can be increased through learning in the process of socialization (Weinstein 1969), and one has to possess a satisfactory level of motivation to learn in order to increase the degree of competence (White 1959). In other words, competence should neither be considered as a stable characteristic or trait of a person, like conscience that is consistent across different situations and contexts, nor as a state or transient experience like emotion that changes moment to moment. One can also argue that competence is both a trait and state, but not in the conventional sense of conceiving the meaning of trait and state. That is to say, competence is a trait that is not ingrained or fixed, and it is a state that does not change quickly in every moment but retains a certain degree of stability. Without accepting this point of view the study of competence will be meaningless, especially from the perspective of education or training. This is why most scholars orient to perceiving competence as an inherent but also changeable ability, which provides individuals with potentiality for motivating themselves to learn to move up to the upper ladder of human development (Fang 1980). In the context of intercultural communication, competence is therefore a person’s ability to interact with people from differing cultural backgrounds. This ability is enhanced through the acquiring of cultural knowledge and skills. Moreover, because of the diversity of cultural conventions, it is understandable that the ability may fluctuate in different cultural contexts. Deardorff (2015) echoed this view by emphasizing the importance of treating ICC as a lifelong developmental process

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so that one can become fully competent in intercultural communication. Deardorff pointed out that future research on ICC needs to focus on issues such as how to cultivate ICC in individuals, how to figure out effective forms of learning experiences and activities for different audiences and contexts, how to cultivate ICC in larger contexts, and how to increase the awareness of ICC in different sectors of human society.

2.3 Effectiveness vs. appropriateness While scholars commonly agree that competence is an ability to act in interaction, how to define this ability becomes problematic. White (1959) first indicated that one has to act “effectively” to be competent in communication. A number of scholars also used the two concepts of “effectiveness” and “competence” interchangeably in the early stage of ICC study (e.g., Hammer, Gudykunst & Wiseman 1978; Ruben 1977). Chen and Starosta (1996) contended that, because the interchangeability of the two concepts inevitably led to the conceptual ambiguity when dealing with competence, “intercultural adroitness” can be used to replace “intercultural effectiveness” to avoid confusion. Being effective in intercultural communication refers to the ability to control and manipulate the interaction to attain one’s goal. It is obvious that perceiving competence on the basis of goal attainment through the means of control is quite Western in orientation, and it often results in the failure of intercultural communication due to the involvement of people of different cultures with diverse or contrasting beliefs and values. In other words, it will be difficult for Asian people, who treat human interaction as a holistic and interconnected process in which harmony is the ultimate value and goal (Chen 2006), to imagine that being effective in the Western sense can be perceived as being competent in the process of intercultural communication. Hence, intercultural communication scholars have agreed that appropriateness also must be an essence for the conceptualization of competence to avoid potential cultural biases. Appropriateness implies other-oriented ability by acknowledging cultural constraints in the process of intercultural communication. More specifically, it refers to the ability to recognize cultural differences and to exercise fitting communication functions in that specific cultural context (Chen & Starosta 1996). Those communication functions may include the quality, quantity, relevance, and manner of message sending (Grice 1975), or refer to sharing feelings, informing, ritualizing, and imagining in interaction (Getter & Nowinski 1981). Recently, more and more scholars have advocated that ethics, in addition to effectiveness and appropriateness, should be included when conceptualizing ICC (e.g., Casmir 1997; Nakayama & Martin 2014; Xiao & Chen 2009). The ethical principle refers to the moral aspect of intercultural communication. It deals with the ability to show mutual respect, sincerity, tolerance, and responsibility to different

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cultural values and norms in interaction. According to Dai and Chen (2015), mutual respect of cultural differences develops the opportunity for open communication to foster the spirit of solidarity; sincerity creates a space in which both parties can seek mutual understanding and intercultural agreement based on mutual confidence and trust; tolerance is the way to secure cultural diversity through accommodating one’s counterpart’s values; and responsibility cultivates the sense to recognize one’s obligation to engage in constructive criticism, so that commonality and agreement can be negotiated and achieved in intercultural interaction. The ethical principle opens a new venue for enhancing and expanding the depth and scope of conceptualizing competence in an intercultural communication context, and provides a new direction for future research in this line of study.

2.4 Knowledge vs. performance As a linguist, Chomsky (1965) first proposed that competence refers to the knowledge of an interactant’s language code, including grammatical rules, vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling. Phillips (1984) also separated competence and skill by considering competence as individual knowledge, but this knowledge indicates not only the understanding of linguistic codes, but also the familiarity of contextual requirements of the interaction. In addition, McCroskey (1982) argued that competence is not equal to effective communication skills. Instead, it is more suitable to refer to the ability of knowing how to behave appropriately in interaction. However, more scholars insist that competence should include, in addition to knowledge, the aspect of performance. For example, Hymes (1972) was one of the early scholars using knowledge and performance for the conceptualization of competence. Moreover, in response to McCroskey’s view on competence, Spitzberg (1983) contended that knowledge, skill/performance, and motivation have to be included to fully understand the concept of competence. As indicated previously, if competence is a person’s ability to “interact” with others in a specific context, then “act” or “performance” should also be an inherent aspect of the concept. It means that a competent person must have the knowledge of being able to act and possess the ability to really perform the action. Most intercultural communication scholars tend to agree in recent decades that being competent denotes the understanding of both interactants’ cultural conventions and the adroit performance of skills. Cultural knowledge is commonly referred to as intercultural awareness, and skillful performance is referred to as intercultural effectiveness. The former represents the cognitive aspect and the latter the behavioral aspect of intercultural communication competence (Chen 2009b). The remaining question is whether the cognitive understanding of cultural knowledge and the skillful performance of behavior are sufficient for being competent in intercultural communication. Some scholars argued that motivation should be a critical aspect of ICC (e.g., Spitzberg 1989; White 1959); others indicated that

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the affective aspect, represented by intercultural sensitivity, should be included (e.g., Chen & Starosta 1996; Chen & Young 2012). Motivation and affect are closely related. Motivation as an internal state directs a person’s action through the influence of cognitive processes and the promotion of initiating activities, and affect is also an internal state that is concerned with a person’s feelings, emotions, and moods. One’s feeling or emotion affects the motivation to act, such as in learning new tasks. In other words, positive emotions tend to increase motivation for a person to achieve their task or communication goal (Isen 2000; Isen, Daubman & Nowicki 1987). Thus, motivation is the force for cognitive learning and behavioral performance, but it is conditioned by affect. Whether to treat motivation as part of affect, or treat both concepts separately when conceptualizing ICC, is a pending question for scholars to answer in future research.

2.5 Universal vs. local The debate on whether ICC is a universal or local concept is embedded in cultural general vs. cultural specific or etic vs. emic approaches to the study of intercultural communication (Berry 1990). The cultural general approach orients to the etic perspective by assuming that there exists a common structure of social reality in which culture and language can be objectively observed for a generalizable or universal pattern across human societies. The cultural specific approach takes an emic view by arguing that every culture and language has its unique contextual structure, thus, to fully understand a culture one has to be in situ or an insider to observe the sense making process of that specific group. The either-or distinction between cultures is troublesome, for some scholars (e.g., Chen 2009a; Naroll 1971) argued that both cultural general/etic and cultural specific/emic approaches co-exist in human society (see Chapter 6, this volume, for another discussion on this topic). Naroll (1973) went one step further to propose that scholars should find a way that can integrate both approaches, so that emic variations and etic constancies can be employed together to account for cultural similarities and differences. Due to the impact of globalization, the demand of the cultural specific approach for intercultural communication study has increased in the last three decades. It aims to challenge the Eurocentric domination, which tends to universalize intercultural communication based on the attitude of Western triumphalism reflected in aggressive individualism, chauvinistic rationalism, and ruthless culturalism (Asante 2006). The localization of intellectual inquiry not only manifests the necessity of adopting a cultural specific or emic approach to the study of intercultural communication, but also reflects the truth of differences among cultural groups, as illustrated in the study of Asiacentric, Afrocentric, and diasporic communication (e.g., Asante, Miike & Yin 2013; Chen 2011; Miike 2007). Nevertheless, it is unwise to adhere to the dichotomized classification of universalization and localization for the study of intercultural communication. As Chen

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(2006) pointed out, the extreme view of localizing intercultural communication study may suffer from the problem of treating cultural values indiscriminately by creating an insurmountable gap between cultural values of different groups, such as to assume that Eastern cultures are collectivistic and Western cultures are individualistic without noticing internal variations in every culture. The reality is that all cultures share a certain degree of differences and similarities, thus cultural values should be treated as a continuum. This indicates that individualism also exists in Eastern cultures, though collectivism is more emphasized, and vice versa to Western cultures. In other words, as Kluckhohn and Strodbeck (1961) argued more than half century ago, all human societies have to face universal problems, such as issues regarding human nature, nature-man relationship, time, activity, and human relations, but the way to solve the problem, or so called “value orientation,” tends to be different in each society. For example, for the category of human relations, conflicts exist in both Eastern and Western cultures, but people in the East tend to avoid direct conflict by adopting a more harmonious way to solve the problem, while Westerners orient more to a direct and confrontational approach for handling conflict. Moreover, as Chen (2014a) indicated, this doesn’t imply that people in Eastern cultures are not confrontational, or harmony doesn’t exist in the West. The inherent universal and local nature of human culture directly affects the study of ICC in two ways. First, the concept of competence, like other universal problems, exists in all human societies, but the way to perceive it could be different. Second, because cultural knowledge or awareness is a necessary dimension of ICC, to be interculturally competent implies the ability to have both general knowledge of human culture and specific knowledge of cultural conventions of the target culture. Finally, in addition to the basic issues discussed above, another key issue for the conceptualization of ICC is concerned with components and models of the concept. The following section focuses on this issue.

2.6 Components and models of ICC A key issue of the conceptualization of ICC is to identify components and models of the concept, though it is impossible to generate a comprehensive list of the elements of ICC, for different approaches to the study of ICC would provide different components, in addition to similar ones, of the concept. As Dinges (1983) indicated, there are at least six approaches, namely, overseasmanship, subjective culture, multicultural person, social behaviorism, typology, and intercultural communication, to the study of ICC, and each approach has its own rational and identifiable factors for ICC. Collier (1989) also mentioned that ICC can be studied from aspects of the ethnography of speaking, cross-cultural attitude, behavioral skills, and cultural identity, and each aspect provides a variety of components of ICC. Chen (1989) conducted a thorough literature review and organized the content of ICC into a precise chart to show dimensions and components of the concept (see

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Fig. 16.1: Dimensions and components of intercultural communication competence. (From Chen 1989: 121)

Figure 16.1). The figure shows scholars in the early study of ICC presumed that an interculturally competent person has to possess the ability embedded in four categories: 1. personal attributes – which are generally comprised of specific personal qualities, i.e., appropriate self-disclosure, self-awareness, positive self-concept, and less anxiety in intercultural interaction; 2. communication skills – which refers to behavioral performance including verbal and nonverbal message skills, social skills or empathy, behavioral flexibility, and interaction management; 3. psychological adaptation – which involves the ability to cope with frustration, stress, alienation, and ambiguous situations in the process of intercultural communication or adaptation; and 4. cultural awareness – which points to the understanding of cultural conventions, such as values, customs, norms, and social system of a culture.

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Fig. 16.2: A triangular model of ICC. (From Chen 2014b: 19)

Based on the volume of ICC components, scholars continue to make great efforts to abstract the concept by developing theoretical models to summarize or categorize them into a more precise and aesthetic graphic display. For example, Spitzberg and Changnon (2009) classified ICC models into six types: compositional, co-orientational, developmental, adaptational, and causal processes, and each category contains a number of different models. In this chapter a few representative ICC models are introduced from the perspective of context as mentioned previously that competence can be explored in different levels or contexts of human communication. Four categories, including the general ICC model, ICC model in intercultural adaptation context, ICC model in educational/training context, and ICC model in global context, are discussed here. The categories are far from exhaustive and only a few sample models are discussed. First of all, the general model of ICC directly deals with competence in the context of intercultural communication. It is the foundational model for the study of ICC. Two models in this category are discussed. First, Chen’s (2014b) triangular model of ICC (see Figure 16.2) summarizes the literature of the study of ICC into three aspects of ICC. The cognitive aspect of ICC is represented by intercultural awareness, the affective aspect represented by intercultural sensitivity, and the behavioral aspect represented by intercultural adroitness/effectiveness. The model can serve as the basis for the study of ICC, though recently Dai and Chen (2015) advocated that the moral aspect should be added to the triangular model of ICC to make it more complete and inclusive. The second one is the process or pyramid model of ICC developed by Deardorff (2006). Employing the Delphi technique, Deardorff integrated information collected from intercultural communication scholars into a collectively agreed upon model of ICC. Deardorff’s process model of ICC emphasizes the ongoing process of ICC development, which moves from the personal level to the interpersonal level of intercultural interaction. The developmental or improving process of ICC starts

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from an individual’s positive attitudes that motivate the person to acquire cultural knowledge and behavioral skills to achieve desired internal and external outcomes of ICC through interaction. Secondly, examining competence in the context of intercultural adaptation might be the first and most common task in which scholars engage in the study of ICC. The target of this line of research is expatriates, which mainly include international students, immigrants, and those in international business. Four commonly referred models are discussed, i.e., Lysgaard’s U-curve pattern, Bennett’s developmental model, Kim’s ICC model, and Imahari and Lanigan’s relational model. Lysgaard’s (1955) U-curve pattern suggests that the process of intercultural adaptation moves from the phase of initial adjustment, crisis, to regained adjustment, which is characterized by high affect initially, followed by a drop of satisfaction, and then progresses to a period of adjustment. The process also illustrates the gradual achievement of ICC. The model was widely used and expanded, and currently scholars commonly agree that the U-curve hypothesis is comprised of four stages, namely, honeymoon, crisis, adjustment, and biculturalism. Moreover, Gullahorn and Gullahorn (1963) extended the U-curve to W-curve to describe the reentry process of sojourners. The W-curve model indicates that when sojourners return home, they may need to go through the U-curve process again to adjust to their own culture. Bennett’s (1986, 2004) developmental model of ICC specifies that intercultural sensitivity is a transformational process through which interactants move from an ethnocentric state to an ethnorelative state in the process of intercultural adaptation. More specifically, this transformation process consists of six stages: 1. the denial of the existence of cultural differences, 2. the defense of one’s own worldviews, 3. the minimization of cultural differences, 4. the acceptance of cultural differences, 5. the adaptation to cultural differences, and 6. the integration of culture to become ethnorelative. The model is applicable not only to the expatriates mentioned above, but also to different co-cultural groups within or between cultures. Kim (1995) proposed a structural model of intercultural adaptation to delineate ICC, which is embedded in the process of the stress-adaptation-growth dynamic from the open-systems perspective. The model applies to both individual and group levels. It emphasizes the cyclic, continuous, and interactive nature of intercultural adaptation and implies the personal development and transformation of sojourners through the change of affect, cognition, and behaviors required to face the challenge of cultural differences in a new environment. Kim’s (2012) integrative model of intercultural adaptation on the basis of the stress-adaptation-growth transformation to become an interculturally competent person was further developed to indicate that ICC through this transformational process refers to the successful establishment of “intercultural personhood” and “intercultural identity.” As for Imahari and Lanigan’s (1989) relational model of ICC, it extends and integrates Spitzberg and Cupach’s (1984) dimensions of knowledge, motivation, and skills of interpersonal communication competence to the relational aspect of

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intercultural adaptation. The model dictates that ICC is the outcome of the dynamic interactive processes of intercultural relationships between a sojourner and a host national, which is regulated by both appropriateness and effectiveness. Although the model still emphasizes the importance of goal attainment, to situate ICC in the relational process of intercultural interaction gives this model a potential to bridge the gap between different cultures, especially between Western and Eastern perspectives on the conceptualization of communication competence. Thirdly, the ICC model in an educational/training context represents the practical and application aspect of the concept. Globalization trends, mainly instigated by the development of communication and transportation technology, have given human society no choice except for becoming more interdependent and interconnected. To produce and live a successful life in the globally connected network of the 21st century means to acquire ICC, thus, how to educate or train people to transform into a global citizen becomes a key issue in today’s educational institutions and other sectors such as business. The importance of this category of ICC can be witnessed by the ICC project recommended and implemented by UNESCO (2013, drafted by Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz) and Council of Europe (Byram 2003). A number of publications also have been done by scholars in this area (e.g., Landis, Bennett & Bennett 2003; Landis & Brislin 2013). Michael Byram and Derald Wing Sue’s models are discussed respectively in this part. Byram’s (1997, 2009) model of ICC is based in foreign language teaching. It integrates the dimensions of awareness, motivation, and skill of ICC into foreign language education by consolidating ICC with linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, and discourse competence. To be interculturally competent refers to possessing a flexible personal identity for being a successful intercultural mediator who is able to appropriately and effectively negotiate between two cultures. This ability is embedded in knowing relationships not only of one’s own language and culture, but also for other ethnic groups within the same society and for those from different cultures. Language in this model consists of both verbal and nonverbal messages in the teaching process. Byram’s introduction of the concept of critical cultural awareness as a dimension of the ICC model is especially valuable for pedagogical purposes, which is critical for students to learn how to evaluate human’s thoughts and activities from multiple cultural perspectives. Sue’s (1991) original model of ICC was situated in the context of cultural diversity training in an organization such as in business and industry, education, and mental health. The model employs a systematic approach that incorporates functional focus, barriers, and competencies into the model. Functional focus refers to issues of promotion, retention, and recruitment of the organization; barriers refers to differences, interpersonal discrimination, and systematic barriers in the organization; and competencies relate to personal beliefs/attitudes, knowledge, and skills. Together, a 3 × 3 × 3 model was developed to train individuals to be interculturally competent. The model was further expanded by Sue (2001) to Multidimen-

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sional Facets of Cultural Competence (MDCC), which incorporates three primary aspects of multicultural competence, namely, perspectives of specific racial or cultural groups, elements of cultural competence, and foci of cultural competence into a 3 (awareness, knowledge, and skills) × 4 (individual, professional, organizational, and societal) × 5 (African American, Asian American, Latino/Hispanic American, Native American, and European American) design. The model not only is highly heuristic, but also penetrates the boundary of the interpersonal context for the study of ICC by expanding its scope to include different levels of human communication and different sectors of human society, in which cultural competence can be systematically identified. Finally, the impact of globalization trends, including the development of new technologies, global economic interdependence, the globally widespread movement of populations, the increase of multiculturalism in society, and the de-emphasis of nation-state (Chen & Starosta 2005), has transformed human society into a globally interconnected network. The new face of human society demands that scholars reexamine ICC in the global context and develop the concept of ICC to the level of global communication. Global communication competence dictates the ability to identify and understand cultural differences, to competently interact and mutually collaborate with people across cultures, and to assess one’s performance in intercultural interaction (Hunter, White & Godbey 2006). Two models from Chen (2005) and Sorrells (2014), respectively, responding to the call of global communication competence are discussed in this section. Chen (2005) expanded the triangular model of ICC (Figure 16.2) into a model of global communication competence (GCC) (Figure 16.3). The author argued that global interdependence for people and cultures has become a norm of human life, hence, to communicate effectively and successfully with people of differing cultural, ethnic, social, and religious backgrounds becomes a critical ability to help individuals adapt to the demands of the new way of life in the 21st century. According to Chen (2005: 5), GCC aims to enable people to “search for the vision, shared understanding, and sense of multiple identities that lead to the unlocking of human potential in the development of intelligence, knowledge, and creativity for a peaceful and productive society”. The model is comprised of four dimensions: global mindset, unfolding the self, mapping the culture, and aligning interaction. Global mindset indicates the openness towards different cultures that promotes intercultural communication; unfolding the self is to foster personal abilities, such as motivation, sensitivity, flexibility, and open-mindedness, to face and cope with the challenges of constant changes and complexities of global society; mapping culture is the ability to acquire self and other cultural knowledge that leads to respect and integration of cultural differences; and aligning interaction is based on behavioral skills that help individuals adjust to the change of interactional patterns in global society. The intercultural praxis model developed by Sorrells (2014: 153) stipulates that GCC is “a process of critical, reflective, engaged thinking and acting that enables

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Fig. 16.3: A model of global communication competence. (From Chen 2005: 3)

us to navigate the complex, contradictory, and challenging intercultural spaces we inhabit interpersonally, communally, and globally”. Six interrelated concepts for the intercultural praxis model of GCC include inquiry, framing, positioning, dialogue, reflection, and action. In other words, GCC demands that intercultural interaction in global context aims to raise awareness, enhance critical analysis, and develop socially responsible action of individuals. The model is heuristic and philosophical. It is embedded in the critical approach of intercultural communication inquiry. By transforming ICC through engaged praxis in the global context, the model not only redefines culture as a site of contestation in which the making of meaning is treated as a process of struggling rather than a static entity, but also involves history and power in globally intercultural encountering through mico/ meso/macro analyses with a multifocal vision. In addition to the models discussed above, there exist numerous models dealing with ICC from different perspectives and contexts. They include, e.g., Arasaratnam’s (2009) ICC model, Fantini’s (1995) worldviews convergence model and intercultural interlocutor competence model, Hammer, Wiseman, Rasmussen, and Bruschke’s (1998) anxiety/uncertainty management model, Chen and An’s (2009) Chinese model of intercultural leadership competence, Manian and Naidu’s (2009) conciliatory intercultural competence model, Rathje’s (2007) coherence-cohesion model, Trompenaars and Woolliams’ (2009) global communication competence model, and Ting-Toomey and Kurogi’s (1998) facework mode, etc. These models as well make significant contributions to the understanding of ICC. Moreover, it must be emphasized again that the sample ICC models discussed in this chapter only represent a small portion of existing ones, and the categories used for explicating

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the sample models are arbitrary, and most are from communication scholars. They are only used as a reference to show the variety and large quantity of research in this specific area. We can foresee that more and more models of ICC will be developed when human society continues to move forward.

3 Future study of ICC and conclusion Among the many issues scholars will face for the future study of ICC, two are critical. They regard the diversity of approaches to the study of ICC and the potential impact of new technology on the nature of ICC. First, as Chen (2014b) pointed out, the study of ICC traditionally was dominated by discovery or the functional paradigm that dictates empirical research on the basis of positivism and behaviorism. The scientific inquiry from this tradition has made enormous contributions to knowledge production in the research community. However, due to the impact of globalization trends, the functional paradigm has been challenged by interpretative and critical paradigms since the 1980s. Reflected in the field of intercultural communication, more and more scholars, as well, began to examine concepts from different paradigmatic perspectives (Nakayama & Halualani 2010). Similarly, the study of ICC has been facing and will continue to face the challenge from other paradigms, including, e.g., the dialectical approach which originated from the critical paradigm that emphasizes the holistic nature of dynamic intercultural interaction. The dialectical approach argues that ICC should be conceived as the ability to deal with the opposite but interdependent and transformative relationship between two parties (Martin & Nakayama 2010). Sorrells (2014), who calls for new action in the study of ICC based on the critical approach discussed previously, is another example. Moreover, Carbaugh and Lie (2014) employed cultural discourse analysis embedded in an interpretative paradigm to examine ICC. They claimed that intercultural communication is the part of social interaction that is knitted by meaning and knowledge produced by members of a specific cultural group, thus ICC cannot be generalized, but can only be observed in a specific cultural context. In addition to exploring the diversity of approaches to the study of ICC from paradigmatic inquiry, another challenge is the conceptualization of ICC from different cultural and religious heritages. They include perspectives from, e.g., Africa (Nwosu 2009), Latin America (Medina-Lopez-Portillo & Sinnigen 2009), Japan (Miyahara 2004), India (Hegde 1993), Korea (Yun 1994), Buddhism (Dissanayake 2014), Confucianism (Xiao & Chen 2009), and Islam (Mowlana 2014) for the conceptualization of communication competence. The contributions from these perspectives will continue to enrich our understanding of ICC in global society, while at the same time challenge and correct the biases rooted in Eurocentrism.

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Second, we live in times of constant and rapid change. The complexity of this change of human society mainly caused by technological revolutions will continue to increase for decades to come. The flux of this trend is challenging the fundamental assumptions of human society and scholarly inquiry. As Chen (2012) indicated, the emergence of new media has challenged the very existence of intercultural communication in its traditional sense. The impact is manifested in the aspects of intercultural relationship development (Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe 2007), cultural identity (Chen & Zhang 2010), and intercultural adaptation (Sawyer & Chen 2012). We can foresee that the potential influence of new media on intercultural communication may lead to the need for reconceptualization of ICC in future research. In conclusion, facing the rapid change of human society in the 21st century, the study of ICC will need to continue to ride the turbulence with collective efforts from scholars for reexamining the concept from a new perspective, which may be resonant with the traditional mindset and practice, but most likely will demand a new perspective of thinking to cope with the concept. This chapter attempts to look into past and current issues and explore possible directions for the conceptualization of ICC. The analysis and discussion in this chapter is not meant to be comprehensive, but it is hoped that the chapter can promote further understanding of ICC, so that consensus can be reached for certain aspects for the study of the concept. As the foundation of intellectual inquiry, a sound conceptualization of a concept will serve as a solid basis for the operationalization and application of ICC in future development of this line of research.

Further Readings Chen, Guo-Ming. 2010. A study of intercultural communication competence. Hong Kong: China Review Academic Publishers. Chen, Guo-Ming. 2015. Theorizing global community as cultural home in the new century. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 46. 73–81.

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17 Intergroup communication Abstract: The chapter aims to demonstrate how an intergroup perspective informs our understanding of intercultural communication. It provides a general overview of the social identity and intergroup research tradition and summarizes research and theoretical approaches to understand constructive and potentially negative aspects of intergroup communication (e.g., communication accommodation theory). The chapter highlights the theorization and empirical studies on intergroup contact in contexts. Included works examine facilitating conditions and communicative processes that differentiate positive (e.g., reduction in prejudice) and negative outcomes of contact between members of different social groups (e.g., ethnicity, race, culture, political). Last, particular attention is paid to the changing landscape of intergroup and intercultural communication in the digital age. Keywords: communication accommodation theory, contact space, digital media, intergroup contact, group salience, self-categorization theory, social identity theory, prejudice

1 Introduction At the heart of the intergroup perspective is the idea that individuals are connected to social collectives and “operating in terms of groups is an inherent part of being human” (Harwood 2006: 85). This is not to suggest that the personal aspects of our self-concept should be ignored. Rather, it highlights that to truly understand identity, social relations, and interactions on both dyadic and group-based levels, we need to account for not only the personal aspects of self but also the aspects of our identity that reflect the social groups for which we belong or identify (or, in some cases, are categorized by others). Many of these social groups represent foci that often fall under the umbrella of intercultural communication (e.g., race, ethnicity, regional-national identity). Yet, this perspective also accounts for other social contexts in which intergroup distinctions – often infused with social hierarchies and norms – influence our perceptions and interactions with others. Age identity, for instance, is highly salient for many individuals and the negative attitudes toward older adults (Kite, Stockdale, Whitley & Johnson 2005) often pervade our intergenerational interactions. At times, patronizing communication on the part of younger adults based on negative age-based older adult stereotypes (Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci & Henwood 1986). Health contexts are also often infused with intergroup dynamic. For instance, Hewett, Watson, Gallois, Ward and Legget (2009) demonstrate how specialties in medical settings reflect hierarchical social DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-017

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groups among physicians and this can influence the experience of patients as physicians resolve the power and control issues that may arise in medical care. Recent work has also focused on the salient intergroup dynamics of police-civilian interactions (Choi & Giles 2012) demonstrating how factors such as attitudes toward police or civilians, media depictions, sociohistorical context, and the nature of the communication influence outcomes of these interactions (e.g., compliance). These are but a few of the social realms that constitute the study of intergroup communication (see Giles 2012). In each case, the focus is on the manner in which identification and affiliation with social groups influences our perceptions and interactions with others. The intergroup perspective has its origins in the social psychology tradition and, specifically, social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner 1979). Thus, we now turn to a general overview of the social identity theoretical perspective. Following this, our discussion addresses the shift from the cognitive to the communicative realm briefly highlighting communication accommodation theory (Giles in press) as a framework for understanding intergroup (and interpersonal) dynamics of our interactions. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the facilitating conditions, challenges, and potential benefits of intergroup contact including considerations of interactions in the digital age.

2 Social identity and the intergroup tradition Following the horrors that occurred in WWII (i.e., holocaust), scholars devoted a great deal of attention to understanding why these atrocities occurred. Whereas some theoretical discussions and research focused on individual-based explanations, others focused on group-motivations. It is from this that social identity theory (SIT; Tajfel & Turner 1979), along with the related self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell 1987), emerged (see Hornsey 2008, for review). Developments of SIT began with experiments based on the minimal group paradigm (e.g., Tajfel, Billig, Bundy & Flament 1971). In these experiments, participants were arbitrarily assigned to groups and asked to allocate resources as an experimental task. In this study and others that followed, participants allocated more resources to their group and less to others regardless of personal benefit. Thus, even in these conditions where group affiliation was trivial and minimal, ingroup favoritism emerged reflecting a clear “us” and “them” orientation. Elaborations on this ultimately resulted in the main tenets of the theory. SIT posits that our self-concept is made up of both a personal and social identity. Personal identity reflects the idiosyncratic features of the self whereas social identity corresponds to the aspect of self that is shaped by identification and affiliation – often, cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally – with social groups. As such, we categorize the world into ingroups (i.e., the social groups for which we identity and affiliate) and corresponding outgroups. Our self-concept is directly tied to our collective (i.e., social) identities and the status and general social per-

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ceptions of our ingroups. SIT lays out various “moves” that individuals and groups can make if their social groups are viewed negatively in society (e.g., individual identification with a more prestigious ingroup, attempting to shift the nature of comparison and evaluation among social groups, social competition such as civil rights movements). Because we strive for a positive distinctiveness and positive self-concept, we embrace beliefs and enact behaviors that position our group in the best light possible; thereby, enhancing our general self-concept. Further, ingroup favoritism and bias, outgroup attitudes, and intergroup conflict are all a reflection of our social categorization of ingroups and outgroups as well as the desire for positive self-concept. A natural extension and potential outcome of this social categorization and ingroup favoritism is a prejudicial social orientation toward outgroups often manifested in racist, nationalist, and xenophobic attitudes as well as other forms of prejudice. Whereas the dangers of these are clear, there are other biases that may seem more benign; yet are still problematic in facilitating positive intergroup encounters. For instance, intergroup anxiety (i.e., apprehension for interactions with specific outgroups or outgroups in general) has potential negative consequences (e.g., avoidance, subdued communication, ineffective communication; see Stephan 2014, for review). Research also points to an outgroup homogeneity effect (Mullen & Hu 1989), or a tendency to view ingroups as varied and dynamic whereas attributes and characteristics of outgroups are viewed as relatively stable (i.e., “they are all the same”). Although complexities of outgroup homogeneity have been put forward including the potential of ingroup homogeneity, early research indicated that we are less likely to make distinctions among outgroup members (Linville, Salovey & Fischer 1989) resulting in more stereotyping and less permeable intergroup boundaries. In short, social identity theory provides a positive self-concept through cognitive and motivational aspects in order to position the “group” as an integral part of one’s self-concept (for review, see Capozza & Brown 2000: 133–148). As such, our interactions with others are based, in part, on our identification with social collectives; thus, the moniker, intergroup. Although not always explicitly recognized, much of the work on intergroup relations addressed issues of language and communication as both affecting and reflecting (e.g., media portrayals) intergroup dynamics. Shifting from the more cognitive focus and recognizing the communication processes embedded in intergroup relations was reified in the study of intergroup communication.

3 Intergroup communication Building from the social identity traditions, researchers recognized that an individual’s self-concept is often constituted by a variety of social groups (e.g., race-eth-

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nicity, nationality, age, vocation) with a specific identity being salient in a given situation or context (Macrae, Bodenhausen & Milne 1995). As such, intergroup communication represents interactions or communicative contexts in which the salience of a social identity of one or more persons in the interaction influences the nature and perceptions of the communication (Giles & Maass in press; Harwood, Giles & Palomares 2005). This is in contrast to more interpersonal interactions in which social affiliations are not salient and communication is more reflective of the idiosyncratic features of the individuals. Contrary to some perceptions that tend to dichotomize the interpersonal and intergroup orientations, early theorizing on intergroup relations (Giles & Hewstone 1982) argued that even more of our personal interactions are infused with intergroup dynamics (see also Dragojevic & Giles, 2014; Gangi & Soliz in press). There are certainly more “pure” intergroup encounters where individuals have little knowledge of each other and, thus, rely on social categorization and cognitions in framing perceptions of self and other. Yet, in many interactions, both personal and social identity dynamics are at play. As an “interdisciplinary model of relational and identity processes in communicative interaction” (Coupland & Jaworski 1997: 241–242), communication accommodation theory (Giles in press) has been well positioned to address both interpersonal and intergroup dimensions of our interactions.

3.1 Communication accommodation theory As social identity theory emerged and developed, a concurrent development of communication accommodation theory (CAT) – originally speech accommodation theory – started to take shape (see McGlone & Giles 2011 for review). CAT’s origins are in the ethnolinguistic realm focusing on shifts in accent and dialects in interethnic and intercultural scenarios (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis 1973). Early iterations of the theory focused on two behaviors: convergence and divergence. Convergence represents behaviors in which an individual attempts to adapt speech to the needs and/or desires of a conversational partner. Conversely, divergence corresponds to communication aimed at amplifying distinctiveness and difference in communication modes (i.e., discursively moving away from the speech styles of another). In a multilingual intercultural context, an individual may enact a specific language to accommodate another (i.e., converge) and, thus, reduce uncertainty and anxiety in the encounter. On the other hand, an individual may speak a language or adopt a dialect that marks a desired distancing from another (i.e., divergence). Often in intercultural interactions, convergence is associated with more positive perceptions of the interactions and divergence characterized with more negative attributes. Further, there are a variety of motivations for convergent or divergent behaviors. For instance, a minority group member may converge to a more socially-acceptable and prestigious speech code or, in some cases, maintain or diverge from this speech code as a way to challenge social norms

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and expectations. These tenets of the theory have provided an important conceptual basis for early investigations into communication between ethnic, cultural, and national group members (e.g., Bourhis 1984; Giles, Bourhis & Taylor 1977) including theoretical expansions of CAT to understand language, communication, and ethnic group vitality (Giles & Johnson 1987) and intercultural interactions, in general (Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005). Given the origins of the theory, it is not surprising that a great deal of research has focused on the intercultural-ethnic context (Soliz & Giles 2014). However, elaboration of the theory and development of specific principles (Giles in press) emerged as CAT was applied to intergroup contexts beyond culture and ethnicity. Moving beyond the approximation strategies (convergence, divergence and maintenance of behavior) in speech, Coupland, Coupland, Giles, and Henwood (1988) introduced other dimensions that individuals for which individuals can attune their communication in interactions with others. For instance, one may purposely choose topics of conversation (i.e., discourse management) to discuss or avoid in an intergroup context to reach specific goals as evidenced in Ayoko, Hartel, and Callan’s (2002) study on intercultural working groups. Individuals may also enact behaviors and strategies aimed at interpretability of messages (e.g., talking slower and louder). Yet, invoking our earlier discussion of the role of stereotyped expectations, these strategies may not correspond to the needs and desires of others. This is perhaps best exemplified by the communication predicament of aging model (Ryan et al. 1986). According to this model, young adults rely on stereotyped expectations in encountering older adults and attune their communication based on these expectations. Often, these stereotypes position the older adults as communicatively and cognitively-impaired and, as such, the communication enacted by the younger adults is slower, perhaps louder, and with a more simplified speech structure. Although there are times when this style of speech is necessary, it is often not the case. Thus, this patronizing of communication has consequences for the older adults in terms of their own self-concept and opportunities to engage in more nuanced and person-centered communication with others. In addition to demonstrating the potential negative consequences of group-based cognitions (i.e., stereotypes) and the resulting communication, this model also exemplifies a major principle of CAT in that there may be – and often is – a discrepancy between motivation for our communication shifts and perceptions of behavior. In this intergenerational scenario, the younger adults are likely motivated by the desire to effectively communicate with the older adults (see Chapter 13, this volume, for more on aging and communication). Unfortunately, that enactment of the specific communication style is indicative of stereotypical knowledge about a group rather than personal-level knowledge of the individual. CAT, therefore, emphasizes that we must understand the interplay between motivations, actual communication, and perceptions of communication in intergroup encounters. Further, ineffective or problematic communication is not always a reflection of

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a hostile orientation toward the other; rather, it can be indicative of a stereotyped misattributions and expectations. The development of CAT includes other sociolinguistic encoding strategies to include multiple verbal (e.g., language, pitch, tempo) and nonverbal behaviors. Further, individuals can attune their communication on a variety of dimensions representing general accommodative or nonaccommodative (i.e., failing to attune to the desire or needs of others) stances. In addition to ethnicity-culture and intergenerational interactions as well as contexts mentioned in the introduction of this chapter (i.e., police-civilian, health care), CAT has been applied to a multitude of other intergroup contexts (see Palomares et al., in press, for review) such as – but not limited to – communication between genders, interfaith relations, inter and intragroup dynamics related to sexual identity, interability interaction, and social identity dynamics in computer-mediated contexts Palomares et al. (in press) emphasize four “theoretical applications” of CAT specific to an intergroup context: a) a motivation for accommodation is to facilitate effective communication in intercultural and intergroup contexts; b) individuals communicatively converge or diverge from others with the goal of increasing or decreasing social distance and inclusion in or desired exclusion from social groups; c) stereotypes and communication schemas play an important role in shaping – often inaccurately – our interactions as we often rely on group-based cognitions; and d) communication can “activate” a specific identity (e.g., ethnicity, gender) for one or both individuals in the interaction that perhaps was not salient on the onset of the interaction. Further, in the intergroup process model of CAT, they position intergroup and interpersonal history as well as societal-cultural norms and values as important contextual considerations for understanding the motivations, behaviors, perceptions, and outcomes of intergroup interactions. Whereas CAT primarily focuses on what happens during interactions, intergroup scholarship has also focused on the potential short and long-term consequences and outcomes of intergroup interactions. Therefore, we next turn our attention to the body of work on intergroup contact.

4 Intergroup contact An important goal of intercultural and intergroup interactions is to reduce any biases or prejudicial views toward outgroup members. Beginning after World War II (Williams 1947), researchers in social psychology focused on the reduction of prejudicial views through the study of intergroup contact. Gordon Allport (1954) proposed four interaction conditions that facilitate positive intergroup contact, which have the potential to reduce prejudice between groups. These conditions proved to be some of the most influential research areas of social psychology, thus promoting more elaboration and advances in this area. This section details All-

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port’s conditions, presents extensions to facilitating positive intergroup contact, and then discusses how group salience and other theoretical models help unpack and detail intergroup contact and reduction of prejudicial views.

4.1 Allport’s facilitating conditions Allport (1954) argued that positive intergroup contact could reduce negative and prejudicial views between disparate groups, both on the individual level and the group level. That is, positive contact between one majority group member and a minority group member should promote less negative or stereotypical assessments toward the other group member and in turn those assessments should map onto the group at large. Allport proposed positive intergroup contact when specific conditions of the intergroup meeting are met: a) equal status, b) common goals, c) intergroup cooperation, and d) authoritative support. First, equal status refers to group members having and being perceived as possessing similar backgrounds in order to minimize any group member having an obvious advantage over the other. Second, during intergroup contact group members should have common goals so that members are motivated to complete a common purpose. An example of common goals is to facilitate a game where group members are encouraged to work together to achieve a goal. In line with common goals is intergroup cooperation, which refers to interdependency in intergroup competition. Group members should depend on each other in order for the common goal to be attained. The fourth condition of Allport’s contact hypothesis is support of the authorities or law. There is considerable research and support for Allport’s contact hypothesis. Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) extensive meta-analysis of intergroup contact research revealed broad support for the reduction of prejudicial attitudes regarding targeted outgroup members and to the targeted outgroup. Further, Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) analyzed how the three most studied mediators of intergroup contact (knowledge of the outgroup, anxiety about contact, and empathy) influenced levels of prejudicial attitudes. Meta-analytical results suggests that anxiety about intergroup contact is one of the strongest mediators in producing positive outgroup attitudes, particularly when intergroup encounters are repeated (see Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter, Lickel & Kowai-Bell 2001). Contrary to this, Swart, Hewstone, Christ, and Voci (2011) found empathy to be the strongest mediator in producing less prejudicial views in the context of interracial student interactions. Although Allport’s conditions produced favorable outcomes, Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) concluded that not all of Allport’s conditions needed to be in place for improved attitudes to occur. Rather, each condition in the contact hypothesis serves as a facilitator in improvement of positive contact outcomes (see Pettigrew 1998 for mechanisms of attitudinal change from contact).

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4.2 Extensions to Allport’s conditions There has been considerable attention to improving intergroup contact situations and thus several extensions and areas of intergroup contact have been thoroughly addressed. We will discuss these extensions and areas in turn.

4.2.1 Group salience One concern in achieving improved outgroup attitudes is to ensure that these attitudes generalize to the larger group as a whole. Drawing out of Tajfel’s (1978) interpersonal-intergroup continuum and Wilder’s (1984) study on category-based encounters, Hewstone and Brown (1986) argued that intergroup contact should make a concerted effort toward creating typical group representations of both the ingroup and outgroup. They argued that in ensuring the representativeness of group members, that any altered attitudes should carry on into the general group at large, thus rendering a more “intergroup” contact situation (Brown & Hewstone 2005). Group salience should be maintained throughout intergroup contact or else any changed attitudes about outgroup members could be seen as superficial. Wolkso, Park, Judd, and Bachelor (2003) further argued that in order for positive evaluations of an outgroup member to be meaningful, that the group member needs not only to disconfirm the stereotype but also be seen as part of the group (i.e., group salience needs to be intact). Thus, introducing both stereotype confirming and disconfirming information about both groups is critical in evaluating attitudinal change. Brown and Hewstone generally concluded that more group salience in intergroup contact produced more favorable outgroup attitudes (see also Brown, Eller, Leeds & Stace 2007; Brown, Vivian & Hewstone 1999) when immediate interactions were also positive. Other extensions to Allport’s contact hypothesis have focused more on the interpersonal characteristics of the contact situation.

4.2.2 Friendship potential Pettigrew (1997) suggested that Allport’s four guiding conditions of optimal intergroup contact could be better implored through intergroup friendship. In a reformulation of intergroup contact theory, Pettigrew (1998: 76) proposed that a fifth condition of the contact hypothesis to include potential for group members to become friends. Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) meta-analysis looked at related studies of intergroup contact involving friendships and revealed larger effects than contact situations without outgroup friendships. A more recent meta-analysis on just crossgroup friendships in intergroup encounters revealed further support for greater prejudicial attitudes reduction and a general improvement in outgroup attitudes (Davies, Tropp, Aron, Pettigrew & Wright 2011). This was particularly true when a

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cross-group friend self-disclosed. Friendships can also evoke more lasting effects on attitudinal changes of the general group. For example, Levin, Laar, and Sidanius (2003) uncovered longitudinal effects of improved outgroup attitudes in college students who had intergroup friendships. Likewise, those students who had more ingroup friendships reported more negative outgroup attitudes. In another longitudinal study of college students’ intergroup friendships over four years, Bohmerht and DeMaris (2014) found that individuals with more interracial friendships reported more positive attitudes about minority groups, particularly for women. Pettigrew developed a model that included intergroup contact to have friendship potential. Rather than just making a list of conditions for optimal intergroup contact, Pettigrew (1998) proposed a longitudinal model in order to include friendship potential between ingroup and outgroup members. The model includes group members meeting in a decatogorized environment where group members reduce anxiety by communicating as persons rather than as group members. This initial contact step can lead to more liking between group members (i.e., friendships) and is also absent of generalization to any group. The second stage is what Pettigrew called salient categorization. This stage introduces intergroup contact by making group salience prominent between group members, which extends attitudinal changes at the intergroup or targeted group level. The last stage is recategorization of group members so that any improved attitudes are transferred to the larger group as a whole. Recategorization is by and large the ultimate goal for optimal intergroup contact because less prejudicial views are mapped onto group members not involved in the initial contact situation. Pettigrew’s longitudinal model emphasizes a sequential process whereby each stage could work as an isolated juncture, but ideally work together to maximize improved outgroup attitudes (see Chapter 21, this volume, for more on intercultural friendship).

4.2.3 Common ingroup identity model Differentiating from Hewstone and Brown’s (1986) group salience approach and Pettigrew’s (1998) longitudinal model, the common ingroup identity model (Gaertner & Dovidio 2000) suggests that creating a common ingroup identity instead of salient group memberships could reduce prejudicial attitudes. The overarching idea is to blend two distinct groups into one group where everyone is an ingroup member (Gaertner et al. 2000). Gaertner and Dovidio review the success of the common ingroup identity in experimental settings. For example, one study revealed that intergroup bias was lower when two groups were made to feel part of one group (i.e., possess a common ingroup identity) rather than two groups with distinct ingroup and outgroup identities (Gaertner, Mann, Dovidio, Murrell & Pomare 1990). However, Brown and Hewstone (2005) point out that a weakness in the

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common ingroup identity model is its emphasis on artificial or experimental group labels rather than real social identities such as in intercultural interactions. More research is attempting to place the common ingroup identity model in intercultural settings. Imamura and Zhang (2014) investigated Americans’ willingness to communicate with a Chinese student by utilizing the common ingroup identity model to minimize group affiliations in one condition and maximize group differences in the other condition. Results revealed that Americans were more willing to communicate with Chinese students who assimilated to American culture, thus rendering a common ingroup identity. Minimizing group affiliations and forming a shared ingroup identity has potential to reduce intergroup anxiety and reduce racist and prejudicial views (Gaertner & Dovidio 2005). Research also supports the benefits of a shared identity to transcend group differences in intimate contexts such as family (Soliz & Harwood 2006; Soliz, Thorson & Rittenour 2009).

4.2.4 Communication and intergroup contact Early inquiries into intergroup contact tended to conceptualize communication as a general positive or negative-valenced feature of the interaction. Over time, however, research began to consider some of the nuances of communication in these interactions. For instance, Tam, Hewstone, Harwood, Voci and Kenworthy (2006) investigated the role of self-disclosure in implicit and explicit attitudinal outcomes of intergroup contact. Guided, in part, by communication accommodation theory, Harwood et al. (2005) demonstrated that accommodation and perspective taking played important mediating roles in positive outcomes from intergroup contact. Building on this, Soliz and Harwood (2006) demonstrated that (non)accommodative communication directly and indirectly (via group salience) predict outcomes from intergroup contact. In short, communication theorists have much to offer in understanding the communicative dynamics of intergroup contact.

4.2.5 Other perspectives As Allport’s (1954) contact conditions are rather influential to the study of prejudice and intergroup contact, there are several more perspectives and extensions to the contact hypothesis. One notable approach to intergroup contact is Brewer and Miller’s (1984) decategorization model, which attends to increasing the interpersonal mode of communicating and thinking. In doing so, group members focus on less ingroup homogeneity and more toward seeing ingroup and outgroup members as unique individuals. One way to achieve this in experimental settings is to have group members focus on personal tasks rather than competitive goals. Whereas most intergroup contact approaches involve direct contact with outgroup members, another extension to Allport’s contact hypothesis attends to indi-

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rect contact, otherwise known as extended contact. Wright, Aron, McLaughlin, and Ropp (1997) presented the extended contact hypothesis to explain how an ingroup member’s knowledge of an outgroup member through a friend can impact levels of prejudicial attitudes. Extended contact can accumulate from observations and knowledge of intergroup contact situations and requires no direct contact with an outgroup member.

5 Intergroup contact and relations in the digital age The potential for intergroup relations to be improved through communication on the internet is vast and continues to emerge as one of the most pervasive ways to research and promote optimal intergroup contact (Amichai-Hamburger & McKenna 2006; Walther 2009). Communicating via digital channels (i.e., relational media) has become an ubiquitous feature of everyday communication. The affordances of these media have introduced new and exciting approaches for studying and understanding intergroup relations in the digital age. In this section we discuss three areas of research on intergroup relations and contact in a digital context and also discuss the benefits and drawbacks to online intergroup relations.

5.1 Identity and relational media One’s social and personal identity is afforded numerous ways of being constructed and presented through and on relational media. One major affordance is the degree of anonymity that is provided to the user. On many platforms, individuals can maintain visual anonymity as well as hide personal information. For example, the website reddit does not allow for users to upload user pictures and also doesn’t encourage disclosing personal information (e.g., physical location, real name). Anonymity provides users with a heightened ability to control what they disclose to others. Some theoretical approaches about computer-mediated communication propose that this ability to control one’s self-presentation can promote idealized versions of selves (Walther 1996). Baym (2015) sees relational media as a tool for flexible and multiple identities. An individual’s multiple selves can be managed and parceled through the usage of multiple profiles, usernames, and platforms. These identities have flexibility because of the ability to edit, delete, and craft idealized selves (Walther 1996). Whether these identities represent social versus personal identities has been thoroughly researched remains a question when it comes to intergroup relations. The social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) (Postmes, Spears & Lea 1998; Reicher, Spears & Postmes 1995) proposes that because of reduced cues

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in online spaces, most online communication is based on a social identity. The outcome of anonymity results in depersonalization with more emphasis on category-based social identities. More anonymity in place will result in greater group salience and thus more group prototypical communication. Thus, the SIDE model explains the presence of group identities in digital spaces and suggests that a majority of online communication is based on group norms. Research looking at group prototypal behavior in anonymous spaces, both offline and online, has generally supported depersonalization (see Postmes, Spears & Lea 1998). However, Wang and Shen (2011) argued that different cultures might arrive at group conformity on anonymous online platforms through personalization instead of depersonalization, as is the case in East Asian cultures. Thus, one weakness of the SIDE perspective is that it derives many of its results from zero-history groups and not from larger social categories such as national and ethnic identities. The SIDE model focuses more on how reduced visual and individuating information promotes group-based communication. In the interest of the current chapter, a more compelling question is, “How do relational media influence intergroup contact?”

5.2 Intergroup contact in the digital age The previous section explained how relational media promotes the creation of idealized selves and in many cases bolsters the presence of social identities. These facets have positive implications for optimal intergroup contact because of technology’s ability to provide greater control of the self, ability to access similar others, and because of the internet’s ability to create fun and entertaining environments (Amichai-Hamburger, Haslet & Shani-Sherman 2015). According to these scholars, the internet provides more positive aspects for intergroup contact than traditional face-to-face settings. Other researchers have argued that online intergroup contact is also more realistic because of society’s continued emergence and dependence on technology (White, Harvey & Abu-Rayya 2015). Thus, researchers have focused on reformulating Allport’s contact hypothesis by integrating how technology fosters more opportunity for improved intergroup relations. Amichai-Hamburger and McKenna (2006) proposed that Allport’s (1954) facilitating conditions are better realized through the internet. First, the existence of equal status among group members is easily managed through anonymity and other features that allow individuals to remove or hide any status differences (e.g., avatars). Amichai-Hamburger and McKenna also posit that working toward a shared goal via online modes is just as effective as meeting those goals in offline settings. In regards to institutional support, communicating in digital spaces can be safer, hence a more supportive climate, because physical contact is not necessary. Moreover, Amichai-Hamburger and McKenna strongly emphasize the decrease in intergroup anxiety when communicating through the internet. Reducing anxiety between ingroup and outgroup members is one of the most important elements in

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achieving optimal intergroup contact and improving outgroup attitudes (Pettigrew & Tropp 2008). Since geographic space and physical features can become somewhat obsolete in computer-mediated spaces, individuals should feel less anxiety and feel more as group members in an online environment compared to an offline counterpart. Amichai-Hamburger and Furham (2007) contend that this affordance promotes more generalization of changed attitudes toward the larger outgroup instead of the targeted group. White and Abu-Rayya (2012) propose that not only are Allport’s conditions better carried out through internet channels but that Gaertner and Dovidio’s (2000) recategorization of ingroup identities can be managed through what they call electronic or e-contact. This type of contact is synchronous text-based chat between group members with visual anonymity controlled. White and Abu-Rayya position e-contact as a new paradigm for measuring changes in prejudicial attitudes, intergroup anxiety, and outgroup knowledge. Their argument is that e-contact lends insight into the communication of the self and the potential for friendship formation. In their study on e-contact, White and Abu-Rayya created an online chat system where students from Muslim and Christian backgrounds communicated at multiple time points in a semester, completed pre and post-test measures, and utilized recategorization (i.e., dual identity approach) to get group members to foster a common ingroup identity in order to test whether e-contact impacted prejudicial attitudes, intergroup anxiety, and outgroup knowledge. Results revealed that individuals with more outgroup friendships showed less intergroup bias and increased outgroup knowledge. This suggests that e-contact provided optimal conditions for participants to communicate as friends in the beginning of the experiment. However, prejudicial attitudes and longitudinal effects on outgroup knowledge were not significant. Ultimately, e-contact is a promising strategy in achieving intergroup harmony (White, Harvey & Abu-Rayya 2015). Technology can also provide a graded approach to optimal intergroup contact. Amichai-Hamburger and McKenna (2006) set forth a step-by-step guide in how groups can gradually add richness to their communication in order to warm up to face-to-face interaction. A first step could be asynchronous communication and the next step could add pictures, audio, and synchrony. Each step adds richness until the groups are able to meet face-to-face. White, Harvey, and Abu-Rayya (2015) also advocate for multiple modes of contact with e-contact being a step toward direct contact with outgroup members. In this sense, technology serves as a preparation for face-to-face contact with e-contact acting as a bridge between indirect and direct communication. Unfortunately, the graded approach to optimal intergroup contact has seen little attention in intergroup contact research.

5.3 Contact space Harwood (2010) combined intergroup contact research in face-to-face, indirect, and mediated settings in order to derive the contact space framework. In this frame-

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work Harwood positions two dimensions to explain the effectiveness of different types of contact space. The two dimensions are: a) the involvement of the self in the contact situation, and b) the richness of the self-outgroup experience. For example, an individual who imagines face-to-face contact with an outgroup member would have high involvement of the self but have indirect contact with the outgroup member, thus rendering low richness of the self-outgroup experience. Harwood contends that richness of the self and the outgroup member experience can predict probable mediators and moderators of intergroup contact. Wertley (2014) also used the contact space framework in a study to compare different modes of intergroup communicating on prejudicial attitudes toward immigrants. The different approaches included playing a video as an immigrant, watching a video with a refugee telling one’s story, and reading an online blog regarding immigration. Wertley compared these modes in order to test whether high involvement of self and self-outgroup experience would produce higher effects in prejudicial attitudes reduction across conditions. Results revealed change in prejudicial attitudes in the text and video conditions over playing the video game. In this study, digital media prove to be facilitating factors in improving outgroup attitudes.

5.4 Benefits and drawbacks to online intergroup relations There are many benefits to analyzing and integrating intergroup contact in a digital context. One prevailing benefit is the development and continued emergence of new technology in everyday communication (Rainie & Wellman 2012). Technology can foster new forms of intergroup contact such as online video games (Wertley 2014; Williams, Yee & Caplan 2008) as well as serve as a mechanism for future face-to-face contact (Amichai-Hamburger & McKenna 2006; White, Harvey & AbuRayya 2015). Amichai-Hamburger, Haslet, and Shani-Sherman (2015), for example, defer to how intergroup contact can be digitally managed through structured and unstructured contact. Cost and feasibility are also benefits to using the internet for intergroup contact; technological costs are decreasing and easier ways of using technology are increasing because of competition between companies. As discussed above, many signs point to the advantage of using technology for improving intergroup relations. However, there are many drawbacks to these efforts as well. Arguably the biggest drawback to implementing optimal intergroup relations in the digital age is the digital divide, which spans the division of access to technology as well as educational and economical differences between groups. In an intergroup contact situation, access to and knowledge about technology is a critical aspect to consider. In the United States alone, the largest digital divide is parceled by education and generational differences when measuring attitudes toward technology (Graham 2009; Van Volkom, Stapley & Amaturo 2014). From a slightly different vantage point, Brake (2014) suggested that individuals who create online content create more privileged and specialized groups. Clearly, online content is not created equal toward multiple groups.

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6 Conclusion The study of intergroup communication has similar goals and underpinnings as the study of intercultural communication. Whether one characterizes these traditions as close, interdisciplinary cousins or positions culture as one of many social identities at play in our interactions, the emphasis is on attending to the role and influence of our social collectives in understanding human relations. Whereas the intergroup tradition is clearly aligned with social identity theory and self-categorization theory, other important theoretical lines such as uncertainty identity theory (Hogg 2012) and optimal distinctiveness theory (Pickett & Leonardelli 2006) should continue to be considered in our elaborations and extensions of intergroup theorizing. Further, while communication accommodation theory is highlighted in this chapter, there are certainly other communication theories (see Gudykunst, 2005 for review) that can inform intergroup communication research, e.g., communication theory of identity (Hecht, Warren, Jung & Krieger, 2005) and co-cultural theory (Orbe 1997). Intergroup interactions, whether in mediated or face-to-face realms, are an inherent part of everyday interactions and, ideally, our inquiries into intergroup relations serve to promote a world where differences are acknowledged, mitigated, and transformed. Doing so requires a conceptual and theoretical framework that attends to the manner in which our social collectives manifest in our personal, dyadic, and collective behaviors. We believe the intergroup communication perspective provides this framework and, ultimately, will assist scholars in translating research into practice with the goal of a more pluralistic understanding of various groups and cultures.

Further Readings Brown, Rupert & Sam Gaertner (eds.). 2003. Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Intergroup processes. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Hogg, Michael & Dominic Abrams (eds.). 2001. Intergroup relations: Essential readings. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis. Giles, Howard, Scott Reid & Jake Harwood (eds.). 2010. The dynamics of intergroup communication. New York: Peter Lang.

7 References Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub. Amichai-Hamburger, Yair & Adrian Furnham. 2007. The positive net. Computers in Human Behavior 23. 1033–1045.

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Amichai-Hamburger, Yair, Béatrice S. Hasler & Tal Shani-Sherman. 2015. Structured and unstructured intergroup contact in the digital age. Computers in Human Behavior 52. 515– 522. Amichai-Hamburger, Yair & Katelyn McKenna. 2006. The contact hypothesis reconsidered: Interacting via the internet. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11. 825–843. Ayoko, Oluermi B., Charmine E. J. Härtel & Victor J. Callan. 2002. Resolving the puzzle of productive and destructive conflict in culturally heterogeneous workgroups: A communication accommodation theory approach. The International Journal of Conflict Management 13(2). 165–195. Baym, Nancy K. 2015. Personal connections in the digital age, 2 nd edn. Cambridge: Polity. Blascovich, Jim, Wendy B. Mendes, Sarah B. Hunter, Brian Lickel & Neneh Kowai-Bell. 2001. Perceiver threat in social interactions with stigmatized others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80(2). 253–267. Bohmert, Miram N. & Alfred DeMaris. 2014. Interracial friendship and the trajectory of prominority attitudes: Assessing intergroup contact theory. Group Processes Intergroup Relations 18(2). 225–240. Bourhis, Richard Y. 1984. Cross-cultural communication in Montreal: Two field studies since Bill 101. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 46. 33–47. Brake, David R. 2014. Are we all online content creators now? Web 2.0 and digital divides. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19(3). 591–609. Brewer, Marilynn B. & Norman Miller. 1984. Beyond the contact hypothesis: Theoretical perspectives on desegregation. In Norman Miller & Marliynn B. Brewer (eds.), Groups in contact: The psychology of desegregation, 281–302. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Brown, Rupert, Anja Eller, Sarah Leeds & Kim Stace. 2007. Intergroup contact and intergroup attitudes: A longitudinal study. European Journal of Social Psychology 37(4). 692–703. Brown, Rupert & Miles Hewstone. 2005. An integrative theory of intergroup contact. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 37. 255–343. Brown, Rupert, James Vivian & Miles Hewstone. 1999. Changing attitudes through intergroup contact: The effects of group membership salience. European Journal of Social Psychology 29(5–6). 741–764. Capozza, Dora & Rupert Brown (eds.). 2000. Social identity processes: Trends in theory and research. London: Sage. Choi, Charles & Howard Giles. 2012. Intergroup messages in policing the community. In Howard Giles (ed.), The handbook of intergroup communication, 264–277. New York, NY: Routledge. Coupland, Justine, Nikolas Coupland, Howard Giles & Karen Henwood. 1988. Accommodating the elderly: Invoking and extending a theory. Language in Society 17(1). 1–41. Coupland, Nikolas & Adam Jaworski. 1997. Relevance, accommodation, and conversation. Modeling the social dimension of communication. Multilingua 16(2–3). 235–258. Davies, Kristin, Linda R. Tropp, Arthur Aron, Thomas F. Pettigrew & Stephen C. Wright. 2011. Cross-group friendships and intergroup attitudes: A meta-analytic review. Personality and Social Psychology Review 15(4). 332–351. Dragojevic, Marko & Howard Giles. 2014. Language and interpersonal communication: Their intergroup dynamics. In Charles R. Berger (ed.), Handbook of interpersonal communication, 29–51. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. Gaertner, Samuel L. & John. F. Dovidio. 2000. Reducing intergroup bias: The common ingroup identity model. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Gaertner, Samuel. L. & John F. Dovidio. 2005. Understanding and addressing contemporary racism: From aversive racism to the common ingroup identity model. Journal of Social Issues 61(3). 615–639. Gaertner, Samuel L., John F. Dovidio, Jason A. Nier, Brenda S. Banker, Christine M. Ward, Melissa Houlette & Stephenie Loux. 2000. The common ingroup identity model for reducing

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Young Yun Kim

18 Interethnic communication: An interdisciplinary overview Abstract: Issues pertaining to ethnicity and interethnic relations have been investigated extensively and continuously since the early 20th century. This chapter presents a synoptic overview of the extant literature to identify the core theoretical and research activities across social science disciplines, so as to provide a conceptual map of the broad and complex domain of interethnic communication as an interdisciplinary field of study. Focusing on the everyday associative and dissociative communication behaviors at the grassroots level, the author employs the multidimensional and multifaceted model in Kim’s (2005, 2009) Contextual Theory of Interethnic Communication as the organizing framework for the present overview. A wide range of salient issues, concepts, theories, and related research findings across disciplinary lines of inquiry are examined according to the eight key factors of the three contextual layers identified in Kim’s model as influencing interethnic communication behavior: 1. the communicator (identity inclusivity/exclusivity and identity security/insecurity); 2. the situation (ethnic proximity/distance, shared/ separate goal structure, and personal network integration); and 3. the environment (institutional equity/inequity, relative ingroup strength, and environmental stress). The chapter ends with a call for a greater emphasis in future studies on linking interethnic behavior and contextual factors and on integrating normative theorytesting research and descriptive-interpretive research. Keywords: ethnicity, ethnic identity, ethnic identification, interethnic conflict, interethnic cooperation, interethnic relationship

1 Introduction We human beings are social animals with a “tribal instinct” (Van Vugt & Park 2010). Even as the forces of globalization diminish traditional physical and social boundaries, the desire for rootedness and belonging continues to drive the common tendency to define and differentiate oneself from others. With this basic human condition, ethnicity serves as a powerful social and political force shaping how one sees oneself and each other and defining “us” and “them”. As amply documented in the daily news headlines from around the world, the seemingly innocent banner of ethnic identity is often used as a source of power, symbolic or real, galvanizing people into an "us-against-them" posturing, creating strain and conflict in society. DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-018

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Reflecting the history of immigration and ethnic diversity in the United States throughout the 20th century, and more recently in European countries and beyond, social scientists have dedicated a substantial amount of attention to issues of ethnicity and interethnic relations (e.g., Schuetz 1944; Simmel 1908/1950; Stonequist 1937). Among the most frequent research foci are psychological and behavioral patterns of individuals, including cognitive factors such as interethnic perception, beliefs, knowledge/ignorance, stereotyping, and attribution errors (e.g., Detweiler 1986), affective-motivational-attitudinal tendencies such as ethnic tolerance, prejudice, ethnocentrism, and racism (e.g., Stephan & Stephan 2000), and the use of derogatory ethnic labels and other forms of discriminatory discourse (e.g., Smitherman-Donaldson & Van Dijk 1988). Beyond such individual-level research foci are interpersonal and organizational factors and their influences on one or more psychological tendencies. Prominent among them are goal interdependence (e.g., Johnson, Johnson & Maruyama 1984) and cooperative or competitive relationship (e.g., Worchel 1986). Other studies have focused on macro-level issues such as dominant or non-dominant group status in society (e.g., Nakayama & Martin 1998) and threat from an outgroup directed against an ingroup caused by terrorist activities (e.g., Das, Bushman, Bezemer, Kerkhof & Vermeulen 2009). Interethnic communication is a relatively new area of study within the discipline of communication. It emerged in the 1980s as a sub-domain of intercultural communication study, with the first anthology published in 1986 featuring some of its early works (Kim 1986a). Consistent with the focal research interest among intercultural communication scholars, almost all of the research activities in the area of interethnic communication addressed issues concerning micro-level interactions between individuals of differing ethnic backgrounds within a society. Closely paralleling psychological and social psychological studies on interethnic relations, and interpersonal communication studies within the discipline of communication, primary research issues addressed by communication scholars include ethnic stereotypes (e.g., McNabb 1986) and prejudice (e.g., Hecht 1998), ethnic conflict communication style (Kochman 1986; Ting-Toomey 1986), and interethnic uncertainty reduction (Gudykunst 1986). The extensive academic inquiry across multiple social science disciplines has produced a literature pertinent to interethnic communication that is remarkably wide-ranging. Even a casual reading of the literature dealing with issues of ethnicity and interethnic relations leaves one with little doubt that the field is vast, varied, and largely segmented along the disciplinary lines. Although the field today offers a broad array of theoretical and empirical insights into interethnic communication, such insights are largely limited to variables within a single level of analysis (e.g., the individual level), making it difficult to draw from them a clear understanding of the interrelationships between and among various behavioral tendencies and micro- and macro-level contextual factors.

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This chapter presents a synoptic overview of the extant literature. By weaving together key issues, concepts, theories, and related research studies salient across social science disciplines, the author seeks to present a comprehensive perspective on interethnic communication by bringing together the largely separate disciplinary lines of inquiry and, thereby, “mapping” the domain of interethnic communication as an interdisciplinary field of study. In so doing, the focus of attention is trained on the micro-level phenomenon of direct contact and communication activities involving individuals of dissimilar ethnic backgrounds.

1.1 Organizing framework Guiding the present effort to bring together many of the salient concepts pertaining to interethnic communication into a single frame is the multidimensional-multifaceted model proposed in Kim’s (2005, 2009) Contextual Theory of Interethnic Communication. Grounded in an open-systems perspective, this theory was developed with the specific purpose of integrating a wide range of concepts, issues, and theories across social science disciplines, so as to provide a single theoretical framework with which to explain an individual’s communication behavior. Such an interdisciplinary integration was made possible by employing constructs that were broader and more general than the various existing concepts and articulating their theoretical interrelationships based on logic and empirical evidence. With its focus on the behaviors of individual communicators in interethnic encounters, Kim’s theory integrates the full spectrum of communication behaviors into a single continuum ranging from the most associative (cooperative and friendly) to the most dissociative (aggressive and hostile). The three levels of the communication context are placed in a hierarchical arrangement, with the communicator at the center, the immediate interaction situation at the next level, and the larger environment at the macro-level. The theory, then, posits eight theorems specifying the interrelationships between the associative-dissociative behavior and each of the eight contextual factors: two factors of the communicator (identity inclusivity/ exclusivity and identity security/insecurity), three factors of the situation (ethnic proximity/distance, shared/separate goal structure, and personal network integration), and three factors of the environment (institutional equity/inequity, relative ingroup strength, and environmental stress). Together, the behavior and the context are conceived in this theory as co-constituting the basic interethnic communication system, operating simultaneously in a dynamic interplay, each affecting the other in a back-and-forth, or circular stimulus-and-response. Interethnic communication is, thus, treated not as a specific analytic unit, but as the entirety of an event in which the behavior and the context are taken together into a theoretical fusion, emphasizing the unitary nature of psychological and social processes. In Bateson's (1972: 402) words, “… without context, there is no communication”.

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Fig. 18.1: The contextual model of interethnic communication. From “Association and Dissociation” A Contextual Theory of Interethnic Communication,” by Young Yun Kim, 2005. In W. Gudykunst (ed.), Theorizing about Intercultural Communication, p. 329. © Copyright 2005 by Y. Y. Kim.

1.2 Definitions of key terms The concept, ethnicity, has been used with varying meanings across social sciences. As such, there is no authoritative definition that is universally accepted. Most scholars in anthropology and sociology approach ethnicity-related issues as grouplevel phenomena. Cultural anthropologists conceive ethnicity as a kind of temporal continuity or common tradition linking its members to a common future (Nash 1989), reflected in the communal life patterns associated with language, behavior, norms, beliefs, myths, and values, as well as the forms and practices of social institutions. In sociological research, the complex conceptual entity of ethnicity has been investigated in terms of a social category defined by membership that is differentiated from other groups by a combination of objective characteristics, qualities, or conditions such as national origin or homeland, language or dialect, religious faith or faiths, and race-related physical features. This is the way, for instance, sociologists (e.g., Glazer & Moynihan 1963, 1975; Platt 2011) have investigated “ethnic stratification” and ethnic group inequalities in the United States. Social psychological studies, on the other hand, have approached ethnicity mostly in terms of the subjective identity orientation of an individual vis-a-vis his or her ethnic origin or ethnic group (Zagefka 2009). Terms such as ethnic identity,

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ethnolinguistic identity, or ethnic identification have been exchangeably used to replace ethnicity per se in most social psychological studies of intergroup behavior. The Realistic Conflict Theory (Sherif 1966: 12), for example, postulates that intergroup behavior occurs “whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identification”. All three conceptions (anthropological, sociological, and psychological) of ethnicity are reflected in the present examination of the literature. Regardless of how individual investigators have used the term, ethnicity, in their respective works, the focal phenomenon of interethnic communication is regarded as the micro-level phenomenon and defined in terms of the individual communicator’s point of view as the communication event whenever at least one of the communicators orients himself/herself toward the interacting partner(s) in terms of ethnicity, ethnic group membership, and/or ingroup identification. This conception of interethnic communication is consistent with the view on “intergroup communication” provided by Dragojevic and Giles (2014: 30) as a communication event that occurs when “either person in a social interaction defines self or other in terms of their social identity”.

2 Communication behavior A variety of interethnic communication behaviors has been investigated, largely in psychological studies. Included in this behavior spectrum are not only overtly observable verbal and nonverbal encoding activities, but also intrapersonal decoding activities taking place within the person that are hidden from other communicators. By and large, researchers investigating communication behaviors have tended to focus either on associative behavior or on dissociative behavior.

2.1 Concepts related to associative/dissociative behavior A number of concepts employed in the literature indicate associative decoding behaviors. Among the most prominent ones are cognitive differentiation (Brewer & Miller 1988), multiple categorization (Prati, Crisp, Meleady & Rubini 2016), decategorization (e.g., Billig 1987), individuation (e.g., Kim 2005), recategorization (Dovidio, Gaertner, Shnabel, Saguy & Johnson 2010), and wide categorization (Detweiler 1986). Others have employed more general concepts such as openness (e.g., Broome 2015), and mindfulness (Langer 1989) to describe the patterns of perception and thought that foster association in the form of a “dialogue” with a finer cognitive discrimination and more accurate and thoughtful ways of interpreting messages about and from out-group members.

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Additional concepts indicating associative encoding behaviors include the notion of message complexity (Applegate & Sypher 1988) that generally requires speakers to recognize another person's perspectives and is reflected in person-centered messages that contain a quality responsiveness and concern for relational cohesion, and adaptation of one’s nonverbal behaviors to foster synchrony (Kim 2012, 2015) or alignment talk (Hopper 1986) signifying the quality of interactional cohesion and mutuality. The concepts indicating interethnic associative decoding and encoding behaviors such as the ones described above have been counterbalanced by many other concepts indicating various dissociative behaviors. One of the most salient concepts pertain to dissociative decoding is the categorization of information about or from out-group members, a concept referring to the strong human tendency to simplify cognitive representations of the social world by placing persons in discrete social categories. In interethnic communication situations, this decoding pattern underlies the tendency to perceive outgroup members as "undifferentiated items in a unified social category" and not as individuals (Turner 1982: 28). Once such categories have been defined and labeled, processes of stereotyping and category accentuation are set into motion (Detweiler 1986). Distinction is made between ingroups (“us”) and outgroups (“them”) leading to the tendency to accentuate differences or de-accentuate similarities (Oddou & Mendenhal 1984) as well as the tendency of depersonalization or de-individuation (Tajfel 1970). Such categorical cognitive behavior constrains interethnic communication as it creates self-fulfilling prophecies, prompting a person to somehow see behavior that confirms his or her expectations even when it is absent, which, in turn, serves as the cognitive basis for ethnic prejudice (Stephan & Stephan 2000). Inaccurate attributions have been further identified as dissociative decoding behaviors. Research has shown the common tendency to underestimate the importance of situational causes in making inferences about others' negative behavior, an effect labeled the fundamental attribution error (Ross 1977). The fundamental attribution error becomes the ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew 1979) when this involves a positive bias toward one's group and a negative bias toward outgroup members. Relatedly, Hopper (1986) employs the term, Shiboleth schema, based on a biblical tale to illustrate prejudicial listening, a tendency to interpret dialectic differences as being defective and an object of hostility and discrimination. To these concepts pertaining to dissociative decoding behaviors, Volkan (1992) adds yet another concept, projection, a psychological response that leads to ego-defensive reactions such as feelings of inferiority or superiority, avoidance, suspicion, and paranoia. Research has demonstrated that these elements of dissociative decoding behavior are linked to a number of overt encoding behaviors. Among the most salient dissociative verbal behavior is prejudiced talk (e.g., Van Dijk 1987) with varying degrees of emotional intensity and explicitness, from the subtle expressions such

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as “you people” to more blatant uses of derogatory words, or ethnophaulism (Ehrlich 1973). Similar observations have been made regarding a wide range of nonverbal expressions of communicative distance (Lukens 1979), from tense voice tone, physical distance, avoidance of eye contact, and frozen facial expressions, to more explicit nonverbal expressions and actions of anger, hatred, and aggression such as spitting, cross-burning, flag burning, rioting, to extreme acts of violence. More global terms such as racism have been also used to characterize a person, a group, a policy, an institution, and a nation in terms of some or all of the above-identified characteristics (e.g., Whitehead & Stokoe 2015).

2.2 Theoretical accounts for associative/dissociative behaviors In addition to Kim’s (2005, 2009) Contextual Theory of Interethnic Communication guiding the present overview, associative and dissociative behaviors are the main focus of at least two other theories developed within the discipline of communication. Communication Accommodation Theory (Gallois, Franklyn-Stokes, Giles & Copeland 1988; Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005) focuses on the individual’s “convergent” behavior and “divergent/maintenance” behavior. To explain the behaviors, the theory identifies three factors of the sociohistorical context (“intergroup history,” “interpersonal history,” and “societal/cultural norms and values”) and two types of individual communicators’ initial orientation (“intergroup” or “interpersonal”), which, in turn, interact with each communicator’s “psychological accommodation strategies” (“accommodative” or “nonaccommodative”), “behavior tactics,” “perceptions/attributions,” and “evaluations/future intensions” with respect to the other communicator. Orbe’s Co-cultural Theory (Orbe 1998; Orbe & Speller 2005), grounded in a critical perspective and informed by “muted group theory” and “standpoint theory,” presents a typology of nine associative and dissociative “communication orientations” commonly observed among members of traditionally under-represented groups (e.g., non-whites and women) when interacting with dominant group members (e.g., “non-assertive separation,” “assertive accommodation,” and “aggressive assimilation”). These nine orientations are explained by each non-dominant group member’s “preferred outcome” from interactions with dominant group members (assimilation, accommodation, or separation) and his/her “communication approach” (non-assertive, assertive, or aggressive).

3 The communicator context Associative/dissociative interethnic communication behaviors have been directly linked to a variety of internal characteristics of the communicator in social psycho-

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logical and communication theories and related research studies. These theoretical concepts and related research findings in the literature generally fall into two functionally interrelated, but conceptually distinct, identity orientations as the communicator context: 1. identity inclusivity/exclusivity and 2. identity security/insecurity.

3.1 Concepts related to identity inclusivity/exclusivity Identity inclusivity/exclusivity refers to the tendency of individuals to categorize themselves and others as ingroup or outgroup members. Inclusive identity orientation serves as a cognitive and motivational basis of associative behavior, whereas exclusive identity orientation is closely linked to a more rigid differentiation of oneself from ethnically dissimilar others. The Social Identity Theory (Tajfel 1974; Tajfel & Turner 1986) has provided a major intellectual foundation by pointing out that identification with a social group involves two key ingredients: first, that membership in the social group is an important, emotionally significant aspect of the individual’s self-concept, and second, that collective interests are of concern to the individual, above and beyond their implications for personal self-interest. Building on this theory, collective ethnic identity has been explained as a main source of interethnic dissociation in a number of related social psychological theories. Among such theories are the Self-categorization Theory (Turner 1989), the Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict (Tajfel & Turner 1979), and the Communication Accommodation Theory (Gallois, Franklyn-Stokes, Giles & Copeland 1988; Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005). Each of these theories accounts for individual differences in degrees of subjective ingroup identification as the pivotal factor in explaining interethnic association or dissociation, particularly under the condition of a real or perceived competition or threat to one’s ingroup. These theoretical accounts have generated numerous studies that provide a substantial amount of empirical evidence for the significant relationship between exclusive ethnic identity and various forms of dissociative interethnic behavior including: stereotyping (e.g., Francis 1976), hostility and aggression (e.g., Berkowitz 1962), and outgroup discrimination (e.g., Brewer & Miller 1988).

3.2 Concepts related to identity security/insecurity Another set of social psychological studies has examined the role played by the degree to which a communicator feels secure or insecure in his or her identity or ethnic identity in influencing interethnic communication behavior. As a broad concept within which many of the specific concepts are integrated, identity security/insecurity refers to the overall “ego-strength” (Lazarus 1966) or “character strength” (Peter-

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son & Seligman 2004) of an individual, that is, the inner resource (or lack of it) by which one reacts to a stressful situation with composure and clear and rational thinking, thereby allowing for qualities of flexibility and relaxedness in one’s behavior. Identity security, thus, indicates an individual’s overall sense of self-confidence or self-efficacy, and self-assuredness, whereas identity insecurity manifests itself in feelings of inferiority or defensiveness when interacting with others, including those who are ethnically dissimilar. As Worchel (1986) suggests, identity security is likely to help alleviate unwarranted fear and perceived threat. Among the various specific concepts integrated into identity are self-confidence (e.g., Van den Broucke, de Soete & Bohrer 1989) and self-esteem (e.g., Das, Bushman, Bezemer, Kerkhof & Vermeulen 2009). Most of the social psychological studies of intergroup relations addressing identity security-insecurity have been focused on the insecurity members of a nondominant ethnic group feel about their group’ s relative status, often in the symbolic sense of the group’s importance, worth, and respectability, or in the practical sense of its social power and control. The classic works, including the Realistic Conflict Theory (Sheriff 1966) and the Group Threat Theory (Blalock 1976), explain that actual intergroup competition over scarce resource drives subjectively perceived threats to ingroup interests, which, in turn, motivate ingroup members to express anti-outgroup attitudes. Among the concepts generated from this theory are status anxiety (De Vos 1990), perceived threat (Giles & Johnson 1986; Prati, Crisp, Meleady & Rubini 2016; Stephan & Stephan 2000), marginality (Stonequist 1937; Taft 1977), and identity uncertainty (Hogg 2007; Hogg & Blaylock 2011). In addition to the identity insecurity experiences of non-dominant group members examined in these social psychological studies, a number of sociobiographic case studies have revealed that dominant group members are also vulnerable to identity exclusivity and identity insecurity. Pfafman, Carpenter and Tang (2015), for example, examine the politics of Chinese netizens’ racism toward African immigrants on the website, ChinaSMACK, revealing that racism on this website is triggered by perceived threats to identity, economic stability, and state fidelity in a paradoxical relationship with globalization.

4 The situational context Next to the contextual layer of the communicator is the immediate milieu in which an interethnic encounter takes place. An extensive amount of attention has been given in social psychological and communication studies to various situational variables as being significant to understanding the nature of interethnic communication behavior. These situational factors are examined below according to three

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broad factors: ethnic proximity/distance, shared/separate goal structure, and personal network integration/segregation.

4.1 Ethnic proximity/distance Individuals come to an interethnic communication situation with differing ethnicity-related characteristics. Each communicator’s ethnicity manifests itself in individuals at two levels: 1. extrinsic ethnic markers related to physical features (e.g., skin color, physique, hair, and facial features), material artifacts (e.g., food, dress, decorative objects, and religious practices), and certain noticeable behaviors such as unique gestures and paralinguistic patterns (e.g., distinct accents, tempos of utterance, intonations, and pitch levels; and 2. intrinsic ethnic markers including internalized beliefs, value orientations, and norms closely associated with a particular ethnic group. Extrinsically and intrinsically, each interethnic communication event presents a level of ethnic proximity or distance between the involved parties. Ethnic proximity (or distance) is, thus, a situational concept comparing a given communicator’s ethnicity with that of the other(s) involved in a particular interethnic communication event. Interethnic behavior is likely to be more associative when a communicator sees in the other(s) a higher degree of similarities in extrinsic ethnic markers and/or a higher degree of compatibility in intrinsic ethnic markers. A significant amount of differences and incompatibility, on the other hand, tends to accentuate category salience and the accompanying psychological distance, inhibiting the communicator’s motivation to engage in the communication encounter and seek a cooperative relationship. Research evidence shows a clear link between ethnic distance to intergroup anxiety (Stephan & Stephan 1985), miscommunication (Gumperz 1978), and unfavorable attitudes toward interethnic marriages (Torngren 2016), among others. The classic study by Gumperz (1978) illustrates how dissociative and associative interethnic behaviors arise from ethnic differences and similarities between interactants’ communication patterns. Employing conversational analysis of two naturally occurring episodes, Gumperz contrasts a heated and often disjointed exchange between a British young female staff member and a middle-aged male Indian immigrant and a more cohesive and cooperative exchange between the same Indian man and a female social worker who is also an immigrant from India. By identifying specific ethnic verbal strategies employed by each interactant, Gumperz’s analysis illuminates how interethnic conflict arises from inaccurate interpretation processes attributable to dissimilar communication rules and pragmatic strategies and their lack of awareness of this fact. Further insights into interethnic proximity/distance have been made available in various ethnographic studies focused on the traditional cultural communication symbols and practices within specific ethnic communities (see Chapter 6, this vol-

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ume, for more on cultural communication). The Speech Codes Theory (Philipsen 1997; Philipsen, Coutu & Covarrubias 2005) has served as a major intellectual foundation for an extensive body of field studies. Applying Geertz’s (1973) framework of the interpretation of culture, Philipsen and his associates provide an interpretive framework for identifying and illuminating the essential features of communication unique to a given culture. The theory has generated a variety of ethnographic studies investigating shared patterns of communication practices unique to specific ethnic communities including Native Americans (e.g., Basso 1990; Pratt 1998) and African Americans (e.g., Hecht, Jackson & Ribeau 2003; Kochman 1986).

4.2 Shared/separate goal structure Shared/separate goal structure refers to the extent to which communicators interact with or without the mutuality of interests. Shared goals foster, and are fostered by, associative behaviors and cooperative relationships between the involved parties. In contrast, communicators who see in the other interactant(s) few shared goals are less likely to be motivated to engage in associative behaviors. Among the most salient concepts pertaining to shared/separate goal structure are goal interdependence and cooperative/competitive relationship. Brewer and Miller (1988) theorizes that associative behavior (such as individuated decoding rather than stereotypical categorization) are more likely when the interaction is structured to promote an interpersonal and cooperative orientation compared to a task-oriented and competitive one. Cooperative work teams are often composed and structured in such a way that roles or functions within the team are correlated with subgroup category identities (such as ethnic categories). Extensive research evidence is available to demonstrate the theorized relationships. Johnson, Johnson and Maruyama (1984), for example, report a significant role of goal interdependence and competitive/cooperative relationship (e.g., Worchel 1986) in producing change in key psychological orientations of individual communicators (such as positive or negative attitudes, liking, and attraction).

4.3 Personal network integration The degree to which a communicator’s relational network is ethnically integrated is the third situational factor, emerging from the literature as having a significant relevance to understanding his or her associative/dissociative interethnic communication behavior. The ethnic composition of a given communicator’s personal network is indicative of the extent to which he or she has, or has not, already participated in associative activities with ethnically dissimilar others. Conversely, an individual whose interethnic behavior is generally associative is likely to form a more heterogeneous network of relationships. In communication studies of ethnic mi-

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norities and immigrants (Kim 1986b, 2001, 2005, 2009; Yum 1988), the level of interethnic contact and integration in personal network structure has been found to be closely linked to the level of psychological and functional adaptation to the mainstream culture. A number of social psychological theories of intergroup relations provide further insights into the ethnic integration of an individual’s personal network and its relationship to his or her engagement in interethnic communication activities. Among the most notable theories are the Contact Hypothesis (Amir 1969) and its subsequent fledging theories of intergroup relations such as the intergroup contact theory (Pettigrew 1998). These theories have generated numerous empirical studies providing evidence for the psychological effects interethnic communication experiences are likely to have in decreasing intergroup prejudice and increasing more positive attitudes toward outgroups and more mixed interethnic social contacts (Pettigrew & Tropp 2011). Furthermore, because persons who share a friend are more likely to become friends themselves, an effect called “transitivity” in network studies (Wasserman & Faust 1994), studies have shown that multiethnic persons tend to foster cross-ethnic friendships in their personal network (Vonofakou et al. 2008), thereby serving as “bridges” between ethnic groups (Quillian & Redd 2009). Of special interest is the related phenomenon of secondary transfer effect of contact (Pettigrew 2009), that is, the effect of interethnic contact spreading to non-contacted outgroups. A sizable pool of research findings exists to support the role of personal network integration and associative interethnic behavior. In the case of American Indians (Kim, Lujan & Dixon 1998), those individuals who report higher levels of network heterogeneity with more friends and intimate friends of dissimilar ethnic backgrounds have been found to be significantly more positive in their attitudes toward non-Indians. Relatedly, Chen and Magazine (2012) report that American Internet use among Chinese international students in the United States directly and positively influences their sociocultural and psychological adaptation to the host society.

5 The environmental context Surrounding the immediate situational context is the environment, or larger social milieu, in which interethnic communication takes place. The environment is comprised of multiple sub-levels of social entities ranging from a small work unit (e.g., academic departments within a university), a neighborhood, an organization, and a local community, to larger social entities such as a city and a society as a whole. Three major themes of the environment are salient in the literature: 1. institutional equity/inequity; 2. ingroup strength; and 3. environmental stress. These key

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environmental conditions emerge from the literature as key factors influencing the associative/dissociative interethnic behaviors of individual communicators.

5.1 Institutional equity/inequity Institutional equity/inequity addresses issues of fairness and justice with respect to ethnic groups. Whether an organization, a community, or a government, or any other level constituting the environment of an interethnic communication event, the institutionalized organizing principles (such as laws, policies, rules, or practices) shape the normative beliefs guiding and reinforcing the judgments and behaviors of individuals within that system. Through the activities of social comparison, individual communicators are less likely to act associatively toward outgroup members, if the institutions relevant to their life activities are, or are at least perceived to be, unfair to their ethnic group (Turner 1975). Institutional inequity has been linked to dissociative interethnic behavior in studies that investigated within organizations in terms of objectively recognized systemic status differential along ethnic lines – the convergence of ethnic category and functional roles within the organization reflecting the historical interethnic power inequality in the society at large. To the extent that inequity exists, members of subordinate ethnic groups' actions express their comparative feelings of dissatisfaction, or what is referred to as fraternalistic relative deprivation (Walker & Smith 2002). Rigid socioeconomic stratification along ethnic lines, in particular, is emphasized in social identity theory, which addresses structural conflicts of interest between social groups as encouraging dissociative behaviors by increasing “category salience” in intergroup interaction (Tajfel 1974; Tajfel & Turner 1979). Institutional inequity has been of particular interest to scholars of the Critical School. Built on the basic aim of exposing the existence of power inequality between dominant and non-dominant ethnic groups, critical scholars have addressed issues of institutional inequity employing a range of concepts such as institutional racism (Hayes 2015) and structural privilege of White Americans as the dominant group (Nakayama & Martin 1998). Likewise, the Cultural Identifications Theory (Collier 2005) presumes power inequality between groups when examining the dynamics of group identity positioning and negotiation between dominant and non-dominant group members.

5.2 Relative ingroup strength The second environmental factor addressed in the literature is the collective strength of the communicator's ethnic group vis-à-vis his or her interaction partner’s group strength. The overall strength of an ethnic group is closely tied to the objective properties and positions of political and economic resources associated

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with that group, bringing status and prestige to members of that group. Stronger ingroup status, thus, serves as a kind of social advantage in interethnic communication that helps to draw interest, if not acceptance, from outgroup members. As such, when one’s ingroup’s relative ingroup strength is stronger, he or she is likely to act less associatively (or more dissociatively) toward someone with a lesser ingroup strength. A number of sociological theories addressing the evolution of ethnic groups further suggest the linkage between the relative ingroup strength and dissociative interethnic behavior of an individual communicator. Clarke and Obler (1976) argue that, as an ethnic group grows from its initial, economic adjustment stage to the later stages of ethnic community development, it increasingly shows a collective strength with which to manipulate its ethnic identity for political self-assertion for the benefit of the group's interests. Likewise, sociologists Breton (1964) and Keyes (1981) provide their respective views on the developmental stages of an ethnic group and its increased capability for political mobilization. A crucial force in this process is a strong communication system including ethnic media and community organizations such as churches and social clubs. The theoretical relationship between relative ingroup strength and dissociative interethnic behavior is supported by the observations of Brewer and Miller (1984) that interethnic relationships tend to be more acrimonious in larger groups with several equal size ethnic subgroups. Hoffman (1985) argues further that, as the size of ingroups increases, the likelihood of contact with outgroup members decreases and the ingroup members become more likely to interact with other ingroup members. These observations suggest that communities where ethnic minorities constitute only a small proportion of the overall population are likely to engage in more associative interethnic behaviors. Such is the conclusion, for example, drawn from a study of Greek and Italian ethnic groups in Australia by Gallois and Pittam (1991). In this study, adolescents in the well-organized Greek community are found to place more emphasis on their ethnic identity and maintaining their heritage and less emphasis on adapting to the dominant Australian culture at large, compared to their Italian counterparts whose community is less cohesive.

5.3 Environmental stress The third environmental factor, environmental stress, pertains to the tension in an organization, community, or society at large. Interethnic dissociation is likely to increase when the environment is under duress due to threatening events that are directly or indirectly linked to a particular outgroup. Dissociative behaviors also tend to increase when the society undergoes certain challenging circumstances caused by economic hardship, shortage of resources, or involvement in an international crisis that are likely to intensify competition throughout a given social system.

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The Group Threat Theory of Intergroup Relations (Blumer 1958) identifies a causal link between environmental stress and interethnic dissociation. According to this theory, social distance results when a group with less power threatens to consume resources that are perceived to more rightfully belong to the group in power. Although group threat has been applied frequently to exploring relations between a dominant group and a minority group, it may also be applied to relations between minority groups that may have relative power in relation to one another with respect to specific aspects of power and privilege. The Realistic Conflict Theory (Sherif 1966) further explains that the actual or perceived competition for scarce resources leads to bias against outgroups in the absence of existing common or complementary goals. Extending this theory, Esses, Jackson and Armstrong (1998) has proposed the instrumental model of group conflict, highlighting the role of the perception of intergroup competition and zero-sum beliefs (if one group gains, the other loses) that are accompanied by anxiety and fear. Environmental stress has been investigated as a factor that intensifies intergroup dissociation or conflict in a substantial number of social psychological studies. Intergroup conflicts have been linked to certain challenging circumstances in a society caused by economic hardship (e.g., Butz & Yogeeswaran 2011). More recently, terrorism-related events have been identified as causing anti-outgroup attitudes (e.g., Das, Bushman, Bezemer, Kerkhof & Vermeulen 2009) and the rapidly increasing size of immigrants and refugees brought about as events producing environmental stress for the native-born majority population (e.g., Schlueter & Scheepers 2010; Tawa, Negron, Suyemoto & Carter 2015).

6 Looking forward Though far from being complete, the present synoptic overview has been an effort to capture and profile the intellectual core constituting interethnic communication as an interdisciplinary field of study. Based on a broadly-based review of the extant literature and guided by the multidimensional and multifaceted model in Kim’s (2005, 2009) Contextual Theory of Interethnic Communication, many of the salient concepts and theories across social science disciplines have been examined in relation to the focal phenomenon, interethnic communication behavior (association and dissociation) and the eight general contextual factors pertaining to the communicator (identity inclusivity/exclusivity), the situation (ethnic proximity/distance, shared/separate goal structure, and personal network integration), and the environment (institutional equity/inequity, relative ingroup strength, and environmental stress). Revealed from this overview is a clear link between an individual’s associative/ dissociative communication behaviors with each of the eight contextual factors. That is, interethnic communication behavior is likely to be more associative when

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the communicator is more inclusive and secure in identity orientation, when the communication situation created by the communicator and the other interactant(s) presents greater ethnic proximity (similarity and compatibility) and shared goals (common interests), when the communicator’s existing personal network is more ethnically integrated, when the larger environment offers the individual a system of law, rules, policies, and/or normative practices that are, and/or are perceived to be, more equitable for all groups, when the communicator’s own ethnic group is smaller in size and weaker in collective strength, and when the relevant environment is calmer and more prosperous. Based on the interdisciplinary prospective on the interethnic communication field and the behavior-context interrelationships presented in this overview, a case is made below for two main considerations for future research: 1. broadening the conceptual base of a research design linking communication behavior with factors of one or more layers of the communication context; and 2. integrating normative theory-testing research and descriptive-interpretive research to gain a more complete and realistic understanding of the dynamic and complex nature of interethnic communication.

6.1 Broadening the conceptual base for research As shown in the extant literature examined so far, studies across social science disciplines pertaining to interethnic communication have tended to address narrow conceptual domains, with each study focusing on a limited number of research variables chosen for discipline-specific interests and those of individual investigators. More often than not, the selected variables belong to a single dimension (such as behavioral, psychological, interpersonal or societal dimension). Such a limited conceptual base underlying the past studies has rendered a lack of conceptual coherence and integration in the knowledge claims currently available in the literature, making it difficult to generate an understanding of interethnic communication that accurately reflects the multidimensional and multifaceted reality in which communication behaviors and contextual forces operate simultaneously and in reciprocal relationships. As such, despite the rich and wide-ranging array of theories and research findings concerning the phenomenon of interethnic communication, the field of interethnic communication remains largely disjointed, largely along disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines. For this field of study to strive for a higher level of knowledge integration, there needs to be a greater emphasis placed in future research on grounding individual studies in a broader conceptualization, so as to obtain data that inform more of the totality of the interethnic communication phenomenon. Specifically, more studies need to utilize a “multilevel research” design (cf. DiPrete & Forristal 1994), that is, a research aimed at increasing the research-reality correspondence by identifying the interrelationships between/among multiple

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levels of theoretical units at once. This “vertical integration” can be achieved by “connecting the dots,” or bringing together multiple variables encompassing multiple dimensions of interethnic communication. Through such studies, the largely disconnected knowledge claims available in the literature currently can be brought together more readily, so as to render academic insights that are more complete, more realistic, and, thus, more useful in addressing a wide range of practical issues pertaining to ethnic diversity in a given society.

6.2 Toward methodological integration Along with broadening the conceptual base to include multiple levels of research variables, future studies can contribute more fruitfully to the continuing development of the interdisciplinary field of interethnic communication by broadening the range of research methods derived from different methodological traditions. Since the early years of interethnic research in the early 20th century, empirical studies across social science disciplines have been conducted following two main methodological approaches. On the one hand, the vast majority of empirical studies, including most of the studies cited in the present overview, have employed normative and quantitative social-scientific research methods such as experiments and sample-based questionnaire surveys. On the other hand, a substantial number of descriptive-interpretive-qualitative case studies have produced insights into a wide range of interethnic conflicts illuminating the particularities of interethnic communication involving specific groups or communities (cf. McKay-Semmler & Kim 2012). To date, these two methodological approaches remain largely separate with few cross-citations and few attempts at integrating the knowledge gained from each approach. Greater efforts are needed in future studies of interethnic communication to integrate these two methodological approaches. Combined in a “mixed” methodology (Tashakkori & Teddlie 1998), these approaches complement each other to produce a fuller account of a given interethnic communication phenomenon. As McGrath (1982: 99) points out, “One must use multiple methods, selected from different classes of methods with different vulnerabilities … knowledge requires convergence of substantive findings derived from a diversity of methods of study”. Likewise, Miles and Huberman (1994: 207) observe that “we have to face the fact that numbers and words are both needed if we are to understand the world”. By employing an integrated methodology, investigators can not only examine a set of theoretical relationships between and among research variables pertaining to interethnic communication, but also illuminate holistically the particularities of how the predicted patterns of theoretical relationships operate in the reality of one or more specific interethnic encounters, particularly through the use of narratives provided by the research participants themselves (Elliott 2005). A normative social-

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scientific study is likely to benefit from integrating an ethnographic case study involving field research, which allows for an unparalleled means for investigating and collecting contextual information that is embeded in the particular setting that is being studied (Orum, Feagin & Sjoberg 1991; Yin 2009). Conversely, a set of theoretical concepts and relationships can help ethnographic case studies as an analytic framework with which to survey the entire “field” of behavior-context interface in a given interethnic communication phenomenon and make sense of how interethnic communication plays out in that particular case. Grenier and Castro (2001), for example, has considered the impact of the Cuban “enclave” in Miami on African American-Latino relations within that community, with an eye toward the implications disparate levels of ingroup strength have for broader African American-Latino relations in other American cities.

7 Conclusion: Weaving the social fabric Ethnicity has been, and most likely will remain, a powerful force behind the natural tendency for people to divide themselves into separate group categories within a society. Even as the tightly knit system of communication and transportation has brought differing ethnicities closer than ever before, a deeply unsettling landscape of many societies has been unfolding in today’s world. “Diversity” or “multiculturalism” embraced in many societies has become as much a point of tension, contention, and terror, as it is a cause celebre. As Friedman (2016) puts it, we live in “the age of protest”. Mostly absent in the midst of the on-going “identity politics” are the original ideals of diversity or multiculturalism itself, that is, people with differing ethnic roots can coexist, that they can learn from each other, and that they can and should look across and beyond ethnic group boundaries with minimum prejudice or illusion, and learn to think together to advance together as an integrated society. The current ethnic polemics seem to deny the fact that some of the most interesting things of all in human history and its remarkable stability and peace have happened, in fact, at the free and democratic interface of differing ethnicities. Indeed, there is an increasing recognition in the United States and in many European countries of the failure of diversity policies and programs in bringing people together for greater social cohesion, as they have not necessarily brought about inclusion of ethnically diverse individuals in cooperative and meaningful social relationships (Eligon 2016). Yet, it is precisely the widespread fracturing of interethnic relations that promises the continuing viability and significance of interethnic communication as an interdisciplinary field of study. Researchers investigating interethnic communication will undoubtedly find ample opportunities to engage in studies that are aimed at producing findings useful to strengthening the social fabric of ethnically diverse

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neighborhoods, college campuses, communities, organizations, and societies at large. In this regard, the key issues, concepts, and theories identified in the present overview serve as a broad roadmap for future efforts. By focusing on the individual communicator’s associative and dissociative behavior, together with the contextual factors of the communicator, the situation, and the environment, interested researchers can contribute to the continuing development of this field of study by generating systematic knowledge and insights into realistic ways to mitigate unnecessary interethnic conflict and foster social cohesion. Such is believed to be the case because a successfully integrated multiethnic society is one that is built on a unifying purpose and a common culture. To this end, what is most essential is not a set of laws, rules, policies, and programs, but the daily voluntary communicative acts of association between individuals of differing ethnicities. The task of realizing the promise of an ethnically diverse society ultimately falls on the shoulders of ordinary people, who see beyond ethnic categories to discover each other’s unique individuality as well as common humanity and who treat each other as “one of us” – a partner in the project of building a community of mutuality and wholeness from the ground up.

Further readings Roosens, Eugeen E. 1989. Creating ethnicity: The process of ethnogenesis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Stephan, Walter G. & Cookie White Stephan. 1996. Intergroup relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sue, Derald Wing. 2015. Race talk and the conspiracy of silence: Understanding and facilitating difficult dialogues on race. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Wagner, Ulrich, Linda R, Tropp, Gillian Finchilescu & Colin Tredoux (eds.). 2008. Improving intergroup relations: Building on the legacy of Thomas F. Pettigrew. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Whillock, Rita Kirk & David Slayden (eds.). 1995. Hate speech. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Anne-Marie Søderberg

19 Experience and cultural learning in global business contexts Abstract: Globalization with increased mobility of the workforce and more frequent use of information and communication technologies means still more people must develop a deeper understanding of Cultural Others, a higher degree of cultural selfawareness and an ability to bridge across multiple cultural divides. This chapter discusses a number of issues in relation to cultural learning processes in global business contexts: various concepts of learning, different approaches to cross-cultural competence training of future global leaders, and various learning contexts in management education and training. Learners in today’s global business (school) world are more culturally diverse, and the potential of the increasing number of bi-cultural and bi-lingual students and managers as boundary-spanners must be considered. Recent empirical studies of face-to-face and virtual global collaboration show that cross-cultural encounters may not only trigger existing values and cognitive patterns, but also create motivation to find new ways to cope with challenging situations. Through storytelling the actors involved may create a deeper understanding of the specific socio-cultural context, but a teacher or coach is needed to facilitate a learning process that transforms emotionally laden experiences into learning through conceptualization, active experimentation and reflective observation. Keywords: diverse classrooms and workplaces, cross-cultural encounters, cultural intelligence, experiential learning

“Learning from experience requires more than being in the vicinity of events when they occur; learning emerges from the ability to construe those events and reconstruct them in transformative ways”. (Bennett & Salonen 2007: 46)

1 Introduction The ongoing processes of globalization influence the world of work dramatically. New information and communication technologies that transcend time and distance enable increased virtualization of social interactions. Cross-cultural collaborations within and between organizations as well as in collocated and virtual teams are intensified with increased international interconnectedness. Global collaboration impacts virtually everyone in every department in multinational companies DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-019

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(MNCs), whether at headquarters or in subsidiaries. Even employees in staff functions, who do not travel frequently, are often on a daily basis involved in intercultural communication and virtual collaboration between business units around the world (Gertsen, Søderberg & Zølner 2012). These developments represent new challenges and learning opportunities for both individuals, educational institutions and businesses since an increasing number of persons, not only in MNCs but also in smaller born global firms, are required to span linguistic, ethnic, national, organizational and professional boundaries and deal sensitively with different cultural perspectives in a professional way. Some managers are well aware that there is a stronger need for cross-cultural and virtual collaboration competencies among all those who work across time zones and geographical locations and on a regular basis have to span boundaries of language, ethnicity and nationality. Other managers claim that most of the graduates that companies nowadays recruit from universities and business schools are already well-travelled and well-educated in international business and have a more global mindset than previous generations. However, the problem with this argument is that exposure to foreign cultures or contacts with people who are culturally different do not necessarily develop any cultural competence, nor do they automatically foster close and trustful relations; on the contrary such contacts may even reinforce cultural stereotypes instead of being a point of departure for cultural learning. The globalization of the universities and the business world has led some education and management scholars to investigate and reflect on how students’ and business people’s capabilities to operate in different meaning systems across cultural borders can be assessed, and if they can be further stimulated through various forms of training. Recently it has also created an interest in studying cultural learning processes of students and business people who are involved in communication and collaboration across borders and cultural divides. This chapter focuses on studies of cultural learning in global business contexts. Business people and their cultural learning experiences will be at the fore, and culture training at business schools and culture training as part of the services offered to companies involved in various forms of global collaboration will also be included. The chapter is organized as follows. First, key concepts and theoretical dimensions of learning will be presented. Second, various concepts of cross-cultural competence and cultural intelligence will be introduced and discussed as an outcome of cultural learning processes. Third, attention will be drawn to the learners in today’s global business (school) world. Fourth, various contexts for cultural learning will be considered. Then follow brief accounts of some empirical studies of cultural learning in management education and in a global business context. In the concluding remarks future avenues for research on cultural learning will be outlined.

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2 Dimensions of learning Learning may be conceptualized as involving a cognitive dimension of knowledge and skills, a psychodynamic dimension of motivation and emotions, and a social dimension of communication and cooperation, all three embedded in a societally situated learning context (Illeris 2002). Learning is a complex process that happens in the interface between something well known and something different. It has to do with recognizing patterns and mapping similarities, but also with being able to discern something new and being attentive towards those differences that make a significant difference. This three-dimensional understanding of learning is also inherent in the way the concepts of cross-cultural competence and cultural intelligence have been defined, even though some scholars put most emphasis on the cognitive dimension (see section 3 below). Scholars studying cross-cultural competence training and cultural learning from a primarily cognitive perspective (Bhawuk 2009; Lenartowicz, Johnson & Konopaske 2014; Ng, Van Dyne & Ang 2009; Taras & Gonzalez-Perez 2014) often refer to David A. Kolb’s experiential learning theory (Kolb 1984) as the appropriate theoretical lens through which to examine how people acquire cultural knowledge and learn from their experiences. Kolb himself draws on works by the American educational philosopher John Dewey, the German Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin and the French cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget when he understands learning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb 1984: 41). He shares their view on learning as experience-based conceptualizations and as the outcome of either assimilative or accommodative processes. Kolb also links an individual’s observations and immediate experiences to actions where the individual applies new explicit knowledge. According to Kolb experiential learning consists of two fundamental processes: grasping the experience and transforming it. His cyclical learning process includes four sequential stages starting with 1. concrete experiences (tangible episodes with tacit knowledge that cannot easily be understood) moving further to 2. reflective observation (internal processing through writing a diary or reflection paper), followed by 3. abstract conceptualizations (readings and lectures that provide explicit knowledge) and 4. active experimentation (for example at a field trip where the learner applies transformed and conceptualized knowledge when exposed to new experiences). The cyclical learning process does not end after one cycle; it includes multiple sequential stages where new knowledge is produced, existing patterns and perspectives changed, and new and old ideas and understandings are integrated, until the individual has eventually reached the desired level of competency (Lenartowicz, Johnson & Konopaske 2014: 1703). Kolb focuses on learning first and foremost as a cognitive process at the individual level. The social dimension of learning viewed as the individual’s interaction with other people in a specified socio-cultural environment is less pronounced (Illeris 2002).

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When considering which experiences have most transformative potential for learning, Bird (2014) draws attention to the important relation between emotions, motivation and learning and hence to three other relevant dimensions: affect, intensity and relevance. In a learning context affect refers to the level of emotion that is present in an experience, with feelings of frustration, irritation, anger, joy or sympathy that may surface when accounted for. Emotionally powerful experiences are thus expected to have a greater transformative potential. Intensity refers to the degree to which the experience requires a concentrated effort such as, for example, participating in an international negotiation with a short deadline. Relevance refers to the extent to which an experience is perceived as particularly relevant to the learner. A sojourn with immersion in other national, organizational and/or professional cultures can provide very relevant experiences, since for example “cultural trigger events” (Reichard et al. 2015) where an individual’s values and norms are challenged are likely to elicit sensemaking and thus start a process of reflecting on and even questioning values and perspectives that the individual previously tended to take for granted. “Cultural trigger events” are often perceived as negative by the individual, but they are likely to facilitate personal growth and development if the specific context in which they are narrated provides support for reflexivity and cultural learning. Some scholars (Bird 2014; Ng, Van Dyne & Ang 2009; Taras & Gonzalez-Perez 2014) have used Kolb’s framework of experiential learning when developing programs for cross-cultural training viewed as a sequence of learning cycles that uses a combination of cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning methods. Hereby they have tried to go beyond a more traditional didactic approach to learning where emphasis solely is on the cognitive dimension when intercultural communication and international business topics are taught as if acquired cultural knowledge can be directly transferred, without any emotional engagement and/or any experiments with adjusting and changing behaviours to specific socio-cultural situations.

3 Cultural competencies and cultural learning The main goal of cultural learning is the development of individuals’ capability to function across cultural contexts and with culturally different others. Many scholars within the research fields of intercultural education, cross-cultural management and international business have over the years discussed what constitutes what they label as “intercultural competence” (see Chapter 27, this volume, for discussion on intercultural competence in the world of business), “cross-cultural competence”, “cultural intelligence” or “cultural agility”, and not least which capabilities and skills the concept encompasses. Michael Byram, an influential British scholar of language and culture pedagogy, defines “intercultural competence” as “knowledge of others; knowledge of self;

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skills to interpret and relate; skills to discover and/or to interact; valuing others’ values, beliefs and behaviours, and relativizing one’s self” (Byram 1997: 34). Since Byram focuses on the individual’s ability to function in other national cultures, he also emphasizes proficiency in specific foreign languages as something that plays a key role in establishing sustainable relations to the culturally different others in specific countries or regions. Other scholars are more concerned with providing students with a cultural awareness that is not anchored in a particular territory, but rather with generic intercultural skills that prepare them to act as “world citizens” or “global cosmopolitans” (see Chapter 16, this volume, for discussion on intercultural communication competence). A similar focus on developing culturegeneral competencies is found in texts about the concept of “cultural metacognition” as presented by Thomas et al. (2008, 2015) (see more below). Scholars within international business and cross-cultural management have until recently paid less notice to foreign language proficiency than scholars of intercultural education. A common denominator for the concepts of cross-cultural competence (Bhawuk 2009), cultural intelligence (Earley & Ang 2003; Thomas & Inkson 2009) and cultural agility (Caliguiri 2012) is the focus on 1. the awareness, valuing and understanding of cultural differences, 2. experiencing other cultures, and 3. self-awareness of one’s own cultural background. There is also a shared focus on adaptation and effectiveness. A major international group of scholars within cultural intelligence research state in a recently published review article that the characteristics of effective intercultural interaction in organizational contexts can be summarized as “a) good personal adjustment indicated by feelings of contentment and well-being when interacting with culturally different others, b) development and maintenance of good interpersonal relationships with culturally different others, and c) the effective completion of task-related goals in an intercultural context” (Thomas et al. 2015: 1115). Earley and Ang (2003) and Thomas and Inkson (2009), who introduced the concept of cultural intelligence, agreed − at that time − in seeing cultural intelligence as a dynamic unity of three interdependent dimensions: the cognitive, the emotional, and the behavioural that are closely intertwined in cultural encounters. Thomas et al. (2015) reformulate the concept of cultural intelligence and now exclude the emotional dimension, i.e. motivation to engage in cross-cultural interactions and to accept and reflect upon the positive as well as the negative emotions involved in the cultural encounters. They do it with the argument that motivation or willingness to behave in a particular way and direct energy toward cross-cultural interactions is still potentially important, but must be considered external to cultural intelligence defined as the ability to interact effectively across cultural divides. With this reformulation, cultural intelligence consists of three facets: cultural knowledge, cross-cultural skills and cultural metacognition. Cultural knowledge is both knowledge about culture as a concept and specific knowledge about and understanding of different cultures. It is also process knowledge about how to deal

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with cultural complexity in intercultural encounters, which is a culture general form of intelligence. Cultural skills are the ability to relate successfully with culturally different others, being tolerant of ambiguity, being able to adapt to a particular socio-cultural situation, to shift perspective and switch cultural frame (empathy) and master perceptual acuity. Cultural knowledge and cross-cultural skills are developed in specific cultural contexts, but these two capabilities are dependent on cultural metacognition, which this group of scholars defines as “knowledge of and control over one’s thinking and learning activities in the specific domain of cultural experiences and strategies” (Thomas et al. 2015: 1102). One thing is to define cultural intelligence, another is to recruit, select and develop managers who are able to think and act in culturally intelligent ways. Ng, Van Dyne, and Ang (2009) have developed a model for selecting individuals with cultural intelligence capabilities who are able to engage in experiential learning processes, Stevens et al. (2014) have developed a comprehensive “global competencies inventory”, and Thomas et al. (2015) offer a “theory-based, short form measure of cultural intelligence”. These tools are made to provide organizations and companies with instruments for selecting, training and developing people so that they become able to “adapt” and deal “effectively” with intercultural interactions in a global business context, be it as expatriates on long-term assignments or as project managers or as ordinary members of global virtual teams. Whereas Deardorff – among others − contends that “measuring intercultural competence is specific to context, situation and relation” (Deardorff 2006: 253), the ambition of the abovementioned international management scholars has been to develop context-independent scales for measuring people’s culture general capabilities. Moreover, the cultural intelligence scales all rely on participants’ self-assessments. So even though they may be rigorously developed and tested in various environments around the globe they are still subject to the severe criticisms often leveled at self-report scales. These generalized and often decontextualized measurements likely lead participants to overestimate their capabilities, and if used in pre- and post-tests participants will tend to score higher in the post-test since they expect that a cultural training course or a cross-cultural management class will indeed increase their cultural intelligence (Eisenberg et al. 2013). Some companies also use other diagnostic tests for selection of appropriate candidates for global management positions in order to get access to those who have the best psychological capabilities and cognitive resources for further personal development and intercultural learning. As stated by Mendenhall et al. (2008: 14), “to be effective in a global context, people must be able to understand, change and adapt appropriately to the foreign work and intercultural environment, yet at the same time, they must also have a stable sense of self in order to remain mentally and emotionally healthy”. In other words, in order to become effective in their intercultural interactions, people must also have the right personality. According to Caliguiri (2012) and Stevens et al. (2014), the Big Five Personality Test is frequently used as the very first step to measure an individual’s degree of

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1. extroversion, 2. agreeableness and ability to form good and durable interpersonal relationships with culturally different others, and 3. conscientiousness including perseverance, self-discipline, maturity and resourcefulness in exploring options and risks and making the best possible decisions and the most effective completion of task-related goals. 4. Emotional strength and ability to cope with challenging and frustrating situations and 5. openness to experience are expected to predispose people to be both comfortable and satisfied when working in different cultures and receptive to new and different ways of doing things. Those who have a personality profile that make them open to Cultural Others and resilient to cultural challenges will then have to deal actively with managing their perceptions, their relationships and their emotions, when going through cultural learning processes and thereby developing a so called “global leader intercultural competency” (Stevens et al. 2014): 1. Perception management viewed as the cognitive approach people employ to perceive the world around them and deal more or less flexibly with cultural differences. 2. Relationship management referring to a person’s orientation toward the importance of relationships. It encompasses their interest in and awareness of others and their interaction styles and values. 3. Self-management referring to the strength of personal identity and the ability to effectively manage emotions and stressful situations.

4 The learners As a consequence of globalization processes with an increased mobility of the workforce and more frequent use of information and communication technologies, still more business people, regardless of the industry or geographic location, need to develop cross-cultural competencies and skills in order to be able to deal effectively with cross-cultural encounters and learn from them. It is no longer only top management and expatriates in long-term assignments who need to be better prepared for global collaboration with employees, customers and other stakeholders who have been socialized in significantly different cultures. Also many people at headquarters and in a company’s subsidiaries, who do not travel frequently, are interacting on a daily basis, either face to face with people in culturally diverse teams at a specific location, or virtually with people who work at great distances in geographically dispersed teams. This group of potential learners is increasing dramatically in numbers and they are much more ethnically diverse than those who were offered culture training 20–30 years ago. Students of today also constitute a much more culturally diverse group, both due to migration and to their active utilization of exchange programs. Universities and business schools must therefore also deal with the changing work conditions

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and the demographic changes when preparing students for their future work in global organizations and businesses. One way is to offer courses in international business and cross-cultural management, another is to arrange virtual collaboration among teams of students from different universities, plan field studies abroad, offer exchange programs for students at foreign universities and internships in foreign companies and international organizations. In some study programs students still constitute a fairly homogeneous group viewed from an ethnic and linguistic point of view, other groups of students are more diverse. Eisenberg et al. (2013) describe a sample of students from CEMS, an elite masters program in international management offered by 28 leading business schools, primarily in Europe. These students represent a multitude of nationalities, they master several foreign languages at a high proficiency level, and they spend full semesters in two foreign countries as an inherent part of their study program. Whereas some students are still characterized by their distinct nationality, due to migration and geographic mobility an increasing number of students − and future employees – can be characterized as bicultural or even multicultural individuals. Some scholars have looked more into the profiles of those bicultural and bilingual students and future employees, who early on have been socialized to multiple language and cultural meaning systems resulting in both strong identification with and adequate understanding of them (Brannen & Thomas 2010). They propose that bicultural individuals with hybrid identities have specific opportunities in global organizations as bridges for intercultural communication and collaboration due to their pronounced ability to switch codes and perspectives (Fitzsimmons, Miska & Stahl 2011). Other scholars draw attention to the students and – future employees – who do not have strong identification with any ethnic group or any specific geographical location, but rather act as “global cosmopolitans” (Brimm 2010). They are particularly good at recognizing the cultural similarities and finding common ground in a culturally diverse study or work setting. Lücke, Kostova, and Roth (2014) explain how bi- and multicultural individuals have developed different cognitive patterns through specific sociocultural experiences, not necessarily in their childhood with parents of different nationality, more often through professional experiences. They offer a cognitive perspective on different patterns of multiculturalism when stating that “culture is understood as internalized mental representations fundamental to everyday interpretation, understanding, communication, and overall functioning in society” (Lücke, Kostova & Roth 2014: 170). Based on a typology of different combinations of cultural content and the structure in which the cultural cognitions are organized, they further suggest that people with various patterns of multiculturalism can use their cognitive capabilities to deal with a variety of critical tasks in MNCs. Those multicultural individuals with a pronounced “integration pattern” can mobilize their deep culture specific knowledge when dealing with, for example, translation across cultural

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contexts (recontextualization) and cross-border boundary spanning. Those multicultural individuals who have more culture general competencies, since they tend to recognize commonalities across cultures rather than differences (“convergence pattern”), can assist in global standardization projects with transfer of cross-culturally similar knowledge and practices (Lücke, Kostova & Roth 2014: 179).

5 Contexts for cultural learning In this section various learning contexts for business students and business people will be presented and the opportunities for cultural learning will be discussed. Bird (2014) discusses in much detail the scale of pedagogy, from the most didactic approaches (films, books and cultural briefings) to the most genuine experiential approaches in the other end of the continuum with for example field experiences and expatriate assignments. Bird also introduces the dimension of feedback from other sources, where both the volume and the quality of the feedback are expected to have an impact on the transformative potential of the experiential cultural learning. Here the self-study is contrasted with learning contexts where the individual is required to communicate, collaborate and adapt based on feedback from others, for example, in order to be able to deal with global virtual teamwork or face-toface communication as an expatriate in a foreign subsidiary in close collaboration with both headquarters and the local staff. Pre-departure culture training has often been offered to business people before long-term international assignments, seldom as an in-house service, more often conducted off-site by culture consultants who have specialized in this field. According to Lenartowicz, Johnson, and Konopaske (2014) the number of culture training programs are currently at a very low level, despite the fact that more people are involved in all kinds of global collaboration. A multiple case study of how Danish MNCs prepared their employees for international assignments (Gertsen, Søderberg & Zølner 2012) confirms this trend. It was obvious that headquarters did not give particularly high priority to culture training or consider cultural learning to be a vital part of the company’s globalization process. Recruiting young graduates who had an international dimension in their educational background, who were already well-travelled and had been on studies abroad, was often used as an explanation why pre-departure culture training was no longer particularly important in contrast to 20–30 years ago where at least long-term international assignees were offered courses and more assistance from the Human Resources (HR) department. Most HR departments in the five Danish MNCs still offered brief pre-departure cultural training courses to expatriates on long-term assignments, but to some extent management as well as most individual employees – erroneously − expected cultural learning to follow almost automatically when studying and working internationally.

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According to Lenartowicz, Johnson, and Konopaske (2014), the majority of the US-based programs have an entirely didactic approach with a goal of transferring knowledge, primarily about the Cultural Other and the foreign culture and society, through lectures, written materials, and area briefings. Basic information, such as ‘working in and doing business with China, India and the US’, is also provided through computer-based self-assessments and learning paths (see for example, Aperian Global’s learning portal: www.aperianglobal.com) as well as through selfstudies of films, videos and booklets (for example the Culture Smart series with “the essential guide to customs and culture” in numerous countries). Culture-specific factual information is certainly beneficial, but there seems to be an overemphasis on cognitive training methods in pre-departure training programs, and the main problem is that this approach does not encourage participants to become actively engaged in the learning process (Black & Mendenhall 1989) and thus does not trigger any emotions (Reichard et al. 2015) or give an impetus to change behavioral patterns. In this regard, many pre-departure training programs tend to be fairly ineffective and inappropriate as concluded in the review by Lenartowicz, Johnson, and Konopaske (2014). In language training with a native speaker as instructor, more “analytical” training methods (Black & Mendenhall 1989) are provided, and if the teacher is a native speaker the students may also be exposed to a culturally specific intonation, body language and proxemics. Cultural simulation games in classroom teaching and pre-departure culture training offer opportunities for the learners to interact more with each other and with an instructor as facilitator. The game ‘Bafa Bafa’ where people during the exercise play that they travel back and forth between two distinct cultures, may create an initial awareness of how easy it is to misinterpret actions and exchanges when the rules are unfamiliar. The game ‘Barnga’ where people play cards with two distinct sets of rules, may likewise be used to demonstrate how quickly ingroup-outgroup dynamics form and strong emotions evolve. If case studies, films and videos are discussed with a focus on the cultural components of the interactions that take place, they also have a potential to transfer tacit knowledge. The most common context for acquiring knowledge through interactions with Cultural Others is through exposure to foreign cultures and direct experience with them. For students it may take the form of field trips, exchange studies at foreign universities or internships in a company abroad as part of the university’s internationalization efforts. For business people short-term and long-term international assignments are potential learning platforms for sharing experiences with both expatriates and local people thereby gradually creating new mental models to make sense of events and processes that challenge existing understandings. Also virtual team-work offers cultural learning opportunities. When people are abroad, either as exchange students, interns or international assignees, the risk is big that they remain ethnocentric and let people with a similar

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cultural background just confirm their immediate perceptions of the Cultural Other and reinforce existing negative stereotypes. They may, however, be offered a local buddy or a host-country mentor and such a person can play an important role in assisting them in acting with more cultural sensitivity, improving their understanding of others’ worldviews, and developing closer relations to Cultural Others (Carraher, Sullivan & Crocitto 2008; Jassawalla, Asgary & Sashittal 2006; Mezias & Scandura 2005). A host country mentor might also be able to put challenging experiences from emotionally laden cultural encounters in a new perspective and provide a conceptualized understanding of them and thereby stimulate cultural learning processes (Gertsen & Søderberg 2010). Some repatriates with a more pronounced cultural sensitivity and context-specific knowledge may also be used to mentor expatriates before they depart and to monitor their progress while they are overseas. The HR department in an MNC could also establish informal forums where managers and employees are encouraged to share their problem stories of cultural encounters. Some care would have to be taken when the groups are put together; ideally, each group would be composed of colleagues who have developed a certain level of trust and who do not perceive each other as competitors. Such settings would provide an opportunity to reflect upon the stories together and discuss their impact on the cross-cultural collaboration in a specific business context. In this way, groups of expatriates in a subsidiary or groups of inpatriates at a corporate headquarters could meet on a regular basis and share their stories. Each narrator would be emotionally involved in his/her story, be in doubt about the best course of action, and feel a need to do something in order to solve the problem or at least to find alternative ways to cope with it. However, as emphasized by Gertsen and Søderberg (2010), it is necessary to assign someone to facilitate the reflection processes initiated in such an organizational learning context. Even though it may be felt as helpful in itself to share stories about ambiguous cultural encounters and realize that others have struggled with similar problems, it does not automatically result in cultural learning. If the group is left to itself, there is a risk that some participants would tend to confirm with each other in ethnocentric perspectives on the problems instead of finding alternative explanations that would further the development of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue. Therefore, the involvement of an internal or external narrative consultant is required, preferably someone with a high level of both culture-general and culture-specific knowledge. He/she would be able to assist the narrator in deconstructing his/her problem story and re-authoring it with assistance from the rest of the group who listen first to the problem story and then act as co-creators of an alternative story. In this way, not only the narrator but also the other participants learn something; thus, narrative seminars with a reflective team of participants may also contribute to making the organization more culturally intelligent.

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6 Studies of cultural learning processes Most research on cultural competence and cultural intelligence has been conceptual. Some scholars have presented developmental models with stages for acquiring (Shapiro, Ozanne & Saatcioglu 2008) or training (Bhawuk 2009) intercultural expertise for the global workplace. But relatively few scholars have contributed with empirical studies of the learning processes through which individuals acquire, or can help others acquire, the desired cultural knowledge and skills and mobilize the cognitive capabilities they already have for dealing with Cultural Others.

6.1 Cultural learning in the educational field Below I will present a few empirical studies of cultural learning in a university setting where some of the concepts introduced above are used. Eisenberg et al. (2013) take a quantitative approach when using a survey to investigate if courses in cross-cultural management have the intended effect of “promoting awareness, understanding and collaboration in complex business settings” among the international group of students and developing them into “culturally intelligent leaders and globally responsible citizens” (www.cems.org). The students’ potential development of cross-cultural skills and capabilities was tested with the use of a cultural intelligence questionnaire developed by Ang et al. (2007). The courses were embedded in a traditional academic environment and delivered by cross-cultural management professors, primarily by readings and lectures. According to the learning objectives of the specific cross-cultural management courses the authors nevertheless expected that this didactic approach could be used to teach cultural skills, “create awareness of one’s culture” and “increase competence in interacting with different cultures” (Eisenberg et al. 2013: 619). The tests that were based on the students’ self-reports in questionnaires confirmed the authors’ hypothesis that the courses had pronounced effects on the cognitive and meta-cognitive dimensions of cultural intelligence, defined as an individual’s capabilities to function and manage effectively in culturally diverse settings (Earley & Ang 2003). They had less effect on the motivational dimension and no significant effect on the behavioral dimension of cultural intelligence. Eisenberg et al. (2013) also examined the impact of students’ international experience of working and living in a foreign culture for at least 6 months prior to taking the courses. The longitudinal study showed that the cross-cultural management courses were most important for those students with little or no international experience even though, as mentioned earlier, exposure to other cultures cannot be equated with cultural learning. The efforts made by Eisenberg et al. (2013) towards measuring university students’ cultural intelligence with tests after classroom teaching stands in stark con-

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trast to projects where teachers account for and reflect upon various experiential learning initiatives within the context of intercultural communication and international management. Taras et al. (2013) report about an initiative, X-culture, taken by a large group of university teachers who have established global virtual student collaboration projects of two months where over 6,000 students from nearly 80 universities in 43 countries gain direct experience with working together across cultures and time zones as part of their international management courses. Experiential learning is here at the fore with close dialogue and joint problem solving in the shared assignments. Various assessments of the student teams showed positive outcomes of the virtual collaboration in the culturally diverse teams: reduced stereotyping and prejudice and improved performance based on gradual knowledge and understanding of those who tend to think and act differently from themselves. Holmes and O’Neill (2012) provide another example of experiential learning in a university context. They use an ethnographic method to study university students in a business faculty while they were enrolled in a course in intercultural communication. Their understanding of intercultural competence draws on concepts introduced by Michael Byram (see section 3 above). All 35 students in the course, a third were New Zealand citizens and two thirds were foreign students on exchange, got an assignment that required them to engage and emotionally involve themselves with a stranger from another culture over at least six meetings. They were asked to write field notes on their “lived experiences” with the Cultural Other, and based on them to write a kind of research report with introspection, self-reflection and interpretation of the intercultural encounters, and on their awareness of any intercultural competence or the obvious lack of it. The students were required to use a PEER model in their collection of empirical material and analysis of it: 1. Prepare (the intercultural encounter), 2. Engage (with the Cultural Other over a period of time and in various contexts), 3. Evaluate (based on concepts and models introduced in the course) and 4. Reflect (on their abilities to establish and maintain a relation and to learn from the intercultural encounter). The PEER model accommodates the same flexibility as Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, and also here the process can be continued and repeated for further cultural learning. Reflexivity is here, like in many other works within intercultural education, presented as a strategy for acquiring intercultural competence and as a key learning goal so that students become aware of their own cultural assumptions and develop an openness and tolerance to cultural differences. But how easily do individuals get direct access to their emotions and their cognitive patterns, and how do they master to establish a critical distance from their own standpoints? In her conceptual paper on reflexivity in relation to intercultural education, Blasco seriously questions the assumption that people are able to act as their own “remedial change agent or inner consultant” (Blasco 2012: 475) and can access the self and through introspection fix own prejudices and ‘cultural blindspots’ without any guidance. Here is a parallel to the point made by Gertsen & Søderberg (2010) who

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stated that a culturally skilled mentor was needed to coach expatriates when they shared experiences with critical cultural encounters. The authors have questioned the pre- and post-tests based on students’ selfreports that were used in the study by Eisenberg et al. (2013). But students’ ethnographies of their intercultural encounters also have some limitations since their written research reports are an inherent part of the course assessment. The students may try consciously to demonstrate a culturally intelligent behavior and base their reflections on the intercultural encounters on the literature introduced in the course in order to get a good grade, even when their teachers encourage them “to report openly and honestly on the nature of their intercultural competence” (Holmes & O’Neill 2012: 716). This is an example of how teacher accounts on cultural learning processes do not include reflections on the inherent power relations in the educational setting. However, it is commendable that Holmes and O’Neill (2012) take the initiative to an experience-based self-evaluation of the students’ own intercultural competence and develop a model that can be used in other educational settings. In the future hopefully there is inclusion of accounts from the Cultural Others of how they perceived the intercultural encounters and the cultural competencies of the students in the intercultural communication class mobilized for establishing and maintaining a contact with them.

6.2 Cultural learning in the field of cross-cultural management As already indicated in the sections above, research within international business and cross-cultural management has focused much on selection and cultural training of international assignees and on expatriates’ cultural adjustment during their international assignments. It is surprising how little interest scholars and companies have taken in studying how professionals learn from being expatriated. Only few scholars directly address the developmental objectives and benefits of international assignments. Below I will review two empirical studies of cultural learning that are based on narrative interviews since it is a novel approach to grasp how managers perceive and interpret critical events in cross-cultural encounters and potentially learn from them. The first study (Gertsen & Søderberg 2011) has a focus on the stories told by expatriates about the cultural challenges met during international assignments, stories that also account for misunderstandings and failures that may present excellent learning opportunities. The second study (Gertsen & Søderberg 2010) focuses on how storytelling in itself can be a method to stimulate cultural learning processes that can enable people to become better leaders and make them communicate and collaborate in more competent, sensitive and effective ways across different cultural contexts. Based on a corpus of around 300 interviews generated in the context of a more comprehensive qualitative study of intercultural collaboration and learning in five multinational companies of Danish origin, Gertsen and Søderberg (2011) argue that

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narrative interviewing can be used as a method of inquiry to study individuals’ potential learning processes triggered off by critical events. They initiate their interviews by asking, for example, Western expatriate managers in China: “What are your most significant experiences from collaboration with Chinese colleagues? Can you think of something particularly surprising, frustrating, difficult, positive, thought-provoking?” They ask similar questions on intercultural interaction and collaboration with Western expatriate managers to the local Chinese managers they interview. The differences between the stories told about intercultural business collaboration show that narratives do not mirror reality. The stories rather offer an insight into the narrators’ experiences as they recall them at the time of the interview. Furthermore, they give an impression of the different ways in which various managers retrospectively interpret and try to make sense of their experiences. Gertsen and Søderberg (2011) also argue that a narrative analysis of the interviews may deepen our understanding of managers’ sensemaking of critical events and their cultural learning in an international business context since it shows the shifts and differences in the managers’ projects, alliances and oppositions as these appear in their interview accounts. Focal points are identified in analyses of the plots constructed by the interviewed managers: situations where change, learning and progress in the intercultural collaboration process are particularly likely to have taken place. Such emotionally laden situations, which may be characterized by anger or other kinds of unease, may eventually lead to a change of action and recognition of new dimensions of the experienced problems that may also improve the intercultural collaboration. When individuals think, feel, and act in an ethnocentric manner, i.e. in accordance with a conviction that their own model of the world is the only correct one, they run the risk of contributing to conflicts and misunderstandings when interacting with culturally different others whose ideas and behaviours are different from what they were used to. To the extent that they find their own ways of feeling, understanding, and acting essentially better than those of others, they will tend to tell stories where people with other cultural backgrounds are presented as strange or even adversarial. Although it is hardly possible to be completely free of ethnocentrism, a more complex understanding of one’s own cultural embeddedness makes it easier to switch off one’s “cultural autopilot” or “cruise control” (Thomas & Inkson 2009: 46) and to look at cultural encounters from different angles. In this way, it is possible to start metacognitive processes that may result in a reconfiguration of the cognitive model one holds of the world and of oneself. Stories told from such a point of departure will be likely to represent culturally different others in a non-judgmental manner and deal more constructively with the emotions that appear in cross-cultural interactions. In another study of expatriate stories about cultural encounters, Gertsen and Søderberg (2010) suggest that the process of narrating in itself may be a way to enhance the narrator’s reflection on cultural encounters – his/her metacognition.

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They stress that narration does not automatically lead to metacognition and enhanced cultural intelligence in the fullest sense of these notions, but it has some potential in this respect. When recounting a stressful conflict in connection with a cultural encounter, the narrator almost automatically reflects upon its causes and upon the motivations or intentions of the people involved. In some cases, reflection on the interplay of different cultural identifications – the narrator’s own as well as other people’s– can thus provide an explanation and possibly ideas for handling a similar future situation. Troublesome events may thus provide an impetus for cultural learning, the working out of new interpretive schemes, and an awareness of alternative courses for action. A perceived cultural conflict, experienced as something negative when it took place, may eventually – after reflecting upon the incident and its implications – be reiterated and told in a more richly faceted manner, providing a “thicker” description of the cultural encounter and the social relations involved, thus creating new possibilities for intercultural collaboration (Freedman & Combs 1996). Gertsen and Søderberg (2010) therefore suggest that both scholars and practitioners in global companies look more into narration as an active means of stimulating cultural learning and the development of cultural intelligence. Telling the tale of an ambiguous situation may assist the narrator in creating a deeper understanding of a situation characterized by uncertainty and complexity – as cultural encounters often are. Narrative therapists (Freedman & Combs 1996) have studied the “dominant stories” clients tell about their lives and social relationships, and the meanings they attach to the problems for which they are seeking help. Together with their clients, therapists investigate the effects and influences these dominant stories have for past, present, and future actions. They assist their clients in externalizing their problems and separating them from themselves in order to allow them to consider their attitudes towards a problem. Very often “dominant stories” allow little space for complexities and contradictions; on the contrary they consist of “thin description” of actions, obscuring other possible meanings. Focus in narrative therapy is thus on deconstructing and “re-authoring” dominant problematic stories and developing “preferred stories” with an alternative plot and a richer and ‘thicker’ description of lives and relationships. It is worthwhile considering if some of the key ideas behind narrative therapy could be applied to the development of cultural learning, for instance in connection with programs of cross-cultural training and knowledge exchange in MNCs as well as in repatriation debriefing sessions.

7 Concluding remarks In today’s globalizing world it is extremely important that still more people become able to deal reflectively with cultural encounters, learn from them and thereby develop cross-cultural competencies and skills to bridge across cultural divides,

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whether they are engaged in face-to face communication or make use of information and communication technologies in virtual collaboration. In this chapter I have looked into various approaches used when teaching and training students and business people in order to prepare them for the increasing cultural complexity in global collaborations. A didactic approach where emphasis solely is on the cognitive dimension of learning when intercultural communication and international business topics are taught is still predominant both at universities and business schools, and in culture training in business settings. It means that many students and managers are only told about cultural issues and introduced to cultural concepts and theories, but not put in situations that require any emotional engagement or any experiments with adjusting and changing behaviours to a specific socio-cultural situation. A truly didactic approach with a focus on abstract conceptualizations is not sufficient if the learning goal is to obtain a deeper understanding of other cultures and the Cultural Others, and a higher degree of cultural self-awareness. As emphasized in Kolb’s model of experiential learning processes (Kolb 1984), learning takes its point of departure in concrete experiences, but needs to be followed by reflective observation, conceptualizations and active experimentation. Cultural learning through intercultural competence development is thus an ongoing and never-ending process. Recent studies of experiential learning in international business (e.g. Taras & Gonzalez-Perez 2014) build on these insights. Whereas Kolb and his followers tend to prioritize the cognitive dimension of learning, in this chapter I have put emphasis on learning as a tension field involving a cognitive dimension of knowledge and skills, a psychodynamic dimension of motivation and emotions, and a social dimension of communication and cooperation, all three embedded in a societally situated learning context (Illeris 2002). What is still missing in most models of cultural learning processes are questions that lead to considerations about the specific contexts for cultural learning and the power relations between those who get involved in intercultural interactions that may evoke strong emotions. When existing ideas and cognitive patterns are triggered in cultural encounters they may create motivation to find new ways to cope with challenging and immediately frustrating situations and thereby adapt existing cognitive patterns and learn how to bridge across perceived differences by changing behaviours. Telling stories about an ambiguous situation may assist the narrator in creating a deeper understanding of a situation characterized by uncertainty and complexity – as cultural encounters often are. Cultural trigger events (Reichard et al. 2015) can be a starting point for cultural learning. But narration does not suffice since an audience may also just confirm the storyteller’s negative attributions to the Cultural Other and thereby block any further learning. Therefore it is important that learners are supported by somebody who can act as a buddy or a coach and assist them in conceptualizing their emotionally laden

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experiences and thereby facilitating a cultural learning process that also includes active experimentation. A host country mentor may help both exchange students and expatriates when abroad, whereas culturally diverse teams at a workplace may be assisted by an internal or an external consultant in finding common ground. A perceived cultural conflict, experienced as something negative when it took place, may eventually – after reflecting upon the incident and its implications – be reiterated and told in a more richly faceted manner, providing a “thicker” description of the cultural encounter and the social relations involved, thus creating new possibilities for intercultural collaboration (Freedman & Combs 1996; Gertsen & Søderberg 2010). As already stated there is a dearth of empirical studies of cultural learning processes in various educational and business settings. Most studies are still based on tests, experiments, simulations and brief field trips where students are used because they are easily accessible for the scholars. Research within international business and human resource management has focused much on selection and cultural training of international assignees. In contrast scholars and companies have taken little interest in studying how professionals learn from being expatriated. Moreover, much literature is oriented towards cultural encounters between people from two distinct national cultures, such as Danish expatriate managers collaborating with Chinese managers and employees in a Chinese subsidiary of a MNC (Gertsen & Søderberg 2011), or Dutch engineers collaborating virtually with Indian engineers in an offshore outsourcing context (Marrewijk 2010). Yet, the globalizing world is characterized by much greater cultural complexity (national cultures, organizational cultures, professional cultures etc.), and we need empirical studies of cultural learning processes that include greater cultural diversity, both within and between groups. We have to take the multiple cultures into account when reflecting on how cultural learning processes can be facilitated since we have more culturally diverse groups among students and at the domestic workplaces. Virtual team collaboration is also a new trend, both in universities (Taras et al. 2013), and not least in global business, and global research and development projects. But how do we teach in a global classroom and assist a culturally diverse group of people in collaborating virtually in ways that facilitate cultural learning processes? And how do we study trans-situated learning processes where people are separated by multiple boundaries (functional, geographical and/or organizational) (Vaast & Walsham 2009), in contrast to situated learning processes where students or colleagues share the context of study or work and interact face-to-face? We need richer understandings of the nature of intercultural dialogue and cultural learning in virtual settings. We also have to take into consideration that, viewed from a national perspective, many of the learners are no longer mono-cultural. Due to increased migration and geographical mobility of the workforce, an increasing number of students and business people are rather bicultural and bilingual, which means that they can

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potentially shift with much more ease between different linguistic and cultural patterns and thereby serve important functions as translators, mediators and boundary-spanners. Some students and business people must even be considered “global cosmopolitans” since they are not embedded in any specific national context, but have learnt from extensive international experience and therefore often tend to consider change and challenges as good opportunities for learning (Brimm 2010). But it is still understudied what impact different cognitive patterns of biculturalism and multiculturalism may have on people’s further learning capabilities.

8 References Ang, Soon, Linn Van Dyne, Christine Koh, Kog Yee Ng, Klaus J. Templer, Cheryl Tay & N. Anand Chandrasekar. 2007. Cultural intelligence: Its measurement and effects on cultural judgment and decision making, cultural adaptation and task performance. Management and Organization Review 3. 335–371. Bennett, Janet M. & Riika Salonen. 2007. Intercultural communication and the new american campus. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 39(2). 46–50. Bhawuk, Dharm P. S. 2009. Intercultural training for the global workplace: Review, synthesis, and theoretical explorations. In Rabi S. Bhagat & Richard Steers (eds.), Handbook of culture, organization, and work, 462–488. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bird, Allan. 2014. Introduction: Experiencing the world. In Vas Taras & Maria Alejandra GonzalezPerez (eds.), The palgrave handbook of experiential learning in international business, 3–11. New York: PalgraveMacmillan. Black, J. Stewart & Mark E. Mendenhall. 1989. Selecting cross-cultural training methods: A practical yet theory-based model. Human Resource Management 28. 511–40. Blasco, Maribel. 2012. On reflection: Is reflexivity necessarily beneficial in intercultural education? Intercultural Education 23(6). 1–15. Brannen, Mary-Yoko & David C. Thomas. 2010. Bicultural individuals in organizations: Implications and opportunity. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management 10(1). 5– 16. Brimm, Linda. 2010. Global cosmopolitans: The creative edge of difference. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: INSEAD Business Press, PalgraveMacmillan. Byram, Michael. 1997. Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Caliguiri, Paula. 2012. Cultural agility. Building a pipeline of successful global professionals. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Carraher, Shawn M., Sherry E. Sullivan & Madeline Crocitto, M.. 2008. Mentoring across global boundaries: An empirical examination of home- and host-country mentors on expatriate career outcomes. Journal of International Business Studies 39. 1310–1326. Deardorff, Darla. 2006. Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization. Journal of Studies in International Education 10(3). 241–266. Earley, Chris & Soon Ang. 2003. Cultural intelligence: Individual interactions across cultures. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eisenberg, Jacob, Hyun-Jung Lee, Frank Brück, Barbara Brenner, Marie-Therese Claes, Jacek Mironski & Roger Bell. 2013. Can business schools make students culturally competent? Effects of cross-cultural management courses on cultural intelligence. Academy of Management Learning and Education 12(4). 603–621.

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Fitzsimmons, Stacey R., Christof Miska & Günther K. Stahl. 2011. Multicultural employees: Global business’ untapped resource. Organizational Dynamics 40(3). 199–206. Freedman, Jill & Gene Combs. 1996. Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. New York: Norton. Gertsen, Martine C. & Anne-Marie Søderberg. 2010. Expatriate stories about cultural encounters − a narrative approach to cultural learning processes in multinational companies. Scandinavian Journal of Management 26. 248–257. Gertsen, Martine C. & Anne-Marie Søderberg. 2011. Intercultural collaboration stories. On narrative inquiry and analysis as tools for research in international business. Journal of International Business Studies 42(6). 765–786. Gertsen, Martine C., Anne-Marie Søderberg & Mette Zølner. 2012. Global collaboration: Intercultural experiences and learning. Cheltenham and New York: PalgraveMacmillan. Holmes, Prue & Gillian O'Neill. 2012. Developing and evaluating intercultural competence: Ethnographies of intercultural encounters. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 36(5). 707–718. Illeris, Knud. 2002. The three dimensions of learning – Contemporary learning theory in the tension field between the cognitive, the emotional and the social. Roskilde: Roskilde University Press. Jassawalla, Avan R., Nader Asgary & Hemant C. Sashittal. 2006. Managing expatriates: The role of mentors. International Journal of Commerce and Management 16(2). 130–140. Kolb, David A. 1984. Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Lenartowicz, Thomas, James P. Johnson & Robert Konopaske. 2014. The application of learning theories to improve cross-cultural training programs in MNCs. The International Journal of Human Resource Management 25(12). 1697–1719. Lücke, Gundula, Tatiana Kostova & Kendall Roth. 2014. Multiculturalism from a cognitive perspective: Patterns and implications. Journal of International Business Studies 45. 169– 190. Marrewijk, Alfons van. 2010. Situational construction of Dutch-Indian cultural differences in global IT projects. Scandinavian Journal of Management 26(4). 368–380. Mendenhall, Mark E., Jenny Osland, Allan Bird, Gary Oddou & Martha Maznevski. 2008. Global leadership: Research, practice, and development. London: Routledge. Mezias, John M. & Terri A. Scandura. 2005. A needs-driven approach to expatriate adjustment and career developing: A multiple mentoring perspective. Journal of International Business Studies 36. 519–538. Ng, Kok-Yee, Linn Van Dyne & Soon Ang. 2009. From experience to experiential learning: Cultural intelligence as a learning capability for global leader development. Academy of Management Learning & Education 8(4). 511–526. Reichard, Rebecca J., Shawn A. Serrano, Michael Condren, Natasha Wilder, Maren Dollwet & Wendy Wang. 2015. Engagement in cultural trigger events in the development of cultural competence. Academy of Management Learning & Education 14(4). 461–481. Shapiro, Jon M., Julie L. Ozanne & Bige Saatcioglu. 2008. An interpretive examination of the development of cultural sensitivity in international business. Journal of International Business Studies 39. 71–87. Stevens, Michael, Allan Bird, Mark E. Mendenhall & Gary Oddou. 2014. Measuring global leader intercultural competency: Development and validation of the Global Competencies Inventory (GCI). In Joyce S. Osland, Ming Li & Ying Wang (eds.), Advances in global leadership. Vol. 8, 115–154. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Taras, Vas, Dan Caprar, Daniel Rottig, Riikka M. Sarala, Norhayati Zakaria, Fang Zhao, Alfredo Jiménez, Charles Wankel, Weng Si Lei, Michael S Minor, Paweł Bryła, Xavier Ordeñana,

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Alexander Bode, Anja Schuster, Erika Vaiginiene, Fabian Jintae Froese, Hanoku Bathula, Nilay Yajnik, Rico Baldegger & Victor Zengyu Huang. 2013. A global classroom? Evaluating the effectiveness of global virtual collaboration as a teaching tool in management education. Academy of Management Learning & Education 12(3). 414–435. Taras, Vas & Maria Alejandra Gonzalez-Perez (eds.). 2014. The Palgrave handbook of experiential learning in international business. New York: PalgraveMacmillan. Thomas, David C., Efrat Elron, Günther K. Stahl, Bjørn Z. Ekelund, Elizabeth C. Ravlin, Jean-Luc Cerdin, Steven Poelmans, Richard Brislin, André A. Pekerti, Zeynep Aycan, Martha Maznevski, Kevin Au & Mila B. Lazarova. 2008. Cultural intelligence: Domain and assessment. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management 8(2). 123–143. Thomas, David T. & Kerr Inkson. 2009. Cultural intelligence: Living and working globally. 2 nd revised edition. San Francisco: Berrett Koehler Publishers. Thomas, David C., Yuan Liao, Zeynep Ayçan, André A. Pekerti, Elizabeth C. Ravlin, Günter K. Stahl, Mila B. Lazarova, Henry Fock, Denni Arli, Miriam Moeller, Tyler B. Okimoto & Fons van de Vijver. 2015. Cultural intelligence: A theory-based, short form measure. Journal of International Business Studies 46. 1099–1118. Vaast, Emmanuelle & Geoff Walsham. 2009. Trans-situated learning: Supporting a network of practice with an information infrastructure. Information Systems Research 20(4). 547–564.

Shuang Liu

20 Cross-cultural adaptation: An identity approach Abstract: This chapter addresses the questions of how immigrants and sojourners search and negotiate identities in the host culture context and how different identity negotiation strategies are related to their cross-cultural adaptation experiences. It critically reviews theories of identity and identity negotiation from the perspectives of social psychology, sociology, and communication. Emphasis is given to context, which influences cross-cultural adaptation outcomes. Identity negotiation takes place within the context of both intra- and intergroup relations; and context can exert strong influence on the choice of strategies that immigrants choose to simultaneously navigate through different cultural frameworks. The chapter highlights the point that identity and belonging might not be synonymous and that immigrants’ identity negotiation is a journey, rather than a destination. Keywords: acculturation, blended identity, cross-cultural adaptation, shifted identity

1 Introduction Significant flows of immigrants worldwide over the past decades make identity and cross-cultural adaptation central to intercultural communication research. Historically, immigration was conceptualized as restricted cross-border movements of usually unskilled, often contracted laborers who sought for permanent resettlement in a new country. Modern-day immigration, however, is no longer considered a oneway journey, but instead, immigrants are continuously coming or going across borders. They engage economically, socially, culturally, and politically in their host country while at the same time maintaining close connections with people and events in their home country. Contemporary immigration and transmigration therefore calls for the need to take a new look at cultural identity that straddles multiple spheres beyond the geographic divide. Living between two or more cultures and dealing with demands from different and potentially incompatible cultures can be psychologically and socioculturally challenging. Managing multiple cultural identities is a highly complex process which involves negotiations at the individual, group, community, institutional and even national levels. Regardless of reasons for moving to a new country all immigrants undergo the process of acculturation and cross-cultural adaptation. The term acculturation refers to the process of change arising from sustained contact between two or more cultures (Redfield, Linton & Herskovits 1936). This conceptualization of acculturaDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-020

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tion has generated a plethora of research on cross-cultural adaptation of immigrants, sojourners, asylum seekers, refugees, and international students. Cross-cultural adaptation is defined as “the dynamic process by which individuals, upon relocating to new, unfamiliar, or changed cultural environments, establish (or reestablish) and maintain relatively stable, reciprocal, and functional relationships with those environments” (Kim 2001: 31). Although the types of acculturative outcomes that can be studied may vary considerably, the two most extensively researched outcomes are psychological and sociocultural adaptation. The former refers to affective responses to adjustment including self-esteem, emotional satisfaction, and well-being whereas the latter refers to the behavioral aspects of adjustment required for dealing successfully with daily life problems and social interactions in a new cultural environment (Ward & Kennedy 1994). Research has found that immigrants typically prefer to integrate into their new country, such that they develop material and emotional connections to the host society while still maintaining ties to their home culture (Berry et al. 2006). Identity is at the core of immigrants’ integration because the fundamental question they need to address is how they define themselves culturally (by ethnic culture or by host culture) and how they relate to others in the host country (to host nationals or their ethnic group). Successful integration is reported to be positively related to psychological well-being (e.g. life satisfaction), better sociocultural adjustment (e.g. school adjustment), and greater economic security (e.g., finding jobs; Ward & Kus 2012). In contrast, those who fail to integrate into their host culture are at elevated risk of depression, unemployment, and anti-social behavior including drug use, violence and crime (Gorinas 2014; Harris & Feldmeyer 2013). However, despite numerous studies indicating that integration is most preferred, limited research has examined the process through which integration is achieved (Ward & Geeraert 2016); even less research has investigated under what conditions initial desire to integrate might change over time (Eller, Abrams & Gomez 2012). Given that immigrants’ life prospects are shaped by their integration experiences and that integration is crucial to the maintenance of a prosperous, diverse, and socially cohesive society, it is crucial to understand why some ethnic groups are more likely to be in conflict with host nationals than others, and why within the same ethnic group some individuals experience identity conflict while others identity harmony (Liu 2015b). This chapter discusses cross-cultural adaption experiences of immigrants and sojourners from an identity perspective. It critically synthesizes theories on identities and their applications in research on acculturation and cross-cultural adaptation over the past decades. Although dominant acculturation models theoretically consider the impact of the host society in shaping cross-cultural adaptation of immigrant groups, previous research tends to be based on the assumption that immigrants have the freedom to pursue the adaptation strategy they prefer in the host society. In practice, this is not necessarily true. The chapter highlights the fluid

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nature of identity, emphasizing the importance of context in influencing identity negotiation, challenges the conventional notions of biculturalism, and identifies directions for future research on cross-cultural adaptation.

2 Identity reconstruction in cross-cultural adaptation Throughout our lives we form multiple identities based on our membership in various social groups (e.g. age group, sports club, political party, professional groups and so forth). In attempting to understand who we are culturally and socially, intercultural researchers have observed patterns of behavior that internalize and externalize identities in various contexts (Berry 2005). The discussion of identity in this chapter, however, focuses on ethnic and cultural identities as they are directly related to cross-cultural adaptation. Ethnicity is a key indicator that immigrants use to mark cultural affiliation. Ethnic identity involves a subjective sense of belonging to or identification with an ethnic group and it is more closely related to ancestry (Ting-Toomey 2005). In a broad sense, cultural identity is defined as “identification with and perceived acceptance into a group that has shared systems of symbols and meanings as well as norms/rules for conduct” (Collier & Thomas 1988: 113). Cultural identity represents one’s internalization of the culture’s worldview or framework and that it includes one’s interpretation of the values, norms and goals that are normative in that culture. These internalized cultural frameworks will implicitly or explicitly shape much of the individual’s behavior. Despite variations in theoretical perspectives, identity related research addresses the fundamental issues of self, collectivity, society and the interplays between them. Since social psychology and sociology have set the agenda for much of the theorizing about identity, it is not surprising that the communicative approach traces its heritage to these two fields.

2.1 Theorizing identities Social identity theory underpins much of the theorizing about identity. The premise of social identity theory is that identity formation is a product of social categorization (Hogg & Abrams 1998: 68). Individuals form identities based on memberships of various social groups categorized by gender, ethnicity, occupation, religion, and so forth. Through this process, society is internalized by individuals in the form of social identities. Social identity theory (Tajfel 1981: 255) contends that our sense of who we are (identity) influences and is influenced by the groups we belong to; this group-based social (cultural) identity influences how we see ourselves (selfconcept) and others (outgroup perception). Social identities thus connect individu-

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als to society through group memberships and influence individuals’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in their relationships with members of other social groups (Hecht et al. 2005). As a result, the basic unit by which the individual-society relation is examined is a social group. Social identity theory emphasizes social aspects of identity and group processes over individual aspects. Within the framework of sociology, identity theory focuses more on individual roles in the individual-society relationship and explains the relationship between an individual and society on the basis of roles. A role refers to “the functions or parts a person performs when occupying a particular position within a particular social context” (Schlenker 1985: 18). Roles may be multiple and can change throughout an individual’s life. Since a person’s role involves a pattern of social behavior that conforms to the expectations of others and to the demands of the context, role identities are formed in opposition to and in relation to others. This view has a long history dating back to Mead (1934: 152) who spoke of a self that emerges in relation to a “generalized other”. Similar to Goffman’s (1969: 28) theatrical metaphor of backstage and front stage, individuals exercise control over which role to perform under what situation, although this negotiation of the self has various personal and social constraints. Similar to social identity theory, identity theory sees the individual and society as inseparable and interdependent. The communicative approach is largely influenced by theories from social psychology and sociology, in that it complements role identity theory by acknowledging identity as relational and at the same time utilizes notions of group-based identities and categorization from social identity theory (Kim 2008). Communication theory of identity views social behavior as the enacted identity and that a person’s sense of self is defined and redefined in communication. In other words, identity is formed, maintained, and modified in communicative processes (Hecht et al. 2005). However, what distinguishes the communicative approach from other perspectives is that it situates identity in social interaction. Specifically, first the theory rests on the belief that identity is formed when relevant symbolic meanings are attached to and organized in an individual through social interaction (identity theory). Second, it proposes that when people place themselves in socially recognizable categories, they validate through social interaction whether or the extent to which those categories are relevant to them (social identity theory). Put it another way, identity is formed and reformed through categorization in social interaction (Spreckels & Kotthoff 2007). In this sense, the communication theory of identity views the group and social roles as important aspects of the self, and the categorization processes are one of the bases by which identity is established and enacted through communication (Hecht et al. 2005).

2.2 Theorizing identity negotiation Individuals who are in cultural transition (e.g. immigrants) experience identity change and undergo identity reconstruction. Communication researchers have

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made a significant contribution to advancing theories of identity negotiation. One of the widely known theories of identity negotiation is developed by Ting-Toomey who defines identity as “reflective self-images constructed, experienced and communicated by the individuals within a culture and in a particular interaction situation” (2005: 217). Identity negotiation theory assumes that human beings in all cultures desire both positive group-based and individual-based identities in any type of communicative situation. The concept of negotiation is defined as “a transactional interaction process whereby individuals in an intercultural situation attempt to assert, define, modify, challenge, and/or support their own and others’ desired self-images” (Ting-Toomey 2005: 217). During an intercultural encounter individuals avow the particular identities they wish to assume for themselves (e.g. Chinese American), and ascribe the identities they assign to other interlocutors (Collier & Thomas 1988). Ting-Toomey’s model proposes that during identity negotiation self-identification is mediated on the identity continuum of security-vulnerability, inclusion-differentiation, predictability-unpredictability, connection-autonomy, and consistency-change. Cultural identity has two components: value and salience (Ting-Toomey 2005). The value content refers to the standards cultural members hold when evaluate behaviors. For instance, individuals who identify with individualistic cultures tend to value behaviors that embody independence, self-advancement, individuality, and direct communication style, whereas those who identify with collectivistic cultures would value group orientation, collective responsibility, harmony, and indirect communication style. Identity salience refers to the strength of affiliation members have with their cultural group. As value and salience are separate components, tensions might exist between a person’s physical attributes or ethnic origin and his/her psychological feeling of belonging to the ethnic group, together with the values he or she cherishes. Intercultural communication scholars agree that cultural identity is more of a subjective classification than an objective one; it is the extent to which group members feel emotionally bonded by a common set of values, beliefs, traditions and heritage (Ting-Toomey 2005). Second generation immigrants are less likely to feel as close a bond to their heritage cultural traditions as first generation immigrants, even though they share the same physical attributes and may use the ethnic language at home. Identity management theory, developed by Imahori and Cupach (2005), advances a relational perspective on identity. Relational identity is born out of shared culture, that is, “a privately transacted system of understandings” that helps people to coordinate meanings and behaviors (Wood 1982: 76). It is a specific sense of “we’ rather than “you and I” that is shared in a given relationship (Imahori & Cupach 2005). Similar to identity negotiation theory, identity management theory also acknowledges the crucial role of communication competence “to successfully negotiate mutually acceptable identities in interactions” (Cupach & Imahori 1993: 118). Since its development in the early 1990s, this theory has provided a heuristic

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framework to aid our understanding of identity management in intercultural interactions. The theory postulates that people may experience face threat when their cultural identities are constrained because of being stereotyped or only being seen in terms of a particular category. Such face-threatening tendency is referred to as “identity freezing”, which occurs when individuals avow an identity that differs from the one ascribed to them by others (Imahori & Cupach 2005: 199). In such situation individuals need to apply strategies to manage the discrepancies between self-concept and others’ perceptions of them. Effective identity management is believed to result from competent facework because face is the communicative reflection of people’s relational and cultural identities. Therefore, identity management theory contributes to the understanding of competent communication by clarifying the relationship between identity management and facework strategies within the context of relational development. Identity management occurs across the developmental stages of a relationship (Cupach & Imahori 1993). For instance, at the initial phase of identity management, some immigrants may simply decide that the costs stemming from their cultural differences are too great for them to maintain an intercultural relationship. As a result, they avoid intergroup contact by choosing to live in neighborhoods densely populated by co-ethnics. They patronize ethnic groceries stores, speak the ethnic language whenever they can, socialize with co-ethnics, and consume media products in ethnic language (e.g. internet, movies, radio, television, newspapers). The second phase of identity management involves finding the balance between selfface and other-face dialect. During the second phase of identity development, immigrants may try to build their relationship with the locals based on commonalities, as they stay longer in the host country. Such commonalities include common interests (e.g. love of Asian food), joint activities (e.g. sports), mutual need fulfillment (e.g. collaboration at work) and the like. The third and final phase of identity management is characterized by the increased ability of intercultural interlocutors to work out face dialectics and increased rule convergence based on salient relational identity. Therefore, competent identity negotiation requires appropriate and effective behaviors and cultural identity support that are mutually satisfying to the participants in a relationship (Cupach & Imahori 1993).

2.3 Strategies of identity negotiation Core assumptions of identity negotiation theories are that individuals in all cultures or ethnic groups have the basic motivation needs for identity security, inclusion, predictability, connection and consistency on both group-based and individual-based identity levels (Ting-Toomey 2005). People feel included when their desired group membership identities are positively endorsed, and identity consistency tends to be experienced in a familiar cultural environment. During cultural transition, immigrants experience identity change or even identity loss, which

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could result in a sense of exclusion, at least in the early stage of their settlement in the new country (Liu & Simpson-Reeves 2016). Identity negotiation, therefore, takes place to enable them to come to terms with the changing self and environments (Brockhall & Liu 2011). Successful identity negotiation outcomes include feelings of being understood, respected, and affirmatively valued. Based on the widely applied acculturation model (Berry 1997, 2005) which identified four acculturation strategies (assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization), Ting-Toomey (2005) proposed a fourfold model of ethnic and cultural identity. Immigrants who identify strongly with ethnic tradition maintenance and at the same time incorporate values and practices of the larger society internalize the bicultural identity (integration). Integrators feel comfortable being members of both cultural groups. Immigrants who identify weakly with their ethnic traditions and values but identify strongly with the values and norms of the larger culture adopt the assimilated identity option (assimilation). Immigrants who identify strongly with their ethnic traditions and values and identify weakly with the values of with the values of the dominant culture subscribe to ethnic-oriented identity (separation). Separationists emphasize retaining their ethnic practices and avoid interacting with the dominant group. Finally, those who identify weakly with their ethnic traditions and also the larger culture are in the marginal identity state. During the process of acculturation and cross-cultural adaptation, initial identity strategies adopted by individuals might change as a result of exposure to the host culture for a longer time or experiences of interacting with host nationals, co-ethnics, and other immigrant groups. It needs to be noted that identity option is not simply a choice determined by immigrants; the larger cultural environment plays an important role in shaping their self-concept as well as how they believe they are viewed by other groups in the society, particularly the mainstream cultural group (Liu 2011). Cultural identity, therefore, is not given and fixed, but rather, it is constantly negotiated and reconstructed. The impact of host culture context on immigrants’ acculturation strategies and identity orientations is well reflected in the case of Australia. A major impetus for Australian immigration following its initial post-convict settlement was the discovery of vast goldfields that attracted a mass influx of immigrants in the 1850s, coupled with the extension of parliamentary democracy and the establishment of inland towns. During the Gold Rush era of 1851 to 1860, early migration peaked at arrivals of around 50,000 people a year; but more restricted immigration began by the 1880s, at the start of the movement known as White Australia. The White Australia Policy was strongly assimilationist, and reflected the belief at that time that a population must be culturally homogeneous to be truly egalitarian and democratic (Liu & Simpson-Reeves 2016). Pressure to assimilate was applied both to immigrants and to the indigenous population, so that the dominant Anglo-Celtic group came to be seen as “native” Australians. Given Australia’s orientation to assimilation at that time, immigration research then focused on assimilation; that is, immi-

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grants’ relinquishing their own cultural identity for the sake of adopting the cultural identity of the majority. One of the best known early Australian researchers in the area of immigration is Ronald Taft who led a series of systematic studies in the 1950s. Those studies used Taft’s assimilation model to explain the changes which occurred in individual immigrants during the process of their cross-cultural adaptation (Taft 1986). The findings showed that although interactionism (mutual tolerance of cultural differences between immigrants and host nationals) was generally preferred over monism (immigrants attempting to be absorbed culturally and socially into the mainstream cultural group), monism was rated higher by AngloAustralians (Taft 1986). Those findings highlighted the need for immigrants to compromise between what they wanted to be and do, what they were capable of being and doing, and how much opportunity was offered to them by their social environment to attain their aspirations. Modern day immigrants in Australia and in other parts of the world, particularly those who live in a multicultural environment, are encouraged to maintain their ethnic cultural traditions and at the same time participate in the mainstream society. Many ethnic groups have formed distinct speech communities which serve as markers of their cultural membership and an extension of their ethnic cultural identity in the host society. However, debates exist surrounding what immigrants should do to maintain their bicultural or multicultural identities in different cultural contexts. LaFramboise, Coleman and Gerton (1993: 399–400) claim that exposure to more than one culture can help to develop “alternating” (also called shifted) identity or “fused” (also called blended) identities. The alternating model is similar to code-switching, but differs from the assimilation model in that it assumes an orthogonal relationship between the individual's home and host cultures (LaFramboise, Coleman & Gerton 1993). Although the alternating model does not assume a hierarchical relationship between two cultures, in practice, the individual does not value or prefer both cultures equally across various contexts. The fusion model, on the other hand, represents the assumptions that cultures sharing an economic, political, or geographic space will fuse together until they are indistinguishable to form a new culture (LaFramboise et al. 1993). A typical example of “shifters” came from a Chinese gift shop owner who described his integration as being a cultural chameleon: “If you are in a flock of sheep, you need to look like a sheep; if you are among a pack of ducks, you need to look like a duck” (Liu 2011: 410). While “shifters” are able to move between cultures, more recent research on 1.5 generation Chinese immigrants (those who migrated as children) has found that they might behave in culturally incongruent ways in response to cultural cues, i.e. they feel and act more Chinese in Australia and more Australian in China (Liu 2015b). Other examples of “shifted identities” came from long-term Greek immigrants in Australia, who were expected to meet expectations imposed upon them to become “New Australians” in those early days of immigration (Brockhall & Liu 2010). Because of their strong affinity with their

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homeland and their desire to be accepted by the host culture, they made distinctions between two selves, the public and the private. At home, they spoke their ethnic language, ate Greek food, and lived by Greek traditions. In public, they performed to the expectations of others in the host culture (e.g. spoke English language and observed the norms of the mainstream society). Although identity conflict was present at times, many of them developed an array of mechanisms for dealing with the potential incompatibility and learned to shift their behavior to fit into the particular cultural context they were in. One interesting way of examining identity fusing is to look at how immigrants continuously create new configurations of identification with “home” in both places. Salih (2003: 53) conducted research on Moroccan women living in Italy. Writing about their cooking practices, Salih showed how these women incorporated elements of both countries’ cuisines to symbolize their double identities in homes here and there. When in Italy, the women mixed traditional Italian recipes with Moroccan ingredients to enliven the dishes; and conversely, returning to Morocco for holidays, Italian foods were used in the preparation of local Moroccan meals. Rather than seeing the women’s identities in relation to specific homes as mutually exclusive, Salih demonstrated how the meaning of home was defined through interactive transnational identifications, stretching across geographic boundaries. Research on the cultural identity of third culture individuals shows that participants who described their identity as a blend of different cultures incorporated elements of two or more cultures they had experienced into a single, blended identity (Moore & Barker 2012). Blended or fused identities are different from shifted identity in that the former does not compartmentalize elements of different cultures, but instead integrates different elements from each culture to form a third cultural identity which is larger than the sum of its parts. “Blenders”, on the other hand, believe that integration is a process of creating a new cultural identity that has aspects atypical of either home or host culture, but larger than the sum of its parts. With regard to identity conflict, findings are inconsistent. The study on Muslim youth in New Zealand conducted by Ward and Kus (2012) found that those with a blended identity experienced less identity conflict as compared with “shifters”; other studies reported that shifting bicultural individuals did not experience identity conflict more than the blenders (e.g., Liu 2015b). One thing “blenders” and “shifters” have in common is that they both fit in the integration profile proposed by Berry (2005).

3 Debates over bicultural identity and biculturalism If integration was defined as identification with both home and host cultures, the state of being integrated would be manifested in biculturalism. The concept of bicultural or multicultural individuals is based on the idea that a person can success-

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fully hold two or more cultural identities, speak two or more languages (be bilingual or multilingual) and function effectively in two or more cultures (be bicultural or multicultural). While a bicultural person might not necessarily be proficient in speaking both languages (bilingual), a bilingual person is presumably bicultural. Bicultural individuals include international students, expatriates, business people, immigrants including their descendants (e.g. second generation who are born and raised in their parents’ host country), refugees, or children born to interracial marriages. Categorization of who is and who is not bicultural is commonly based on self-identification, such as “I’m bicultural”, or “I’m Italian and American”, or “I’m an Italian-American”, reflecting an individual’s bicultural orientation. Intercultural scholars argue that biculturalism goes beyond the coexistence of two cultures and languages within one person, but involves integrating and synthesizing two cultures into a new, unique bicultural identity that is not directly reducible to either original culture (Cheng, Lee & Benet-Martínez 2006). Other terms such as multicultural man, universal man, international man, cosmopolitanism, and cultural hybrid share a common characteristic of a non-dichotomous and non-rigid definition of the self and the other. Kim (2008) uses the term intercultural personhood to define a special kind of personal orientation which possesses internal attributes that are not defined rigidly by any single culture. In sum, the term bicultural entails an individual’s ability to synthesize norms from two or more cultures to incorporate them into one behavioral repertoire or the ability to switch between cultural schemas, norms and behaviors in response to context.

3.1 Costs and benefits of bicultural exposure One issue that is often theoretically and empirically debated is whether biculturalism is beneficial. Previous research findings have been inconsistent regarding the subjective experiences involved in acquiring and negotiating two or more languages and cultures. Multicultural exposure can be conducive to the development of intercultural competence, which refers to the ability to function effectively and appropriately in mixed cultural contexts (Benet-Matínez 2012). However, other researchers argue that the process of dealing with more than one culture and acquiring more than one behavioral repertoire can cause stress, isolation, and identity confusion because bicultural individuals could be blamed by both cultural groups for not being representative enough of their culture (Moore & Barker 2012). A recent international meta-analysis based on 83 studies and over 23,000 participants indicates that findings are mixed with regard to the direction and magnitude of the association between integration (biculturalism) and cross-cultural adaptation outcomes (Nguyen & Benet-Martínez 2013). In addition, cross-sectional effects might diminish or even be reversed over time. There has been an ongoing debate surrounding the costs and benefits of exposure to more than one culture on identity development of children who moved to

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another culture before they were socialized into one culture. Some of the early work in this area considered bilingualism and biculturalism to be psychologically handicapping and stressful. The belief is that being socialized into more than one culture hindered children’s cognitive development and academic achievement (Vivero & Jenkins 1999). Other researchers argue that bicultural children are more likely to display advanced reasoning (e.g. seeing both sides of an argument and understanding multiple perspectives on complex issues), and hence biculturalism has a positive impact on their intellectual development (Benet-Martínez & Haritatos 2005). Even within a single study on multi-racial children, there are inconsistent findings: some children with mixed cultural backgrounds reported that they were able to alternate between cultural identities to adapt to the situational requirement, but others expressed cultural confusion as they were unable to reconcile the different cultural expectations (Hoesting & Jenkins 2011). Those mixed results suggest the need to further identify the contextual factors that contribute to bicultural or multicultural identity development. An important issue is how bicultural individuals experience and organize their different, sometimes opposing, cultural orientations. Does biculturalism mean the progressive fading of home cultural identity or the strengthening of the home but not host cultural identity, or the strengthening (weakening) of identification with both cultures? Understanding the identity processes within bicultural or multicultural individuals is important, as it helps us to account for the outcomes shown to be associated with biculturalism. Intercultural scholars have made some attempts to understand bicultural identity processes. Notably, the concept of Bicultural Identity Integration (BII; Benet-Martinéz et al. 2002) seeks to capture the extent to which bicultural individuals perceive their home and host cultural identities (e.g. Chinese and American) as compatible and integrated (high BII) versus oppositional and separate (low BII). Cheng, Lee and Benet-Martínez (2006) conducted a study to examine how the valence of cultural primes affects cultural frame switching of bicultural individuals, using a sample of 179 first-generation and 41 second generation Asian American biculturals. They used an implicit word-priming task that included one of four types of words: a) positive words associated with Asians, b) negative words associated with Asians, c) positive words associated with Americans, or d) negative words associated with Americans. The findings indicated that when exposed to positive cultural cues, biculturals who perceived their cultural identities as compatible (high BII) responded in culturally congruent ways, whereas biculturals who perceived their cultural identities as conflicting (low BII) responded in culturally incongruent ways. The opposite was true for negative cultural cues. These results confirmed that cultural frame-switching process is different depending on one’s level of BII and both high and low BIIs can exhibit culturally congruent or incongruent behaviors under certain situations. However, BII (and other frameworks of bicultural identity) does not explain how distinctive identities can be reconciled.

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3.2 Differentiation between identity and belonging There are also debates over whether bicultural identity means equal identification with two cultures. Recent research on second generation Chinese in Australia, for example, found that those bicultural individuals do not equally identify with the two cultures they are exposed to (Liu 2015a: 124). In other words, biculturalism is not a mid-point on a continuum with monoculturalism in heritage culture at one end and monoculturalism in host culture at the other. The choice of one culture over another is primarily facilitated by contextual conditions. Just because an individual is exposed to the bicultural environment (e.g. inter-racial children; second generation immigrants), it does not necessarily mean that person will develop a bicultural identity. This is because cultural identity has value and salience components. An individual who lives in a multicultural environment could still act as a mono-cultural person. This argument is supported by findings from a study on Hispanic youth in Miami (Schwartz & Zamboanga 2008). This study surveyed a sample of Hispanic young adults in Miami and assessed cultural practices, values, and identifications, along with other culturally salient variables such as familial ethnic socialization, acculturative stress, and perceived discrimination. Although Miami is a highly bicultural and bilingual environment, with business and social transactions occurring in both English and Spanish, a sizeable number of respondents in this study rated themselves as assimilated (mostly American) or separated (mostly Hispanic). Interestingly, the most fully bicultural (those who were above 75 per cent of the range of scores on both heritage and American cultural practices) self-reported that they integrated their Hispanic and American cultural streams; at the same time they also reported the highest levels of familial ethnic socialization. Findings from this study confirmed that while a bicultural or multicultural context plays a significant role in paving the ground for biculturalism to emerge, active and intentional efforts to socialize into more than one culture form an integral part of the development of bicultural or multicultural identities. Acculturation theorists have associated hyphenated identities with integration. However, integration into the host culture does not necessarily suggest individuals’ equal level of attachment to or identification with both cultures. In studying hyphenated identities among the second-generation Chinese in Canada and the Netherlands, Bélanger and Verkuyten (2010) argued that hyphenated identities should not simply be equated with integrated acculturation profile as acculturation theorists suggest. Their findings showed that second-generation immigrants exemplified Dutch or Canadian identity when they were expected by the majority group to do so. They wanted to be accepted by the mainstream cultural group, but they expressed a strong sense of belonging to their ethnic group. Further evidence supporting that identity and belong are not synonymous came from a study conducted by Liu (2015b) on Chinese immigrants in Australia. Findings from interviews with first, second and 1.5 generation Chinese showed that majority of them self-identified as Chinese Australian or Australian Chinese, with only a small number of the

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respondents identified either as Chinese or Australian only. Although hyphenated identity was a commonly accepted category by respondents, they considered hyphenated identity as involving the coexistence, rather than the merging, of two cultures. The Australian identity component was derived from citizenship and extended period of residence in Australia. However, the Chinese identity component was derived from something much deeper: ancestry, beliefs, values, and families; in other words, the Chineseness was “in the blood”, which was difficult to change, if not impossible. Hence, those studies indicate that bicultural identity is interpreted as encompassing coexistence of two cultures rather than the merging of two cultures.

4 Directions for future research on cross-cultural adaptation Previous research on acculturation and cross-cultural adaptation tends to view identity as a product that immigrants have rather than an open-ended process that is continuous, stretched, and without clearly defined boundaries. Despite the proliferation of literature, a number of issues remain insufficiently addressed, including the fluid nature of identity processes (Liu 2015b), the impact of context on acculturation strategies, and benefits and costs of biculturalism. Identity is formed and negotiated during the process of communication. An individual is free to selfidentify with various groups at multiple levels, yet the pool of possible selves that one can negotiate with has various personal and social constraints. The individual and society are inseparable and identity negotiation, as a product of social interaction, usually has to adhere to the expectations of others (Hecht 2005). Moreover, the prevailing research on immigrants’ acculturation tends to focus on new arrivals or younger generations. Less is known about how older immigrants, both those who migrated at an old age and those who grew old in a foreign land, search for a sense of place in the host country. Bearing this in mind, this chapter identifies two main areas for further research in the area of acculturation and cross-cultural adaptation.

4.1 Process oriented research on cross-cultural adaptation We need research to delineate the essential qualities and core processes of integration in contemporary multicultural society. Acculturation involves change within a particular cultural context; but limited studies have systematically examined acculturation “as a dynamic process and how this process is affected by its ecological context” (Ward & Geeraert 2016: 98). Existing dominant acculturation models explain identity and group membership in terms of dualities, i.e. we define what

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and who we are vis-à-vis what and who we are not. In the context of modern-day immigration and transmigration, the complexities of acculturation processes defy the neat boundaries of the dominant dichotomous models. Contemporary society is very different from what it was 50 years ago when the dominant acculturation models were first developed based on the assumptions that acculturation involved a small number of immigrants who needed to adapt to a monolithic national culture. Moreover, social, economic composition of the migrant population worldwide (e.g., education, skill base, occupation, and economic status) and the mobility of migrants today are very different from what they were decades ago. Exactly how contemporary immigrants engage in integration process and the implications for the evolution of both home and host cultures is the key question for immigration research in a multicultural society (Fuligni 2010). It is time for us to explore the process through which modern day migrants achieve integration in a host culture already influenced by waves of multi-ethnic migrants over several generations. Recent qualitative and mixed method approaches signify a shift to elucidating acculturation processes. The Cultural Day Reconstruction Method, for example, used diary studies to examine the range of cultural engagements identified by individuals living in multicultural contexts (Doucerain, Dere & Ryder 2013). Similarly, identity maps were used to encourage acculturating individuals to present their identities through pictorial expressions (Ward 2013). Some scholars suggest replacing the bi-dimensional model with a network approach which recognizes that individuals’ cultural engagements are partial and fluid, whether the engagements are with one or multiple cultures (Morris, Chiu & Liu 2015). As a sizable population in the world is and will be bicultural and multicultural, intercultural research on identities is becoming increasingly interested in how culture is negotiated within individuals, in addition to documenting cultural differences between groups. This shift of research focus calls for process-oriented studies that acknowledge the complex interplay among identity, language, and contextual variables.

4.2 Successful integration of aging immigrants Population aging is a worldwide phenomenon, having reached an unprecedented scale, and it will continue to increase in the forseable future in both developed and developing countries. Older migrants who come to settle in the receiving country are aging alongside the rest of the rapidly growing aging population. Broadly speaking, there are two groups of older immigrants: those long-term migrants who grow old in the host country, and those who migrated at an older age (65+ ), including those who left their homeland to join their relatives or children’s family in a foreign country. Both groups of immigrants face the challenge of cross-cultural adjustment in the context of aging (e.g. loss of valued social networks back in the home country, difficulties in locating a new sense of self in the host country, and language barriers). Indeed, research shows that older immigrants often feel that

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they belong to neither where they come from, nor where they are residing (Liu & Simpson-Reeves 2016). Although this might apply to immigrants of all ages, such feeling tends to be stronger for older immigrants who become more dependent on other people in their late years (Meijering & Lager 2014). Adjusting to change can lead to acculturative stress, as manifested in increased levels of depression, reduced self-esteem, lower perceived quality of life, and health problems. Clearly, aging immigrants experience a sense of identity loss and resolution of this state, involving some form of identity reconstruction, is required for successful cultural and identity transition. It has been widely recognized that a diverse aging population presents major challenges to aged care services, not to mention the challenges for individuals, families, and communities. This is because differences in beliefs, values, and worldviews due to life experiences under different economic, social and cultural contexts may lead to variations in expectations of aging and aged care. Meeting these expectations requires social support, family support, community care, and intergenerational communication; all of which can become conducive to the successful aging of older immigrants. However, most research on immigrants tends to focus on younger populations, second generations or new arrivals, leaving us with very limited knowledge of how older migrants deal with cross-cultural adjustment and aging in a foreign land simultaneously. Elderly immigrants’ identity change processes are central to social connectedness in important ways, because the social (cultural) groups from which they derive those identities shape their sense of belonging and how they relate to others in intergroup situations, and by extension, well-being (Jetten et al. 2009). Recent research in older adults from Western cultures shows how central group processes and social identities are to psychological adjustment in response to life changes (Haslam, Cruwys & Haslam 2014). However, these processes and interventions need to be understood, adapted, and implemented for ethnically and culturally diverse communities. Effectively capitalising on communication within the family, between generations and between ethnic groups to facilitate identity change for aging immigrants will open a new avenue for turning social isolation into social connectedness, thereby facilitating cross-cultural adaptation and enhancing well-being.

5 Conclusion Immigrants’ integration into the host society is a lifelong journey. Successful integration is linked to social connectedness and psychological well-being (Liu 2015b). In contrast, those who fail to integrate into the larger society are at elevated risk of depression and social isolation (Ward 2008). However, the process of identifying with and navigating through two or more cultures is not straightforward. Our knowledge of integration is largely based on Berry’s (1997) bi-dimensional model.

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In an era of increasing border crossing and intercultural contact, integration becomes more complex; so do identities. The development of bicultural or multicultural identity is a product of cultural and contextual forces. These forces are not constant, but rather change over time; they vary across local and national contexts, and may operate differently depending on the ethnic group and the mainstream cultural context in question. Previous research has shown that membership in an ethnic or cultural group does not necessarily always translate into identification. Skin color, for example, does not automatically guarantee cultural identification. The larger cultural environment plays an important role in influencing the strength of identification. This view may apply to not only immigrant groups but also indigenous cultural groups whose dialects have become minority languages within the context of the majority populations. Research on communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia, for example, shows that there are many negative stereotypes associated with speakers of an Aboriginal dialect, such as being linked with lower levels of intelligence and education (Eades 2013: 47). Such negative perceptions of Indigenous people discourage their younger generations to maintain their own language (which is inseparable from culture), even though they bear the physical characteristics of the cultural group. Although it would be beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups, this area is worthy of further research in the area of cross-cultural adaptation and identity. Understanding the process of identity negotiation during cultural transition has important theoretical implications: it can explain why some ethnic groups are more likely to be in conflict with host nationals than others, and why some individuals within the same ethnic group experience identity conflict while others identity harmony. Knowledge of identity integration has tangible social benefits to the receiving society. A cohesive and inclusive society cannot be maintained if immigrants do not develop a sense of belonging or become full participants in mainstream social, economic and cultural networks. Research on cross-cultural adaptation will not only advance intercultural communication theories but will also help policy makers to develop evidence-based programs that can use integration as a cultural catalyst to achieve positive psychological, social, and economic outcomes. These outcomes, in turn, will enhance the receiving society’s capacity to manage diversity and sustain social cohesion.

Further Readings Breugelmans, Seger & Fons Van de Vijver. 2004. Antecedents and components of majority attitudes toward multiculturalism in the Netherlands. Applied Psychology 53(3). 400–422.

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McKay-Semmler, Kelly & Young Y. Kim. 2014. Cross-cultural adaptation of Hispanic youth: A study of communication patterns, functional fitness, and psychological health. Communication Monographs 81(2). 133–156. Sasson-Levy, Orna & Avi Shoshana. 2013. “Passing” as (non)ethnic: The Israeli version of acting white. Sociological Inquiry 83(3). 448–472.

6 References Bélanger, Emmanuelle & Maykel Verkuyten. 2010. Hyphenated identities and acculturation: Second-generation Chinese of Canada and the Netherlands. Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research 10(3). 141–163. Benet-Martínez, Verónica. 2012. Multiculturalism: Cultural, social, and personality processes. In Kay Deaux & Mark Snyder (eds.), Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology, 623–648. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benet-Martínez, Verónica V. & Jana Haritatos. 2005. Bicultural identity integration (BII): Components and psychosocial antecedents. Journal of Personality 73. 1015–1050. Benet-Martínez, Verónica, Janxin Leu, Fiona Lee & Michael Morris. 2002. Negotiating biculturalism: Cultural frame switching in biculturals with oppositional versus compatible cultural identities. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 33. 492–516. Berry, John W. 1997. Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. Applied Psychology 46. 5–34. Berry, John W. 2005. Acculturation: Living successfully in two cultures. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 29. 697–712. Berry, John W., Jean S. Phinney, David L. Sam & Paul Vedder. 2006. Immigrant youth: Acculturation, identity and adaptation. Applied Psychology: An International Review 55(3). 303–332. Brockhall, Ferdinand & Shuang Liu. 2011. Performing new Australians: Identity (re)construction of long-term Greek and Cypriot immigrants in Australia. China Media Research 7(1). 16–24. Cheng, Chi-Ying, Fiona Lee & Verónica Benet-Martínez. 2006. Assimilation and contrast effects in cultural frame-switching: Bicultural identity integration (BII) and valence of cultural Cues. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 37. 742–760. Collier, Mary & Milt Thomas. 1988. Cultural identity: An interpretive perspective. In Young Y. Kim & William B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication, 99–122. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Cupach, William R. & Tadasu T. Imahori. 1993. Identity management theory: Communication competence in intercultural episodes and relationships. In Richard L. Wiseman & Jolene Koester (eds.), Intercultural communication competence, 112–131. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Doucerain, Marina M., Jessica Dere & Andrew G. Ryder. 2013. Travels in hyper-diversity: Multiculturalism and the contextual assessment of acculturation. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 37. 686–699. Eades, Diane. 2013. Aboriginal ways of using English. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Eller, Anja, Dominic Abrams & Angel Gomez. 2012. When the direct route is blocked: The extended contact pathway to improving intergroup relations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 36. 637–646. Fuligni, Andrew J. 2010. The benefits and challenges of belonging. International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development Bulletin 2. 19–21. Goffman, Erving. 1969. The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin Books.

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Schlenker, Barry R. 1985. Introduction: Foundation of the self in social life. In Barry R. Schlenker (ed.), The self and social life, 1–28. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schwartz, Seth J. & Byron L. Zamboanga. 2008. Testing Berry’s model of acculturation: A confirmatory latent class approach. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 14. 275–285. Spreckels, Janet & Helga Kotthoff. 2007. Communicating identity in intercultural communication. In Helga Kotthoff & Helen Spencer-Oatey (eds.), Handbook of intercultural communication, 416–439. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Taft, Ronald.1986. Methodological considerations in the study of immigrant adaptation in Australia. Australian Journal of Psychology 38(3). 339–346. Tajfel, Henri. 1981. Human groups and social categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ting-Toomey, Stella. 2005. Identity negotiation theory: Crossing cultural Boundaries. In William B. Gudykunst (ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication, 211–233. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Vivero, Veronica N. & Sharon R. Jenkins. 1999. Existential hazards of the multicultural individual: Defining and understanding cultural homelessness. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology 5. 6–26. Ward, Colleen. 2008. Thinking outside the Berry boxes: New perspectives on identity, acculturation and intercultural relations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 32. 114–123. Ward, Colleen. 2013. Probing identity, integration and adaptation: big questions, little answers. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 37. 391–404. Ward, Colleen & Nicolas Geeraert. 2016. Advancing acculturation theory and research: The acculturation process in its ecological context. Current Opinion in Psychology 8. 99–104. Ward, Colleen & Antony Kennedy. 1994. Acculturation strategies, psychological adjustment, and sociocultural competence during cross-cultural transitions. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 18. 329–343. Ward, Colleen & Larissa Kus. 2012. Back to and beyond Berry’s basics: The conceptualization, operationalization and classification of acculturation. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 36. 472–485. Wood, Julia T. 1982. Communication and relational culture: Bases for the study of human relationships. Communication Quarterly 30. 75–83.

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21 Intercultural friendship and communication Abstract: Globalization has increased the frequency of intercultural contact worldwide, and with it, the potential for intercultural friendship. A prime arena for intercultural friendship is international higher education. Friendships between international and domestic students have multiple benefits for sojourners and hosts; however, a third or more of international students have no meaningful contact with host nationals. Factors influencing intercultural friendship formation include cultural similarity in general, cultural differences in friendship conceptualizations in particular, culture-specific communication skills (e.g., skills related to relationship development), and culture-general communication skills (e.g., language proficiency). In addition, sojourners’ and hosts’ motivations, attitudes, identity, personality, and intercultural competence affect the likelihood of intercultural friendship formation. Although the basic building blocks of intercultural friendship have been outlined, much still waits to be explored. With friendship’s ability to reduce prejudice and optimize intergroup contact, it ranks among the most meaningful topics to elucidate. Keywords: intercultural friendship, intercultural communication, interpersonal communication, intergroup contact, cross-cultural friendship patterns, cross-cultural communication patterns, international students, international student integration

1 Introduction Globalization has increased the frequency of intercultural contact worldwide. Whether sojourns are temporary or migrants move permanently to a new location, this contact has increased the potential for intercultural friendship.

1.1 Definitions Culture has been defined in myriad ways, but a common tenet has been that culture is a set of attitudes, values, goals, and practices shared by a group (for an analysis of 313 definitions of cultures, see Baldwin et al. 2006). The current trend is toward a broad view of culture where ethnicity, race, religion, gender, class, an age group, an organization, and even a family can be seen as a culture. Research in the context of friendship, however, generally takes a narrower approach: Although DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-021

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intercultural friendship is sometimes used as an umbrella term to encompass interethnic, interracial, and cross-gender friendships, most often it refers to cultures as delineated by national boundaries. As with culture, definitions of friendship vary widely. The category width of the word friend in American English, for example, encompasses relationships ranging from close friendships to acquaintances. As a result, Americans, being asked how many friends they have, may give a number in the dozens, whereas respondents elsewhere give a number in the single digits. In other languages, the equivalent term for friend (e.g., German Freund) is usually reserved for close friendships (Gareis 2000), and most scholarship on intercultural friendship focuses on close friendships. However, even close friendships exhibit significant variation across cultures. Section 3 contains a detailed exploration of friendship definitions and cross-cultural differences.

1.2 Contexts of intercultural friendship research Separation from existing social networks, whether forced (e.g., due to war or persecution) or voluntary (e.g., due to schooling, work, or marriage), fosters the formation of relationships in the new environment. In the United States (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014) and presumably in many other countries, the age group with most social interaction is young adults, who are socially more active than other age groups and tend not to have pressing family and work obligations. Particularly, being away from home at college, with time to interact and in proximity to diverse others, offers prime opportunities to form friendships across cultural lines. Colleges around the world are internationalizing, especially by increasing numbers of international students. The leading destination country is the United States with a million international students (Institute of International Education 2015), followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Australia (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 2013). With almost half the world’s international students studying in Anglophone countries, not surprisingly much of intercultural friendship research focuses on the interactions between international and host-national students in these countries (e.g., Chen 2006; Kudo & Simkin 2003; Peacock & Harrison 2009; Ward, Masgoret & Gezentsvey 2009). This chapter therefore concentrates on intercultural friendship in the context of international higher education, although the basic findings on culture, communication, and other variables also apply in other contexts.

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2 Intercultural friendship in international higher education 2.1 Concerns A central predictor of sojourn satisfaction is contact with host nationals, in particular the meaningful and intimate contact found in friendships (e.g., Rohrlich & Martin 1991). Unfortunately, one of the uppermost complaints of study-abroad students throughout decades of research and across the major Anglophone receiving countries remains the lack of close contact with host nationals (e.g., Gareis, Merkin & Goldman 2011; Kudo & Simkin 2003). Studies consistently find that a third or more international students don’t have meaningful contact with host nationals. For instance, 35 % of international participants in a study in New Zealand reported that they had no New Zealand friends (Ward & Masgoret 2004); a study in the United States showed that 38 % of international students had no close American friends (Gareis 2012a); research in Australia determined that almost three quarters of international students had only superficial contact with Australians (Nesdale et al. 1995); and a study in the United Kingdom found that 83 % of sojourners had no close host-national friends (Bochner, Hutnik & Furnham 1985). Over half of international students worldwide hail from Asia (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 2013), with East Asia (foremost China) sending the largest contingent. It is often East Asian students who have the fewest host-national friendships in Anglophone countries. A study in the United States, for example, showed that 52 % of East Asians had no American friends, compared to 16 % of students from Northern and Central Europe and 10 % of international students from other Anglophone countries (Gareis 2012b). Although students adjust their social expectations when their sojourns are relatively short (Pitts 2009), the situation does not necessarily improve over time. Marginson, Nyland, Sawir, and Forbes-Mewett (2010) found that some student felt ongoing isolation, even after some time in the host environment. Likewise, friendship numbers and satisfaction levels did not change significantly across the 0–10 year sojourn range in a study by Gareis, Merkin, and Goldman (2011).

2.2 Benefits 2.2.1 Prejudice reduction and attitude change Intercultural friendship has unique benefits. Most prominently, intercultural friendship can reduce prejudice. According to Gordon Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis, four conditions foster positive contact between groups of different cultural backgrounds: equal status between the groups, common goals, no competition,

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and support of the authorities. Intercultural friendship meets all of these conditions. Thomas Pettigrew (1997: 183) suggests that it has special importance because it also involves long-term contact; thus the potential for friendship is “an essential, not just facilitating, condition of optimal intergroup contact.” Moreover, prejudice reduction cannot only be achieved by direct but also by indirect friendships where persons only knew an ingroup member with an outgroup friend or observed an in/ outgroup friendship. Through the extended contact effect, such indirect friendships result in less negative attitudes toward that outgroup (Page-Gould, MendozaDenton & Tropp 2008; Wright et al. 1997). In the context of higher education, Selltiz and Cook (1962) found early on that close, meaningful contact with host nationals improved international students’ attitudes toward host nationality and nationals. Likewise, Dziegielewska (1988) and Yum (1988) found that intercultural friendship enhances the image of the host culture. With international students often returning to their home countries to fill influential positions, improved attitudes toward host nationals and positive perceptions of the host country can play important roles in fostering international good will and collaboration.

2.2.2 Adjustment and sojourn success Navigating a new culture without a support system often exerts significant psychological and emotional stress on sojourners (Hotta & Ting-Toomey 2013). Intercultural friendships with host nationals can alleviate acculturative stress (Poyrazli et al. 2004), reduce intergroup anxiety (Page-Gould, Mendoza-Denton & Tropp 2008), and aid cross-cultural adjustment (Zhang & Goodson 2011). In the context of international students, intercultural friendship is linked to stronger language skills, improved academic performance (Ward & Masgoret 2004), and better retention and graduation rates (Mamiseishvili 2012). Overall, sojourners have a more positive mood (Furnham & Erdmann 1995), are more satisfied (Rohrlich & Martin 1991), and experience less homesickness (Hendrickson, Rosen & Aune 2011).

2.2.3 Benefits for destination society Intercultural friendships not only enhance the life satisfaction of people new to a culture, they also enrich the experience of host nationals by facilitating an international outlook. In particular in the context of higher education, interaction of domestic with international students is a prime opportunity to gain cross-cultural knowledge, an enhanced global perspective, and international networks.

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3 Factors influencing intercultural friendship formation 3.1 Cultural similarity The interactants’ cultural differences in intercultural friendship pose challenges. According to the similarity-attraction effect (Byrne 1969), friends from the same culture tend to share the same race, ethnicity, age, sex, educational level, marital status, and social class. However, the similarity-attraction effect is more pronounced in individualistic cultures where the focus is on self-identity as opposed to collectivistic cultures where people are attracted to role rather than personal attributes (Ting-Toomey 1989). While some cultures are relatively similar due to shared histories and traditions (e.g., the United States and Canada), others differ markedly (e.g., the United States and China), making it more difficult for interactants to communicate and overcome barriers to friendship formation. This phenomenon is illustrated by the lower friendship numbers and satisfaction levels of Asian as compared to European and Anglophone students in Anglophone countries (Gareis 2012a; Ward & Masgoret 2004). Cultural similarity gives attributional confidence and reduces uncertainty, because behaviors of culturally similar others are consistent with expectations and are easier to explain. This is especially the case during the initial stages of intercultural contact (Douglas 1994; Kim, H. J. 1991; Lee & Boster 1991). By contrast, the later affective and stable stages tend to have a personalistic focus, with each person being treated uniquely and cultural dissimilarities retreating into the background (Gudykunst 1985b; Gudykunst, Nishida & Chua 1987).

3.2 Communicative competence 3.2.1 Culture-specific communication Cultural differences being less pronounced in the later stages of intercultural contact, the aspects of communicative competence of particular importance are the ones that bridge the gap between the initial and later, stable stages of relationship development (Gudykunst 1985b), including contact initiation, self-disclosure, and the expression of support. With respect to culture-specific communication, research often focuses on the contrast between the collectivistic cultures of the East and the individualistic cultures of the West. In East Asian cultures, one’s friends are often predetermined by the social relationships into which one is born (Heine, Foster & Spina 2009; Hofstede 2011: 225). The concomitant communication patterns are implicit communication (China), little value on oral interaction (Japan), and an exceptional regard for

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status and position (Korea) (Chen 2006). These patterns are not helpful for contact initiation in individualistic cultures where the set of social skills necessary for establishing friendships includes small talk and other competencies related to verbal expression – skills that may not be part of East Asian sojourners’ or migrants’ repertoire (Trice 2007). Although self-disclosure is a common characteristic of friendship around the globe, its rate and amount differ between cultures. Individualistic cultures generally employ an explicit, low-context communication style; in collectivistic cultures, implicit, high-context communication is preferred (Hall 1976). This results in lower levels of verbality in East Asia, including the depth of self-disclosure (e.g., Chen & Nakazawa 2009; Won-Doornink 1991). Additionally, in the East, self-disclosure is subject to regulation due to the importance of saving face, whereas Western cultures are characterized by more revealing interpersonal exchanges (Goodwin & Lee 1994). Hastings (2000), for example, showed that Indians avoid disclosure (i.e., self-suppress) in their friend relationships and view extensive talk and the expression of direct and extreme viewpoints in U.S. Americans unfavorably. Research has also shown cultural differences in the expression of support. A study on U.S. Americans and Chinese found that Americans use verbal and nonverbal expressions of appreciation evenly, whereas Chinese favor nonverbal expression (Bello et al. 2010). Likewise, scholarship comparing love expression between the United States and other countries (including other cultures in the West) have shown that, in the United States, verbal expression of affection is more common, direct, and applied to more relationships (including friends) than elsewhere (Gareis & Wilkins 2011; Wilkins & Gareis 2006).

3.2.2 Expressiveness and gender as a specific consideration Within the United States, the genders have been likened to distinct cultures: Females prefer expressive, intimate talk and spend time in conversation; males prefer instrumental talk and spend time with activities, such as sports (e.g., Tannen 1990). More recently, the degree of difference has been called into question (Burleson 2003), and it has been shown that cultural and ethnic differences in communicating emotional support outweigh gender differences (e.g., Mortensen 2005). In some other cultures, gender differences mirror those traditionally reported for the United States: For example, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women appear to be less guarded in self-disclosure than men (Barry 2003); Kenyan women use more nonverbal immediacy than men (Santilli & Miller 2011); and females in Brazil expect more emotional involvement in friendships than males (Morse 1983). However, there are also cultures, in which no gender differences are apparent. Berman, Murphy-Berman and Pachauri (1988) found that females and males in India, for example, did not differ in overall disclosure, activities, and how they loved their friends.

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The degree of expressiveness can also be explained by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s (2012: 87–99) cultural emotionality versus neutrality orientation. The orientation represents the degree to which individuals display emotions: In affective cultures (e.g., Kuwait, Egypt, Spain), people display feelings outwardly; in neutral cultures (e.g., Ethiopia, Japan, Poland), emotions are controlled.

3.2.3 Culture-general communication Culture-general communication can also affect intercultural friendship formation. One of the most prominent aspects of communicative competence is language proficiency. Although there is some evidence that sometimes intercultural friendships succeed despite a sojourner’s language proficiency issues (problems can even be a source of humor and play for the partners) (Sias et al. 2008), most research shows a connection between language proficiency and intercultural friendship development (e.g., Gareis, Merkin & Goldman 2011; Kudo & Simkin 2003; Ying 2002). Language competence affects the level of anxiety during initial meetings with strangers and the quality of communication during self-disclosure (Kudo & Simkin 2003; Ying 2002). A third of the students in a study in New Zealand believed that they were hindered by their English ability in making friends with host nationals (Ward & Masgoret 2004) and over three quarters of the international students in a study in the United States blamed themselves, including issues in language proficiency, for their lack of friendships with host nationals (Gareis 2012a). In addition, intercultural friendship formation is also aided by low intercultural communication apprehension; that is, the relative absence of fear or anxiety related to real or anticipated communication (Williams & Johnson 2011). Likewise, high scores in communicative adaptability have been linked to intercultural and interethnic interaction involvement (e.g., Samter 2003) and successful intercultural friendship formation (Gareis, Merkin & Goldman 2011). Communicative adaptability includes items related to personality (e.g., social relaxation, supportiveness, and enjoyment of social engagement), cross-cultural competence (e.g., appropriate self-disclosure), wit, as well as language proficiency (Duran 1983). Particularly the communicative adaptability components of other-orientation, sensitivity, and ability to provide positive feelings facilitate initiating and managing intercultural friendships (Chen 1992).

3.3 Friendship conceptualizations Friendship appears to be a universal or near-universal element of human cultures. Hruschka (2010), using the Probability Sample Files (PSF) (an anthropological database of 60 well-documented small-scale societies), found only five cases of highly collective cultures in which exclusive friendships are strongly discouraged (e.g.,

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the Kogi farmers of Colombia). In these cases, friendships are viewed as a threat to the broader community and as seeds for disruptive factions and conflicting loyalties. A closer look, however, reveals that even in these cultures friendships do arise, albeit more rarely and secretly (Hruschka 2010: 54–55). In the West, a friend is generally characterized as someone who helps, with whom you can share news of success and confidences, whom you can trust, who gives you emotional support, stands up for you, and makes you happy (e.g., Argyle et al. 1986; Hruschka 2010: 170–171). In addition, friendships in the West are typically voluntary relationships. This is in contrast to other societies (e.g., the Bangwa in Cameroon), where friendships are formally arranged and ritualistic (Brain 1976: 32–38). In other places, especially those with greater socioeconomic uncertainty, mutual material support takes precedent (Hruschka 2010: 181). For example, research found Russians exchanging more than three times as many favors with friends than Finns (Castrén & Lonkila 2004). Likewise, research found that, compared with the United States, Ghanaians were significantly more likely to emphasize practical assistance (Adams & Plaut 2003). In addition, two cultural value orientations influence friendship patterns. In universalistic cultures, someone would rather uphold the law than protect a friend; in particularistic cultures, someone would violate the law if a friend’s well-being depended on it (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner 2012: 41–50). Likewise, aspects of individualism related to friendship are independence, self-orientation, and low levels of obligation. Collectivism, by contrast, is marked by an emphasis on social relationships, other-orientation, and high levels of obligation. As a consequence, ties in individualistic countries are loose (Hofstede 2001: 225). In collectivistic countries, such as Japan and China, where friendships require the maintenance of interdependence (Markus, Mullally & Kitayama 1997), are expected to last and call on large amounts of friends’ resources, time, and loyalty (Gates 1987: 6).

3.3.1 The case of U.S. American friendship patterns Considering that Anglophone countries rank highest in individualism (Hofstede 2011: 215), it comes to no surprise that sojourners from many other countries experience difficulties adjusting to local friendship patterns. Orientation handbooks for foreign students often warn sojourners that American friendships are less intense and more short-lived than those in other cultures (e.g., Stewart & Bennett 2005: 100–103). The sentiment is echoed by international students who assert that – although Americans are friendly and open and that it is easy to initiate contact and have fun – friendships are superficial, non-committal, and don’t last long (e.g., Gareis 2012a; Trice & Elliott 1993). Similar evaluations can be found in historical and anthropological sources. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, wrote that individualism ([1840] 1961: 121–122)

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as well as restlessness and competitiveness ([1840] 1961: 161–165) weaken communal bonds in the United States. Basso (1979: 48) reports that Western Apache in the U.S. liken Anglo friendships to air because of their lack of depth and longevity. Du Bois (1956: 62–63, 93) describes U.S. friendships as high in spread and trust but low in obligation and duration. She cautions Americans about entering relationships with persons from high-obligation and high-duration cultures since, in such relationships, American openness and friendliness is often misinterpreted as a promise of closer involvement and results in disappointment on the part of the foreigners when this promise is not realized. Sojourner satisfaction is also affected by the personal intimacy needs. Although some participants in Gareis’ (1995: 129) study on German, Indian, and Taiwanese students in the United States were dissatisfied with their American friendships, blaming lack of depth and commitment, some others were quite content. The difference had its roots in sojourners’ intimacy needs: Of the participants with low intimacy needs and a preference for activities, all were content (and all were also male and studying in the sciences); of those with high intimacy needs, only some were content. It can be argued that the low obligation and duration of American friendships derives from a combination of factors. First, the American ideology of individualism and freedom runs counter to attachments and obligations. Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton (1985) suggest that Americans favor loose ties that don’t restrain their personal freedoms. Second, as a nation of immigrants, Americans have a history of breaking the ties of family and friendship and then forming new ones. Likewise, the American form of capitalism prizes mobility, which requires the ability to form and dissolve relationships (Fish 2010). The third factor is a unique interpersonal pattern where much of interaction in the United States occurs in the large public domain, with the innermost private layer being relatively thin. In other cultures, the public realm is the smaller one, and the threshold to private layers is clearly marked by rituals (e.g., the transition from the formal vous to the informal tu in French). Lewin (1948) envisioned the public and private layers as concentric circles around one’s innermost core. In the United States, some interaction patterns that are considered relatively intimate elsewhere (e.g., calling someone by their first name, being invited to someone’s home) occur in the public realm and do not indicate that the threshold to friendship has been crossed. Sojourners in the United States often misinterpret such informality as friendship, not realizing that they may not have crossed into the intimate inner layer yet; that is, they perceive an absence of depth in their friends, when, in fact, they may still be operating in the public realm. Baumgarte (2013) argues that close friendships in the United States have the same degree of intimacy as in other cultures. He suggests that other cultures’ friendships patterns (e.g., Korean and French) are marked by intervention (i.e., with friends considering it their duty to actively intervene in each other’s lives),

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exclusion (i.e., drawing a clear line between acquaintanceship and friendship), and realism (i.e., preferring straightforward frankness when talking with one’s friends). By contrast, Americans are independents, includers, and idealists – traits that can but shouldn’t be misinterpreted as superficiality and lack of commitment. Baumgarte’s (2013) positive reframing notwithstanding, some sojourners find their expectations unmet and have difficulties adjusting to U.S. friendship patterns. Expectancy violation with regard to friendship patterns can also accentuate the identity shock experiences of international students (Hotta & Ting-Toomey 2013). Even if sojourners are aware of host-culture patterns upon arrival, friendship and related communication styles are ingrained in one's identity. When one’s behavior repertoire doesn’t work anymore, and it is difficult to find connections with host nationals, sojourners therefore often retreat to easier affiliations with conationals and other internationals (Chen 2006).

3.4 Sojourner disposition 3.4.1 Conational and multinational networks The functional model of Bochner, McLeod and Lin (1977) posits that student sojourners have three networks: in order of salience, a conational network with a cultural maintenance function to affirm and express the culture of origin, a hostnational network with an instrumental function to facilitate academic and professional aspirations, and a multinational network with a recreational function. The model has been called into question by findings concerning the order of salience as well as the functionality of the networks. Studies have shown that multinational networks may be more salient than the host-national networks (Gareis, Merkin & Goldman 2011) and, if one includes weak ties (i.e., does not focus on only close friendships), that host-national networks may even be larger in size than conational networks (Hendrickson, Rosen & Aune 2011). In addition, Montgomery and McDowell (2009) found that the multinational network of students can provide academic, social, and emotional support; that is, fulfills multiple functions. The general consensus, however, is that conational and international networks play an important role for international students who usually enter the new country alone. These networks help sojourners through culture shock, provide comfort away from home, allow them to share common experiences and face the challenges of adjustment together, and offer companionship for exploring the new surroundings. These shared experiences give individuals common conversation topics and make budding friendships closer (Montgomery & McDowell 2009). Research shows that it is initial contacts with conationals that happen soon after arrival (e.g., through orientation programs or house hunting) which often become close friendships and last throughout the students’ sojourn (Brown 2009; Hendrickson 2015).

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In particular the bonding of international students from collectivistic cultures in Anglophone countries is also often aided by preexisting conational networks in the study location and the absence of peer support for venturing out to establish intercultural relationships (Paige 1983; Trice 2007). As a result, East Asian students have been found to spend most of their time with conationals (Trice 2007; Trice & Elliott 1993; Ward & Masgoret 2004). Some studies show that East Asian students in Anglophone countries can be quite happy in their conational networks. Chinese students in a study in New Zealand (Ward & Masgoret 2004), for example, were the least likely to want host-national friends. And Trice (2007) reports of Korean students in the United States who had developed an all-Korean infrastructure so extensive (including child care and medical support) that they rarely had to venture out.

3.4.2 Motivation and attitudes Whether or not international students make the effort to develop friendships with host nationals also hinges on the students’ sojourn goals. International students arrive in the host country with different motivations. On one end of the spectrum are cultural seekers, whose primary reason for studying abroad is meeting host nationals and learning about the host culture. On the other end are task-oriented students, who tend to concentrate on academics, remain anchored in the home culture, and are not as interested in host-national friendships (Gareis 1995: 136– 137; Paige 1983; Roland 1986). The motivation to reach out is further limited when students are married or arrive with families (Holmes 2005). Research also shows that pre-arrival expectations of difficulty (Searle & Ward 1990) and pre-arrival attitudes (Isabelli-García 2006; Ying 2002) predict future relations with host nationals. Attitudes can reflect the general meaning attached to intercultural relationships (i.e., whether they are taboo, tolerated, or celebrated in a particular culture) (Sorrell 2016: 106); but they can also be based on ethnocentrism, which weakens the motivation to interact with host-nationals in general or with specific subgroups (Arasaratnam & Banerjee 2007).

3.5 Host receptivity Host receptivity is a combination of attitudes, openness, and support of strangers in the host community. When host nationals welcome sojourners and are interested, patient, and empathic (e.g., by accommodating their speech patterns) (Kudo & Simkin 2003), the likelihood of intercultural friendship formation increases; it decreases when host nationals show little interest or willingness to engage. Sometimes the reasons for the lack of engagement are innocuous. Locals may not make an effort to reach out because they have established social networks or

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work and family commitments constraining their time. Research has also suggested that regional cultures within the host country differ in receptivity (Gareis 2012a; Ward & Masgoret 2004) and that metro-areas may be less conducive to friendship development than non-metro-areas (Gareis 2012a). In other cases, however, host nationals don’t engage when sojourners are seen as distant or as a threat, or when ethnocentrism and stereotypes are involved. Thus, for reasons of cultural and linguistic similarity as well as physical appearance, students from Anglophone countries and Europe are embraced more readily than others in Anglophone receiving countries (e.g., Gareis 2012a; Peacock & Harrison 2009; Ward, Masgoret & Gezentsvey 2009). The perceived distance is accentuated when culturally dissimilar sojourners are seen as banding together. Peacock and Harrison (2009: 506), for example, report that in a study in the United Kingdom, “the prevailing culture [of the host] student body … was one of passive xenophobia … Most international students were seen as culturally distant or selfexcluding, with few points of reference on which to base interaction.” Another barrier to intercultural contact initiation is stereotypes. Stereotypes of East Asians – the most researched group in the context of international higher education – range from smart, hardworking, and polite to quiet, socially inept, and unable to adapt (Ruble & Zhang 2013). While some of the stereotypes are clearly negative and, especially in the case of social ineptitude, can become self-fulfilling prophecies, the stereotype of Asians as a model minority can also have negative effects on intercultural friendship formation as it can create a sense of threat, with host nationals fearing a loss of educational, economic, and political opportunities (Maddux et al. 2008). Asian males have the additional disadvantage of being perceived as nerds and least likely to be approached for friendship (Zhang 2010). As a result, it is not uncommon that Asian students in interviews lament that host nationals “don’t talk to Asians” (Hotta & Ting-Toomey 2013: 559) or “don’t need to make Asian male friends” (Gareis 2012a: 319). Stereotypes can lead to mindsets that not only preclude friendship but also cause outright hostility and discrimination (Marginson et al. 2010; Ward & Masgoret 2004). A study in New Zealand, for example, has found that a large influx of Asian students and concomitant changes to neighborhoods and businesses that cater to students, spurred fears of a displacement of local culture and hostile attitudes on part of the local residents and media (Ward & Masgoret 2004).

3.5.1 Propinquity and infrastructure support The degree of liking between two persons increases with the frequency of interaction, known as the exposure effect (Homans 1950: 120). Sojourners’ extensive reliance on conational and multinational networks limits contact frequency and, in turn, curtails the chances of friendship development with host nationals (Ying

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2002). A large international student proportion at an institution fosters conational and multinational networks. Unfortunately, the greater is the density of internationals students, the more international students perceive their campus as less supportive (Zhao, Kuh & Carini 2005). Likewise, high density affects host attitudes. Ward, Masgoret, and Gezentsvey (2009) determined that the tipping point lies at 11 %; that is, an international student enrollment over 11 % is associated with more negative responses to international students by the hosts. Regardless of density, sojourners report being frustrated by structural constraints (e.g., heavy workload, culturally homogeneous work groups) (Trice 2007; Wright & Schatner 2013) as well as intra- and interpersonal constraints on leisure participation (e.g., cultural differences, language difficulties). In a study in the United States, Glass, Gómez and Urzua (2014) found that international students’ perception of a welcoming climate for recreation, leisure, and high-quality interactions was linked to increased socialization with host nationals, greater satisfaction with the academic environment, and attachment to the college. Students from East/Southeast Asia reported greater leisure constraints than students from South Asia and the Middle East/North Africa; students from Europe reported the least.

3.6 Identity, personality, and intercultural competence Similar to intracultural friendships, intercultural friendships provide affirmation and support for self-identities, both personal and cultural; but in intercultural friendships, culture is more salient and often requires extra attention. The identity validation model (Ting-Toomey 1986) explains that people interact with others to affirm their identities. Of the five types of identity (personal, cultural, balanced, marginal, and ambivalent), balanced identifiers are most likely to interact interculturally because they have clear personal and cultural identities; that is, they are confident in how they see themselves and others. Personal identifiers are not clear about their cultural identity, which hinders discussion about culture; and cultural identifiers are enmeshed with their culture, which impedes interaction with othercultural people. Ambivalent identifiers experience perpetual dialectical tensions between their identities, and marginal identifiers have few identities to validate. The model predicts that the latter are the least likely to interact interculturally. Researchers have also linked some personality traits to a greater number of intercultural friendships. These include sensation seeking (Morgan & Arasaratnam 2003), open-mindedness (Williams & Johnson 2011), empathy and social initiative (Woods et al. 2013), extraversion (Ying 2002), as well as intercultural competencies, such as familiarity with elements of deep culture (Kim, Y. Y. 1991; Ying 2002). Some of these traits are also part of the cognition, affection, behavior (CAB) paradigm for intercultural competence. The CAB paradigm posits that intercultural competence consists of cognitive, affective, and behavioral traits and skills. Recently, Spitzberg and Changnon (2009)

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analyzed publications on the CAB, however, and found not only conceptual inconsistency and overlaps among factors, but also an unmanageable number of components (64 cognitive/personality traits, 77 affective/attitudinal dimensions, and 127 behavioral/skill factors). More research on personality and intercultural competence is needed, specifically with respect to intercultural friendship formation. Promising focal points include patience, tolerance for ambiguity, sense of humor, and curiosity. Of particular interest may be the idea of the cultural fit. Ward and Chang (1997) investigated sojourner adjustment in terms of difference between subjects’ extraversion scores and host cultural norms. Although extraversion discrepancy was not linked to social difficulties, the researchers found that larger discrepancies in extraversion were associated with higher levels of depression.

3.7 Online communication Another area with little research is the effect of online communication on the initiation and maintenance of intercultural friendships. Initiating intercultural friendships purely online can have the advantage of allowing partners to focus on common interests, thoughts, and feelings, rather than physical appearance and other superficial concerns. Asynchronous online communication also gives nonnative speakers time to compose and decode messages, thus lowering anxieties related to language proficiency and eliminating the stress of fast turn-taking in oral communication. However, Hampton, Lee and Her (2011) found that, while users of social networking sites did have more diverse networks than non-users, they had fewer ties in local, traditional neighborhood settings. Likewise, Cacioppo (cited in Marché 2012 para. 27–28) argues that, for the most part, people use social networks, such as Facebook, to connect with old friends; that is, one’s face-to-face networks determine the depth of one’s online networks, not the other way around. He maintains that the greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier people. Similarly, the participants in a study by Hendrickson in Argentina (2015: 222) were not able to transform latent online ties with host nationals (i.e., indirect ties through someone else) into friendships. One student in the study commented that “she had 50 new Argentine friends on Facebook but no real Argentine friends” (Hendrickson 2015: 223). Online communication also allows international students to remain in frequent contact with home-country friends and family. Findings are inconclusive concerning the effect of frequent home-country contact on the friendship development with host nationals. Savicki (2010) found no relationship between the two. A student in a study by Hotta and Ting-Toomey (2013: 560), however, reports that her fellow sojourners “close themselves off, relying on long established friendships with friends back in their homelands.” The picture is rosier, when it comes to the use of online communication for the maintenance of already established friendships.

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After returning home, sojourners keep in touch with their host national friends largely through online social networks (Gareis 2015).

4 Challenges and future directions 4.1 Theory development A number of theories address aspects related to intercultural friendship. Examples related to in/outgroup dynamics are the integrated threat theory, focusing on perceived or real threats emanating from outgroups (Stephan et al. 1998), and the uncertainty reduction theory, which contends that a reduction in intercultural anxiety results in lower levels of perceived threat and more positive attitudes toward outgroup members (Gudykunst 1985a). Theories focusing on communication include the face negotiation theory on preferences for face-saving strategies and conflict styles (Ting-Toomey 2005b); the conversational constraints theory, suggesting, for example, that individualists are more concerned with clarity and collectivists with minimizing imposition and others’ feelings (Kim, M.-S. 2005); and the communication accommodation theory, addressing how interactants adjust their verbal communication to facilitate understanding (e.g., by talking more slowly) (Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005). Regarding identity, the identity management theory (Cupach & Imahori 1993) outlines changes according to phases of relationship development, and the identity negotiation theory (Ting-Toomey 2005a) analyzes identity changes, challenges, and salience issues (including how sojourners construct their identity from feeling like an outsider to forging a connective identity in their friendship development experiences with the goal of being understood, respected, and affirmatively valued). Likewise, the Integrative Communication Theory (Kim, Y. Y. 2005) describes the opposing forces of resistance to change, which produces stress, and the embrace of change through self-adjustments. While the abovementioned theories explain facets of intercultural friendship formation, an integrative friendship theory is still outstanding. Likewise, research has led to a taxonomy (Gareis 1995) of intercultural friendship, but not yet a model of intercultural friendship development.

4.2 Measures for promoting contact The greatest gap in intercultural friendship research concerns measures that promote contact and relationship development. Measures frequently mentioned include oral communication instruction, intercultural training for both sojourners and hosts, conducive institutional policies and interventions (e.g., mixed sojourner/host orientations, integrative classroom practices, and extracurricular activi-

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ties), and events and programs to foster interaction (e.g., socializing opportunities, buddy systems, international clubs, and residential programs). However, only few empirical studies have been conducted (e.g., Quintrell & Westwood 1994; Rienties et al. 2012; Sakurai, McCall-Wolf & Kashima 2010; Violet & Ang 1998). More research is needed on which measures are most successful and how they should be administered.

4.3 Health benefits The health benefits of social relationships have been espoused widely. However, no empirical research has been conducted on the health effects specific to intercultural friendship, including potential risks. For example, it has been shown in intracultural contexts that ambivalent relationships influence health negatively (HoltLunstad et al. 2007). Friends may not be able to fully relax in the presence of an ambivalent friend and therefore may not benefit from support during stress. Studies should investigate health benefits of intercultural friendship and also whether tensions related to communication difficulty and cultural difference can cause disadvantages in intercultural friendships.

4.4 Aiding adaptation to dissimilar friendship styles A sizable number of sojourners is satisfied with neither the number nor the quality of their host-national friendships. Part of the reason is the difficulty to reconcile ideals of friendship in home and host culture. This difficulty seems especially pronounced for sojourners in the United States. Gareis (2012a), for example, showed that more than half of international students (64.53 %) were not or only somewhat satisfied with the quality of their host-national friendships. Scholarship is needed on how to aid interactants in the acceptance of and adaptation to dissimilar styles.

4.5 Context and methodology expansion Most research on intercultural friendship thus far has focused on international students (particularly in Anglophone countries) and has relied on self-reports via interviews and surveys. The contexts in which research is conducted and the range of methods should be expanded significantly. Future researchers should include more of the host-national perspective, employ a greater variety of methods (e.g., observations, experimental research, longitudinal studies), and develop and test scales tailored to intercultural friendship contexts. In addition, studies should compare the situation in Anglophone destination countries with other receiving countries worldwide, including the experiences of Anglophone students in Asia. Like-

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wise, the knowledge base of culture-specific friendships styles should be expanded. Most important, research should focus also on areas of intercultural contact other than international student exchange. This could include contexts of business sojourns, voluntary immigration, and refugee/asylum seeker resettlement.

5 Conclusion More than ever, people from different cultures meet and form close relationships. One of the most fertile arenas for intercultural contact is the world’s colleges. Despite the numerous benefits of intercultural friendships for both international and domestic students, however, international students often feel lonely and complain of a lack of host-national friends. Reasons can be found on both sides of the aisle: on part of sojourners and on part of hosts and host institutions. Brandenburg and de Wit (2011) assert that the benefits of student exchange and internationalization are only possible when international students fully participate in the campus community and engage with host-national peers both inside and outside the classroom. In a similar vein, Hotta and Ting-Toomey (2013: 562) state that “members of the host culture need to act as gracious hosts while newcomers need to act as willing-to-learn guests. Without collaborative efforts, the hosts and the new arrivals may end up with great frustrations, miscommunications, and identity misalignments.” Appealing to administrators and institutions, Williams (2005) calls for study-abroad program administrators to find ways to facilitate more interaction. Lee and Rice (2007) go so far as to assert that institutions are undermining the international experience by not providing adequate infrastructures. When U.S. Senator Fulbright initiated the creation of one of the first modern exchange programs in 1945, the goal was the promotion of international good will. Intercultural friendship is ideally suited to further international understanding and good will. Although the basic building blocks of intercultural friendship have been outlined, much still waits to be explored. The task is arguably one of the most important in the world today. If friendship can ensure optimal intergroup contact and reduce prejudice, it ranks among the most urgent and meaningful topics to elucidate.

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Susan C. Baker, Bernadette M. Watson and Cindy Gallois

22 Exploring intercultural communication problems in health care with a communication accommodation competence approach Abstract: In this chapter, we explore intercultural health communication in doctorpatient and interprofessional interactions. Traditionally, intercultural health communication research has focused on interpersonal issues. We argue here that, although interpersonal aspects are present, intergroup issues are often likely more salient and have a greater impact on communicative behavior. Consequently, we propose that intercultural communication competence (ICC) training programs must consider both interpersonal and intergroup characteristics of intercultural health communication. We invoke Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), which takes into account how interpersonal and intergroup aspects of the health context influence motivations and subsequent communicative behavior. CAT is ideally suited to inform ICC training programs. Keywords: health communication, intergroup communication, intercultural communication competence, communication accommodation theory, interprofessional communication

1 Introduction The ability to deliver beneficial, comprehensible, and respectful health care is important to both patients and health care providers. Although providing quality care to patients is a realistic goal, it is not an easy task. Research has consistently pointed to promoting effective health communication as an essential step to assuring quality health care, but has also highlighted the inherent communication problems that arise in the health context (Hewett, Watson, Gallois, Ward & Leggett 2009a, 2009b). These problems are particularly relevant when communication involves individuals of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Most doctors and patients do not receive formal training in health communication (Gudykunst 2002; Wiseman 2002). Meanwhile, researchers in health communication have a growing interest in intercultural issues in the health context. It is generally agreed that training programs designed to promote intercultural communication competence (ICC) are needed to improve intercultural health communication and to reduce disparities in health care in intercultural situations (Betancourt, DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-022

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Green, Carrillo & Ananeh-Firempong 2003; Brach & Fraser 2000; Denboba, Bragdon, Epstein, Garthright & Goldman 1998; Langer 1999; Marks, Reed, Colby & Ibrahim 2004; McNeil 2003; Taylor & Lurie 2004). That research, though, tends to neglect the intergroup aspects of the health context, which can overshadow interpersonal relations and often underlie intercultural ones. Attempts to design effective ICC training programs, therefore, must take into account both the interpersonal and intergroup features of communication among patients and health providers. We argue that Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) is well-positioned to address these interpersonal and intergroup characteristics of the health context and to inform studies of intercultural communication and, thus, should be considered as a robust ICC training tool. This chapter reviews the literature on health communication, placing special emphasis on challenges in the health care setting that perpetuate communicative problems. First, there are the conventional intercultural barriers (like ethnicity) to health communication, but these only represent one layer of intercultural issues. Even when ethnic issues are not evident, other cultural characteristics in the health context can impede effective communication. Interactions among health care providers and those between providers and patients also embody intergroup communication. Specifically, each participant in an interaction has his or her own group norms, values, language, and status that influences communicative behavior and can result in miscommunication and conflict. We cover five aspects of health communication this chapter. First, we explore both intercultural and intergroup approaches to communication. Second, we examine the literature on doctor-patient communication, which has been a dominant focus in health communication research. Third, we investigate intercultural and intergroup communication issues among health care providers. Fourth, we propose CAT as an ideal ICC training tool to improve intercultural communication – both between doctors and patients and among health care providers. Finally, we discuss the current research in intercultural health communication and suggest future directions of research in the 21st century.

2 Intercultural and intergroup communication Intercultural communication is generally conceptualized as communication between individuals from different cultures and is often restricted to face-to-face encounters by many scholars (Berry 2010; Kim 2015; Sam & Berry 2010). Research in intercultural communication has a long history and the major theories of intercultural communication focus on such issues as effective outcomes, identity management or negotiation, communication networks, and acculturation or adjustment. Research in intercultural communication has placed great emphasis on skills training (Gudykunst 2002; Wiseman 2002). ICC training is meant to encourage the

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development of knowledge and skills that will (hopefully) lead to effective communications with individuals from different cultures. According to Hammer (1989), successful ICC training should result in learning the desired new language, the ability to enjoyably interact in the new culture, and good social and psychological adjustment. ICC training has been of interest to health professionals who have faced difficult intercultural encounters with colleagues and/or patients and want to be more effective communicators in future intercultural situations. The ICC training approach focuses on interpersonal communication between individuals and assumes that miscommunication is due, in large part, to a lack of intercultural communication skills. From this perspective, then, more knowledge and skill will result in more effective communication. Under certain circumstances, this may be the case. However, ICC training has been criticized by intergroup communication scholars for its failure to consider the role of power, attitudes, and stereotypes (Watson, Gallois, Hewett & Jones 2012). Specifically, we cannot assume that all speakers are motivated to communicate in positive ways in intercultural situations. In this sense, communication from the intergroup perspective is not viewed as a skill, but rather the result of a motive. Intergroup communication research is a relatively young field of research and began with social psychologists who were interested in group processes. An assumption underlying the intergroup approach to communicative behaviour is that the quality of interactions is based primarily on intergroup history and is driven more by the speakers’ motivations than by their communicative skills. Unlike intercultural research, intergroup communication research does directly address issues of power and status differentials, which is also relevant to intercultural communication. In most contexts, one or more groups are dominant over others. The inherent assumption is that this represents the norm in most intergroup encounters, so there is less emphasis on the interpersonal relationship between speakers. Theories in intergroup communication focus on interactants’ communicative behaviors that work to maintain or even raise group status or power differences. As we discuss more fully below, the health context is a hierarchical system with clear status differentials between the different health professions. Doctors have the most power and status, which influences the communication dynamics between professions. In the health context, then, intercultural communication is only one form of intergroup communication. As a result, there has been a call to generate research that is at the interface between intercultural and intergroup communication. Cargile and Giles (1996), for instance, have argued that combining the perspectives of intercultural and intergroup communication has the potential to generate more robust ICC training. Recent research in health communication has shown the benefits of bridging intercultural and intergroup theory. Baker and Watson (2015), for example, applied theories of second language learning to the health context in examining patient willingness to communicate as a function of doctor communica-

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tion during health consultations. Their findings showed that patients’ decisions to communicate were dependent on doctors’ communication strategies and that there was interplay between interpersonal and intergroup aspects of the health consultation that affected patient communication. Thus, health communication research that accounts for both the intercultural (interpersonal) aspects and intergroup communicative motives would allow for the development of more vigorous ICC training. The current focus of ICC training does not acknowledge the salient power differentials that guide communicative behavior. Junior doctors, for instance, are not likely to attempt to apply effective communication with a senior doctor (e.g., checking understanding), as they may feel that such behavior is inappropriate to their status. Patients, too, are often reluctant to use effective communication, such as seeking clarification of meaning with their doctors. For instance, Bourhis, Roth, and MacQueen (1989) found that nurses often act as intermediaries when they translate the doctor’s medical language into everyday language for the patient. For junior doctors and patients it is the cultural setting of the hospital context that dictates behavioral norms. Communication training programs for health professionals (and indeed, those for patients) usually concentrate on skills for producing clear and comprehensive communication, rather than highlighting the cultural (or interpersonal) and intergroup character of these encounters. In our view, the lens of intergroup communication adds great value, because these intergroup issues have exact analogies in communication between members of different cultures. Theories of communication that address both the intercultural and intergroup aspects are essential to generate a better understanding of the complex dynamics of communication in the health context. Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT, Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005; Giles 1973; Giles 2016), for instance, addresses both interpersonal and intergroup facets of communication and could be used by researchers to more accurately describe health professional and patient interactions in the intercultural context. CAT questions the idea that communication is only a skill and construes all intercultural encounters as essentially intergroup. Before exploring CAT as a potential ICC skills training tool, we discuss research on the intercultural and intergroup features of doctor-patient communication.

3 Health provider-patient communication Interestingly, while medical technology has advanced and improved significantly, health provider-patient communication has not. Since the delivery of quality health care requires communication, developments in the medical science are of little use if provider-patient interactions are not adequate, so that they lead to miscommunication. Although the term “health provider” refers to anyone working in the health

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context (e.g., nurses, pharmacists), research in the area of health communication has focused primarily on the patient’s relationship with the doctor. The relationship that patients have with their doctor has been shown to directly affect their satisfaction with their health care, adherence to treatment, and health outcomes (Hewett et al. 2009a, 2009b; Hewett, Watson & Gallois 2015; Watson, Hewett & Gallois 2012). This is particularly true of patients who require regular interactions with health care providers, such as those living with chronic illnesses (Baker, Gallois, Driedger & Santesso 2011). Once patients leave the health consultation, they become primarily responsible for their own day-to-day care (e.g., following treatment recommendations), so it is important that patients receive and understand information about their health. Thus, doctors and patients need to be able to communicate clearly with each other about health issues. Unfortunately, research findings show that doctors do not always communicate effectively with their patients (Bourhis, Roth & MacQueen 1989; Thomas, Fine & Ibrahim 2014) and that the amount of information they provide to their patients may be insufficient. Patients often indicate that their doctors use medical language that limits their understanding of health information. Indeed, research has found that doctors often use medical jargon during a consultation and rarely ever explain it to their patients (Castro, Wilson, Wang & Schillinger 2007; Deuster, Christopher, Donovan & Farrell 2008; Thomas, Fine & Ibrahim 2014). Further, although patients want to receive health information from their doctors, they rarely ask for it directly. Baker et al. (2011) found that, although patients with chronic illness felt the need to reach out to their doctors and to learn the terminology in order to manage their illness, they did not always communicate effectively with their doctors. Often, the majority of patients tend to communicate passively with their doctors, only answering questions when asked. Differences in ethnicity, language and religion between doctors and patients can add an additional layer of complexity in health-related interactions. Language gaps, in particular, can reduce effective communication to the point that it compromises the quality and safety of health care (Isaacs, Laurier, Turner & Segalowitz 2011). When people are vulnerable – as when they are sick, scared or in pain – it is important to speak to them in their first language (L1), but this is not always possible (Segalowitz & Kehayia 2011). Thus, cultural and language barriers that exist in the health context are a growing concern. Although ethnic and/or cultural differences can have a profound effect on health communication and perceptions of health care, research findings suggest that they are often not directly addressed in health consultations. Gao, Burke, Somkin, and Pasick (2009), for example, examined the influence of cultural practices on doctors’ and patients’ communication about colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. They argued that discussions about CRC screening require effective communication and that, in situations involving intercultural interactions, the potential for miscommunication and ineffective communication increases substantially. Their re-

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sults showed that doctors did not address cultural barriers and patients did not raise culture-specific concerns in their discussions about CRC screening. Kreps and Kunimoto (1994) have investigated health communication in multicultural settings among vulnerable immigrant populations. Their research showed that immigrants have difficulties in obtaining health literacy and that cultural differences reduced access to, and comprehension of, health information. Further, they found that there are significant inequalities in health outcomes among racial and ethnic groups, resulting in poorer outcomes among those patients. They have argued that poor communication in health care is to blame for the unequal access to medical information and participation in medical decision-making, and that more culturally-sensitive health communication is needed to reduce disparities in health care and improve patient outcomes. Culturally-sensitive health communication entails adapting to the specific cultural needs of all health participants. For instance, using language (examples, explanations) that the patient can understand is an important step to overcoming the communication barriers that limit the understanding between providers and patients (Kagawa-Singer & Kassim-Lakha 2003; Kreps & Kunimoto 1994; Kreuter & McClure 2004). Cultural sensitivity, therefore, requires willingness on the part of doctors to acknowledge cultural differences and employ cultural knowledge when interacting with their patients (Brislin 1993; Dennis & Giangreco 1996; Jackson & Haynes 1992). When discussing health matters and treatment recommendations, doctors need to understand, respect and take into account the values, beliefs, and attitudes of all their patients (Bronner 1994; Moore 1992). Cultural sensitivity has been explored with respect to informed consent (Carrese & Rhodes 1995; Gostin 1995), the extent of family involvement in health care and decision-making (Fredericks, Odiet, Miller & Fredericks 2006; Pham, Thornton, Engelberg, Jackson & Curtis 2008; Schulz et al. 2003; Thornton, Pham, Engelberg, Jackson & Curtis 2009) and patient trust in their health provider (Blanchard & Lurie 2004; Brennan, Barnes, Calnan, Corrigan, Dieppe & Entwistle 2013; Corbie-Smith, Thomas, Williams & Moody-Ayers 1999; Freimuth, Quinn, Thomas, Cole, Zook & Duncan 2001; Gamble 1997; Gregg & Curry 1994; O’Malley, Beaton, Yabroff, Abramson & Mandelblatt 2004). Thus cultural sensitivity is critical to effective health communication. However, research findings indicate that there may be a relationship between ethnocentrism and cultural competence among health providers (see Capell, Dean & Veenstra 2008). Fisher (1992) argued that doctors suffer from medical ethnocentrism, so this may limit their ability to successfully interact with patients from different cultures. In fact, ethnocentrism among health providers has been shown to result in patient alienation, inadequate treatment, and misdiagnosis (Andrews 1992). Although possessing cultural competence would allow doctors to communicate effectively with their patients from other cultures, doctors are normally only trained to deal with the dominant culture (Brislin 1993; Fisher 1992, Ulrey & Amason 2001). Doctors,

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therefore, may not be able (or want) to adjust their communication to meet the needs of their culturally diverse clientele. As already noted, traditional attempts to improve intercultural communication in health care have focused on training health professionals in interpersonal skills, which does not take into account the inherently intergroup nature of the health context. Thus, there can be communication problems between patients and health professionals, even when they come from the same culture and speak the same language. Although there is an interpersonal relationship between a patient and a doctor, the interpersonal aspects of the health context alone cannot fully explain why communication in the doctor-patient relationship is so problematic. Some researchers have argued that communication between doctors and patients is more likely to be governed by the expectations attached to each of their roles. Parsons (1951), for instance, long ago conceptualized the patient as being in the “sick” role. Illness, therefore, is a type of social role, and patients are expected to cooperate with their doctor and do everything the doctor says in the process of getting better. The doctor’s role is to offer support and provide expertise that will help the patient. The relationship we currently observe between doctor and patient has changed surprisingly little from Parson’s perspectives over sixty years ago, particularly when illness is acute. Patients are often still described as help seekers, whereas doctors are help providers (Street 2001). The presence of these assigned roles may lead to the assumption that communication between doctors and patients happens in a clear-cut, uncomplicated, one-directional way. In reality, as described above, the relationship between doctors and patients is complicated. The communicative problems that occur in health consultations are likely due to the power differential that exists between health providers and their patients. Each participant is aware of his or her role and behaves accordingly during the medical interaction. Thus, in the health context, doctors’ and patients’ group or social identities become salient. This emphasis on the group identity of patients and doctors is a critical dimension of communication. According to Social Identity Theory (SIT; Hogg & Abrams 1988; Tajfel 1978; Tajfel & Turner 1986), individuals tend to behave in ways that correspond to their ingroup identity (group or social roles) rather than personal identity, which is more about idiosyncratic likes and dislikes (Brewer & Miller 1984; Marcus-Newhall, Miller, Holtz & Brewer 1993). When group identities become salient, as in doctor-patient consultations, interactions become less interpersonal and more intergroup. Specifically, according to SIT, we tend to define ourselves in terms of our group memberships and want those groups to be valued positively. Taking an intergroup approach to examining doctor-patient interactions affords researchers the opportunity to account for the power, language and social differences that influence communicative behaviours and to explain the miscommunication that often happens in those interactions. However, understanding this communication requires moving beyond SIT, which takes account largely of behaviours such as

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favouring the ingroup and discriminating against outgroups. Communication accommodation theory (CAT; Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005) provides a framework for exploring communication behaviours in the health context. For instance, it may be argued that doctors, who represent a group held in high regard, would wish to maintain the imbalance of power between themselves and their patients. This would explain why doctors tend to use medical language during health consultations. Patients, in turn, are more reluctant to overtly question or challenge their doctors, even when they do not understand or agree with their health care (Lambert, Street, Cegala, Smith, Kurtz & Schofield 1997). The interactions between doctors and patients are, therefore, more likely to be governed by the norms and rules present in the health context. The relatively high status and power of doctors extends beyond their relationships with patients, and also appears between doctors and other health care professionals. Indeed hospitals are complex hierarchical structures where health professions work within their own silos and adhere to cultural norms that dictate the authority of doctors (Kreindler, Dowd, Dana Star & Gottschalk 2012; Watson, Hewett & Gallois 2012). Power differentials in the health care institutions between doctors and patients or doctors and other care professionals may confound the intercultural issues to further complicate matters for communicators of different cultural or ethnic backgrounds.

4 Interprofessional health communication Communication among health professionals has received comparatively less attention than communication between doctors and patients, especially from an intercultural perspective. It is, however, worth closely examining interprofessional communication because it, too, can have a profound impact on patient outcomes. In the 21st century, health care advances and the ageing population mean that health professionals must learn to work interprofessionally. There is a strong move to new models of care that embed interprofessional practice as the norm (for a review, see Thistlethwaite 2012). There has been an increase in specialization among health care professionals. Furthermore, when patients have complex illnesses or comorbidities, care is often distributed across many different specialities and units. So, high quality patient care depends increasingly on good communication among health care providers. One fundamental purpose of communication among health providers is to share information about patients with each other. This communication can happen casually in the hospital corridor, during a clinical handover, or in intense, critical and sometimes chaotic situations like those in the emergency department or operating room. Regardless of the communicative circumstances, it is vital that accurate and precise information is exchanged between health providers to ensure

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quality care and safety of the patient. Indeed, poor communication between health professionals can inadvertently put patients at risk. Unfortunately, research indicates that ineffective interprofessional communication is not uncommon. Further, as with the relationship between doctors and patients, interprofessional relationships are also challenged by intercultural issues. Gasiorek and van de Poel (2012), for instance, examined communication between mobile medical professionals (MMPs) – doctors who provide medical care in foreign countries, cultures and languages – and their co-workers. Results of that research indicated that both the MMPs and their colleagues agreed that MMPs would benefit from further training in medical language (in the language of the host country), local dialects, idioms, humor and pronunciation. Findings also showed that MMPs felt that they possessed competent communicative skills, and that this perception was shared by others. Nonetheless, their colleagues described a number of concerns regarding the MMPs’ ability to participate in casual conversation, their nonverbal communication skills and their adherence to local cultural norms – all this, foreseeably, could adversely affect MMPs work. Gasiorek and van de Poel proposed that communication training programs for MMPs are needed to address intercultural communication with their colleagues, and should entail issues concerning language, local cultural norms and cultural expectations. Intergroup issues among health professionals are also prominent. In the health context, they tend to create an environment that inhibits rather than promotes good interprofessional communication. Health providers identify strongly with their roles and specialties and often engage in social competition with other departments. This identification can elicit intergroup comparisons, which, as SIT posits (Tajfel & Turner 1979), can result in discrimination, conflict and miscommunication. Lingard, Bleakley and their colleagues have analyzed interprofessional interactions and miscommunications in contexts where health providers are required to work as a team to coordinate patient care (Bleakley 2006; Bleakley et al. 2004; Lingard, Espin, Evans & Hawryluck 2004; Lingard, Reznick, DeVito & Espin 2002). Their work focuses primarily on interactions in operating and emergency rooms and intensive care units. Results from their work show that health professionals used certain rhetorical strategies when describing incidents and outgroup members. Constructions of others’ professional roles are often at odds with those professional constructions of themselves (Lingard, et al. 2002). Specifically, team members tend to oversimplify others’ roles and may reinforce interprofessional rivalries (Lingard et al. 2002). Hewett and colleagues (2009a, 2009b; Hewett, Watson & Gallois 2015) explored communication between hospital doctors of differing specialities. Their aim was to examine, using an intergroup approach, the communicative friction that occurs in interspecialty interactions and, most importantly, its effect on patient care. That research unearthed the distinctive and prevailing influence of intergroup conflict

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on health communication. Specifically, results of those studies indicated that doctors make excuses for their ingroup peers and use specific language and communicative strategies to reinforce their social identities and win conflicts. Consequently, doctors can avoid taking responsibility for patients and encourage confusion and misunderstandings, which ultimately negatively affects patient care. A recent study by Setchell, Leach, Watson, and Hewett (2015) also demonstrated how group identity can be used to understand language and communicative choices among health providers. Specifically, they examined doctors’ attitudes toward nurses performing endoscopies – a procedure carried out only by doctors in Australia. Their results showed that doctors, in describing their attitudes, used emotional language and portrayed nurses as unintelligent and incompetent. Setchell and colleagues argued that the planned expansion of nurses’ role represented an identity threat to doctors. Specifically, the doctors felt that their identity as specialists was jeopardized by nurses taking on a function (endoscopy) that represents a central characteristic to their specialist role identity, and the language doctors used was a response to that threat. Given the ever-expanding role of health care providers, such findings point to further interprofessional conflicts, as group identities are challenged and professional lines are blurred. We argue here that, although relationships among patients and health providers have interpersonal aspects, the intergroup dimension is more salient. Good ICC training, therefore, must include an education on intergroup relations. We believe that communication theories, like CAT, can be used by researchers to elucidate both the interpersonal and intergroup, as well as intercultural, components of the health context not only to describe doctor-patient and interprofessional health communication more accurately, but also to design more comprehensive ICC training programs.

5 Improving intercultural health communication In the health context, having intercultural communication skills carries particularly great importance, because patients’ health and often their lives are at stake. Since most individuals become health care providers because they want to help others, and since effective communication is one of the best ways to help patients, encouraging health care providers to improve their intercultural health communication skills is a realistic and worthwhile endeavor. However, as we have suggested throughout this chapter, adopting a purely, even culture-related, skills-training approach is insufficient, because it does not take account of the intergroup dynamics in health care relations that can drive communication behaviors. To improve patient care, these dynamics must also change. Working with patients from other cultures can be challenging, and given the serious nature of the health context, it is generally not recommended that health

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providers employ a ‘trial and error’ approach to intercultural communication. For instance, misunderstandings in the health context can lead to misdiagnosis, inadequate treatment and generally poor patient care. Intercultural communication failures can, therefore, put patients’ lives at risk. How, then, can health care providers and patients overcome cultural barriers to ensure satisfying and safe health care? Gudykunst (1995) suggested that we choose (although not always consciously) whether we even want to communicate effectively. If we do choose to improve our communication, we need to know how to do so. According to Gallois (2003), there is the potential to make relations between cultural groups even worse through intercultural training (see also Cargile & Giles 1996). Gallois argued that there are several factors that must be considered when developing training programs, and one of the most important is the specific intergroup situation. The intergroup history of the interactants may be so negative that a communication training program would be futile. Thus, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to communication training is not likely to succeed. In cases where there is a history of intergroup hostility, communication may only make the situation worse. Pitts and Harwood (2015) proposed that exploring communication accommodation competence is a way forward for CAT researchers. As health communication scholars we see this as a positive step, because it provides a theoretical lens to understand the issues health care professionals as well as patients face. Gasiorek (2015) emphasized the importance to health communication research of exploring of both interactant identity/ies and whether people wish to reduce or exaggerate their group memberships. While SIT describes individuals’ identification with social groups, CAT posits that interactants use communication strategies to signify their salient group memberships. Specifically, CAT describes how identity is displayed by interactants across varying communication contexts. In its early conception, CAT began as a theory to explain language patterns that often occur in interpersonal communicative situations; it has since emerged as one of the most influential theories of intergroup communication. The theory describes changes in language style (both strategic and unintentional) that take place during social interactions. Since language is one of the most powerful ways we can convey our identity, group belonging and status to others, CAT posits that changes in speech style are fairly typical in intergroup contexts. Thus, in communicative situations, interactants are active participants who adjust their language and speech to their motivations, attitudes and needs. These adjustments are made by using accommodative strategies that work to either enhance or reduce (accommodate) differences between interactants. Doctors, for instance, can maintain the status difference between themselves and their patients simply by using medical jargon. Not all such behaviours are done deliberately, but rather reflect identity-related attitudes. Each participant in the interaction evaluates the communicative intentions of the other, which influences the current communication and creates expectations in potential future interactions.

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Research in health communication has applied CAT to develop a better understanding of the communicative problems in both doctor-patient interactions (Baker & Watson 2015; Watson et al. 2012; Watson, Hewett & Jones 2016) and interprofessional interactions (Hewett et al. 2009a, 2009b; Hewett, Watson & Gallois 2015). That research highlights common communicative strategies in the health context, how these strategies are perceived, and the subsequent communicative consequences. For instance, Baker and Watson (2015) examined patients’ perceptions of their doctor’s communication strategies during health consultation. Findings revealed that patients described accommodative strategies (explaining, listening) in their positive health care experiences and nonaccommodative strategies (hostility, rudeness) in their negative experiences. Furthermore, patients who perceived accommodative strategies were more willing to participate in the health consultation than those who perceived nonaccommodative strategies. In their epilogue to a special issue of Language and Communication dedicated to research considering the development of Communication Accommodation Theory, Pitts and Harwood (2015) skilfully present the practical applications of CAT across social contexts in their argument to engage CAT as a theory of communicative competence. They posit that communication research would benefit from scholars who examine the development of accommodative strategies over their lifespan and how these strategies are put to the test across social contexts. Further, they highlight findings from the papers focusing on the health context that point to the potential to employ CAT for communication training purposes in the health context. For instance, effective communication accommodation strategies result in safer and better quality of care (Hewett, Watson & Gallois 2015; Watson et al. 2015). In light of these studies, a strong argument can be made for bringing together training health professionals in communication competence with more emphasis on how the differing cultures, rules, and professional norms of health professions that make for a highly intergroup context. CAT is the ideal theoretical basis for interventions that shape and improve interprofessional practice. At present there is little empirical research including CAT in ICC or other communication skills training in the health sector. In a recent study (Watson, Hocking, Meuter, Tam, Gallois, Wong & Segalowitz in progress), however, researchers developed interprofessional communication scenarios involving communication between health professionals and patients, where risk or uncertainty was a concern. Health science students preparing for various professions role-played the scenarios, which gave them opportunities to communicate accommodatively or nonaccommodatively. Results indicated that sociolinguistic strategies theorised in CAT, particularly discourse management interpersonal control and emotional/relational reassurance, predicted high levels of rapport in the health professional and patient role-plays. This study has an immediate analogy in ICC training, where different cultures as well as different professions are in play. It points the way to future studies that apply CAT directly in ICC training in the health (and other) sector.

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What happens, though, when language barriers reduce the ability to accommodate? Research by Gasiorek, van de Poel, and Blockmans (2015) indicated that doctors can still engage in competent accommodation by using external accommodative sources. For instance, when a language shift was not possible, doctors turned to their colleagues for assistance, relied on patients to accommodate, and used electronic translation devices. Such findings show a strong desire by doctors to meet the needs of their patients by going around language barriers and finding alternative ways to accommodate. Thus, when linguistic convergence is not possible, accommodation may still be possible.

6 Current research and future directions Current research is also examining the effects of specific communication accommodation strategies on patient communication. For instance, in a series of studies, Baker and Watson are exploring the role of the doctor’s emotional expression in patient participation in the health context. Research is this area has examined the doctor’s emotional behavior during the consultation, but has not considered how the patient perceives these behaviours and how patient perceptions influence their communication. Their earlier research (see Baker & Watson 2015) found that patients were keenly aware of the doctor’s emotions and often used them to decide whether or not to participate in the consultation. Given the reported decline in emotional support from doctors (Rousseau 2004), this research would potentially highlight the importance of caring and reassuring behaviours (accommodation) to patient communication and to understanding of their health and overall quality of care. Meuter and colleagues are currently exploring how doctors and patients communicate risk when they are interacting in second languages. Their work complements and extends that of Gasiorek, van de Poel, and Blockmans (2015) through the microanalysis of the language barriers that exist when patients and doctors engage in interactions using second language. Using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, Segalowitz, Doucerain, Meuter, Zhao, Hocking and Ryder (2016) demonstrated that epistemic adverbs reflecting doubt or certainly are rated differently in their meaning across cultures. This finding has important implications for how doctors describe health risks to patients using words such as certainly or probably and the subsequent decisions patients make about treatment options. In addition to the interpersonal aspects, ICC training programs must take into account the intergroup aspects of health communication. Research that tends to both features would offer a more comprehensive understanding of the miscommunications that take place in the health context and move us toward being able to better predict and possibly prevent future communicative problems. We believe that bridging intercultural and intergroup communication theory in ICC training

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research opens up several avenues for future research. For instance, health communication research that expands to a variety of cultural contexts would allow for a better understanding of specific communicative behaviours and issues in specific contexts. In relation to CAT, the perceived motivations behind accommodation or nonaccommodation may vary across different cultural contexts. ICC training programs could be tailored to meet the specific needs of particular cultural contexts. For example, Hewett, Watson, and Gallois (2015) identified underaccommodation as common in the health context. ICC training programs could be designed to target this type of communication problem. Future research is also needed to examine the intercultural communication experiences of all participants in the health contexts (patients, doctors, nurses, administrators) to identify not only their perceptions of the communication, but also their specific communicative behaviours, needs and expectations. ICC training programs could then be designed to inform participants of these expectations and, thus include ways to cope with health care related communicative problems. Intergroup leadership within health care is a promising avenue of research and has the potential to improve the relationships between health professionals (see Leach, Watson, Hewett, Schwarz & Gallois 2016). These researchers drew on the work of Hogg, van Knippenberg and Rast III (2012), who developed a model of leadership that acknowledged how intergroup dynamics influences relations. Their model seeks to produce leaders who emphasize core behaviours that are aimed at promoting good relations between health care professional groups. Leaders who adopt this model have the potential to reduce the silos in health care that exist and encourage ‘boundary spanning’ (Callister & Wall Jr. 2001). Hogg et al.’s model provides a framework for leaders to communicate across their boundaries and thereby encourage strong connections between professions. Finally, health communication research would benefit from longitudinal investigations of CAT in the health context. Earlier research suggests that there is some interchange between the interpersonal and intergroup facets of health communication, but it is unclear how the exchange plays out in long-term doctor-patient relationships. The longitudinal applications of CAT would consider the process of accommodation and language shift over time as relationships develop and patterns of accommodation emerge. This could help us further research both the intergroup and interpersonal aspects of the health context.

7 Conclusions We can make positive changes to inherent communicative problems in intercultural health communication. Participants need to enter intercultural communication encounters armed with knowledge about interpersonal and intergroup communication. As Gallois (2003) noted, intercultural skills and ethnorelativism are important,

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but they are not enough. In any communication situation, the ability to read others’ cues, to adapt and adjust communication accordingly and to cope with communicative difficulties is essential to achieving good intercultural communication. Interactants need to be aware that at times individuals are motivated to communicate based on their belief systems and biases. There needs to be an understanding of the impact of inequality and the motivations behind others’ communicative behaviour. If health practitioners become proficient in understanding and communicating more accommodatively and more interpersonally in these intergroup contexts, they will deliver better and safer patient care, and both they and patients will be more satisfied with the communication as well.

8 References Andrews, Margaret M. 1992. Cultural perspectives on nursing in the 21 st century. Journal of Professional Nursing 8(1). 7–15. Baker, Susan C., Cindy Gallois, S. Michelle Driedger & Nancy Santesso. 2011. Communication accommodation and managing muscuskeletal disorders: doctors’ and patients’ perspectives. Health Communication 26. 379–388. Baker, Susan C. & Bernadette M. Watson. 2015. How patients perceive their doctors’ communication: Implications for patient willingness to communicate. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34. 621–639. Berry, John W. 2010. Intercultural relations and accultuarion in the Pacific region. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology 4. 95–102. Betancourt, Joseph R., Alexander R. Green, J. Emilio Carrillo & Owusu Ananeh-Firempong. 2003. Defining cultural competence: A practical framework for addressing racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care. Public Health Reports 118. 293–302. Blanchard, Janice & Nicole Lurie. 2004. R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Patient reports of disrespect in the health care setting and its impact on care. Journal of Family Practice 53. 721–730. Bleakley, A. 2006. A common body of care: The ethics and politics of teamwork in the operating theater are inseparable. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A forum for Bioethics and Philosopy of Medicine 31. 305–322. Bleakley, Alan, Adrian Hobbs, James Boyden & Linda Walsh. 2004. Safety in operating theatres: Improving teamwork through team resource management. Journal of Workplace Learning 16. 83–91. Bourhis, Richard Y., Sharon Roth & Glenda MacQueen. 1989. Communication in the hospital setting: A survey of medical and everyday language use amongst patients, nurses and doctors. Social Science and Medicine 28. 339–346. Brach, Cindy & Irene Fraser. 2000. Can cultural competency reduce racial and ethnic disparities? A review and conceptual model. Medical Care Research Review 1. 181–217. Brennan, Nicola, Rebecca Barnes, Mike Calnan, Oonagh Corrigan, Paul Dieppe & Vikki Entwistle. 2013. Trust in the health-care provider–patient relationship: A systematic mapping review of the evidence base. International Journal for Quality in Health Care 25. 682–688. Brewer, Marilynn B. & Norman S. Miller. 1984. Beyond the contact hypothesis: Theoretical perspectives on desegregation. In Norman S. Miller & Marilynn B. Brewer (eds.), Groups in contact: The psychology of desegregation, 281–302. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Brislin, Richard. 1993. Understanding culture’s influence on behavior. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace.

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Bronner, Yvonne. 1994. Cultural sensitivity and nutrition counseling. Topics in Clinical Nutrition 9. 13–19. Callister, Ronda Roberts & James A. Wall Jr. 2001. Conflict across organizational boundaries: Managed care organizations versus health care providers. Journal of Applied Psychology 86. 754–763. Capell, Jen, Elizabeth Dean & Gerry Veenstra. 2008. The relationship between cultural competence and ethnocentrism of health care professionals. Journal of Transcultural Nursing 19. 121–125. Cargile, Aaron Castelan & Howard Giles. 1996. Intercultural communication trianing review, critique and a new theoretical framework. Communication Yearbook 19. 385–423. Carrese, Joseph A. & Lorna A. Rhodes. 1995. Western bioethics on the Navajo reservation. The Journal of the American Medical Association 274. 826–829. Castro, Cesar M., Clifford Wilson, Frances Wang & Dean Schillinger. 2007. Babel babble: Physicians’ use of unclarified medical jargon with patients. American Journal of Health Behavior 31. 85–95. Corbie-Smith, Giselle, Stephen B. Thomas, Mark V. Williams & Sandra Moody-Ayers. 1999. Attitudes and beliefs of African Americans toward participation in medical research. Journal of General Internal Medicine 14. 537–546. Denboba, Diana L., Judith L. Bragdon, Leonard G. Epstein, Karen Garthright & Thurma McCann Goldman. 1998. Reducing health disparities through cultural competence. Journal of Health Education 29. 47–53. Dennis, Ruth E. & Michael F. Giangreco. 1996. Creating conversation: Reflections on cultural sensitivity in family interviewing. Exceptional Children 63. 103–116. Deuster, Lindsay, Stephanie Christopher, Jodi Donovan & Michael Farrell. 2008. A method to quantify residents’ jargon use during counseling of standardized patients about cancer screening. Journal of General Internal Medicine 23. 1947–1952. Fisher, Nancy L. 1992. Ethnocultural approaches to genetics. Pediatric Clinics of North America 39. 55–64. Fredericks, Marcel, Jeff A. Odiet, Steven I. Miller & Janet Fredericks. 2006. Toward a Conceptual Reexamination of the Patient-Physician Relationship in the Healthcare Institution for the New Millennium. Journal of the National Medical Association 98. 378–385. Freimuth, Vicki S., Sandra Crouse Quinn, Stephen B. Thomas, Galen Cole, Eric Zook & Ted Duncan. 2001. African Americans’ views on research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Social Science & Medicine 52. 797–808. Gallois, Cindy. 2003. Reconciliation through communication in intercutlural encounters: Potential or peril? Journal of Communication 53. 5–15. Gallois, Cindy, Tania Ogay & Howard Giles. 2005. Communication accommodation theory: A look back and a look ahead. In William B. Gudykunst (ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication, 121–148. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gamble, Vanessa Northington. 1997. Under the shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and health care. American Journal of Public Health 87. 1773–1778. Gao, Ge, Nancy Burke, Carol P. Somkin & Rena Pasick. 2009. Considering culture in physician– patient communication during colorectal cancer screening. Qualitative Health Research 19. 778–789. Gasiorek, Jessica. 2015. Epilogue: Engaging identity and foregrounding context in health communication research. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34. 702–708. Gasiorek, Jessica & Kris van de Poel. 2012. Divergent perspectives on language-discordant mobile medical professionals' communication with colleagues: An exploratory study. Journal of Applied Communication Research 40. 368–383.

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Gasiorek, Jessica, Kris van de Poel & Inge Blockmans. 2015. What do you do when you can’t accommodate? Managing and evaluating problematic interactions in a multilingual medical environment. Language and Communication 41. 84–88. Giles, Howard. 1973. Communicative effectiveness as a function of accented speech. Speech Monographs 40. 330–331. Giles, Howard. 2016. Communication accommodation theory: Negotiating personal relationships and social identities across contexts. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Gostin, Lawrence O. 1995. Informed consent, cultural sensitivity, and respect for persons. Journal of the American Medical Association 274. 844–845. Gregg, Jessica & Robert H. Curry. 1994. Explanatory models for cancer among African American women at two Atlanta neighborhood health centers: The implications for a cancer screening program. Social Science & Medicine 39. 519–526. Gudykunst, William B. 1995. Anxiety/uncertainty management (AUM) theory. In Richard L. Wiseman (ed.), Intercultural communication theory, 8–58.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gudykunst, William B. 2002. Intercultural communication theories. In William B. Gudykunst & Bella Mody (eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication. 2 nd edition, 183–205. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hammer, Mitchell R. 1989. Intercultural communication competence. In Molefi Kete Asante & William B. Gudykunst (eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication, 247–260. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Hewett, David G., Bernadette M. Watson & Cindy Gallois. 2015. Communication between hospital doctors: Underaccommodation and interpretability. Language and Communication 41. 71–83. Hewett, David G., Bernadette M. Watson, Cindy Gallois, Michael Ward & Barbara A. Leggett. 2009a. Communication in medical records: Intergroup language and patient care. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 28. 119–138. Hewett, David G., Bernadette M. Watson, Cindy Gallois, Michael Ward & Barbara A. Leggett. 2009b. Intergroup communication between hospital doctors: Implications for quality of patient care. Social Science and Medicine 69. 1732–1740. Hogg, Michael A. & Dominic Abrams. 1988. Social identifications: A social psychology of intergroup relations and group processes. London: Routledge. Hogg, Michael A., Daan van Knippenberg & David E. Rast III. 2012. Intergroup leadership in organizations: Leading across group and organizational boundaries. Academy of Management Review 37. 232–255. Isaacs, Talia, Michel D. Laurier, Carolyn E. Turner & Norman Segalowitz, N. 2011. Identifying second language speech tasks and ability levels for successful nurse oral interaction with patients in a linguistic minority setting: An instrument development project. Health Communication 26. 560–570. Jackson, Cennette & Twilla Haynes. 1992. Cultural sensitivity: A working model. Atlanta, GA: Southern Council on Collegiate Education for Nursing. Kagawa-Singer, Marjorie & Shaheen Kassim-Lakha. 2003.Astrategy to reduce cross-cultural miscommunication and increase the likelihood of improving health outcomes. Academic Medicine 78. 577–587. Kim, Young Yun. 2015. Achieving synchrony: A foundational dimension of intercultural communication competence. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 48. 27–37. Kreindler, Sara A., Damien A. Dowd, Noah Dana Star & Tania Gottschalk. 2012. Silos and social identity: The social identity approach as a framework for understanding and overcoming divisions in health care. Milbank Quarterly 90. 347–374. Kreps, Gary L. & Elizabeth N. Kunimoto. 1994. Effective communication in multicultural health care settings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kreuter, Matthew W. & Stephanie M. McClure. 2004. The role of culture in health communication. Annual Review of Public Health 25. 439–455.

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Lambert, Bruce L., Richard L. Street, Donald J. Cegala, David H. Smith, Suzanne Kurtz & Theo Schofield. 1997. Provider-patient communication, patient-centered care, and the mangle of practice. Health Communication 9. 27–43. Langer, Nieli. 1999. Culturally competent professionals in therapeutic alliances enhance patient compliance. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 10. 19–26. Leach, Linda Searle, Bernadette M. Watson, David G. Hewett, Gavin M. Schwarz & Cindy Gallois. 2016. Interprofessional conflict, collaboration and leadership in health. In Howard Giles and Anne Maass (eds.), Advances in intergroup communication, 247–265. Peter Lang Publishing. Lingard, Lorelei, Sherry Espin, Cathy Evans & Laura Hawryluck. 2004. The rules of the game: interprofessional collaboration on the intensive care unit team. Critical Care 8. 403–408. Lingard, Lorelei, Richard Reznick, I. DeVito & Sherry Espin. 2002. Forming professional identities on the helath care team: discursive constructions of the “other” in the operating room. Medical Education 36. 728–734. Marcus-Newhall, Amy, Norman Miller, Rolf Holtz & Marilynn B. Brewer. 1993. Cross-cutting category membership with role assignment: A means of reducing intergroup bias. British Journal of Social Psychology 32. 125–146. Marks, Jonnie P., Wornie Reed, Kay Colby & Said A. Ibrahim. 2004. A culturally competent approach to cancer news and education in an inner city community: Focus group findings. Journal of Health Communication 9. 143–157. McNeil, John I. 2003. A model for cultural competency in the HIV management of African American patients. Journal of the National Medical Association 95(Suppl. 2). 3S-7S. Moore, Sharon E. 1992. Cultural sensitivity treatment and research issues with Black adolescent drug users. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 9. 249–260. O’Malley, Ann S. Beaton, E. Robin Yabroff, Richard G. Abramson & Jeanne S. Mandelblatt. 2004. Patient and provider barriers to colorectal cancer screening in the primary care safety-net. Preventive Medicine 39. 56–63. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. Illness and the role of the physician: A sociological perspective. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 21(3). 452–460. Pham, Kiemanh, J. Daryl Thornton, Ruth A. Engelberg, J. Carey Jackson & J. Randall Curtis. 2008. Alterations during medical interpretation of ICU family conferences that interfere with or enhance communication. Chest 134. 109–116. Pitts, Margaret J. & Jake Harwood. 2015. Communication accommodation competence: The nature and nurture of accommodative resources across the lifespan. Language and Communication 41. 89–99. Rousseau, Paul. 2004. Empathy and compassion: Where have they gone? American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine 21. 331–332. Sam, David L. & John W. Berry. 2010. Acculturation: When individuals and groups of different cultural backgrounds meet. Perspectives on Psychological Science 5. 472–481. Schulz, Richard, Aaron B. Mendelsohn, William E. Haley, Diane Mahoney, Rebecca S. Allen, Song Zhang, Larry Thompson & Steven H. Belle. 2003. End-of-life care and the effects of bereavement on family caregivers of persons with dementia. New English Journal of Medicine 349. 1936–1942. Segalowitz, Norman, Marina Doucerain, Renata Meuter, Yue Zhao, Julia Hocking & Andrew Ryder. 2016. Comprehending adverbs of doubt and certainty in health communication: A multidimensional scaling approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. 558. Segalowitz, Norman & Eva Kehayia. 2011. Exploring the determinants of language barriers in health care (LBHC): Toward a research agenda for the language sciences. Canadian modern language review 67(4). 480–507. Setchell, Jenny, Lori E. Leach, Bernadette M. Watson & David G. Hewett. 2015. Impact of identity on support for new roles in health care: A language inquiry of doctors’ commentary. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34. 672–686.

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Street, Richard L. 2001. Active patients as powerful communicators. In W. Peter Robinson & Howard Giles (eds.), The new handbook of language and social psychology, 541–561. Chichester: Wiley. Tajfel, Henri. 1978. Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations. London: Academic Press. Tajfel, Henri & John C. Turner. 1979. An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In William G. Austin & Stephen Worchel (eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations, 33–53. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Tajfel, Henri & John C. Turner. 1986. The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In Stephen Worchel & William G. Austin (eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations. 2 nd edition, 7–24. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Taylor, Stephanie L. & Nicole Lurie. 2004. The role of culturally competent communication in reducing ethnic and racial healthcare disparities. American Journal of Managed Care 10. 1–4. Thistlethwaite, Jill. 2012. Interprofessional education: A review of context, learning and the research agenda. Medical Education 46. 58–70. Thomas, Stephen B., Michael J. Fine & Said A. Ibrahim. 2014. Health disparities: The importance of culture and health communication. American Journal of Public Health 94. 2050. Thornton, J. Daryl, Kiemanh Pham, Ruth A. Engelberg, J. Carey Jackson & J. Randall Curtis. 2009. Families with limited English proficiency receive less information and support in interpreted intensive care unit family conferences. Critical Care Medicine 37. 89–95. Ulrey, Kelsy Lin & Patricia Amason. 2001. Intercultural communication between patients and health care providers: An exploration of intercultural communication effectiveness, cultural sensitivity, stress, and anxiety. Health Communication 13. 449–463. Watson, Bernadette M., Daniel Angus, Lyndsey Gore & Jillann Farmer. 2015. Communication in open disclosure conversations about adverse events in hospitals. Language and Communication 41. 51–70. Watson, Bernadette M., Cindy Gallois, David G. Hewett & Liz Jones. 2012. Culture and health care: Intergroup communication and its consequences. In Jane Jackson (ed.), The Routledge handbook of intercultural communication, 512–524. London, UK: Routledge. Watson, Bernadette M., David G. Hewett & Cindy Gallois. 2012. Intergroup communication and healthcare. In Howard Giles (ed.), The handbook of intergroup communication, 293–305. New York, NY: Routledge. Watson, Bernadette M., David G. Hewett, & Liz Jones. 2016. Accommodating Health. In Howard Giles (ed.), Intergroup handbook, 152–168. NY: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Bernadette M., Julia Hocking, Renata Meuter, Vincent Tam, Cindy Gallois, Jane Wong & Norman Segalowitz. In progress. Applying theory to role-play for effective health communication training. Wiseman, Richard L. 2002. Intercultural communication competence. In William B. Gudykunst & Bella Mody (eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication. 2 nd edition, 207–224. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Part IV. Interactions and exchange between cultures

Michael G. Elasmar

23 Cross-border mediated messages Abstract: This chapter traces the evolution of cross-border mediated messages beginning at the turn of the 20th century and until more contemporary times. It details the geopolitical factors that prompted the growth of cross-border mediated communication, the technologies that facilitated its dissemination and the concerns that were raised about its influence. This chapter also provides an overview of the theoretical frameworks that emerged in academic circles as means of understanding the process and influence of cross-border mediated messages. Keywords: cross-border messages, history, international flows, propaganda, theories of media influence, cultural imperialism, susceptibility to imported media

1 A definition of cross-border mediated messages A cross-border mediated message is communication content that was produced in a country different than the one in which it is transmitted and/or is received, regardless of how it arrived to the latter country. A mediated message may cross border in one medium or more, such as videotape, DVD, cable, media importation, cross-border transmission, direct broadcast satellite, leaflet, telegram, film, Internet, etc.

2 Historical and technological developments and initial theoretical frameworks for the study of cross-border mediated messages Various theoretical frameworks have emerged over the years to explain the process and impact of cross-border mediated messages. One cannot fully understand these frameworks without a review of the historical and technological contexts during which these frameworks came into life. For that purpose, the following sections will provide glimpses of historically-relevant facts about geopolitical and technological developments that contextualize the scholarly thinking about the social influence of cross-border mediated messages.

2.1 International propaganda as a catalyst International propaganda is arguably the first recognized form of large scale and systematic cross-border mediated messaging (see Lasswell 1938). In the early 20th DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-023

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century, propaganda was defined as “… the art of influencing, manipulating, controlling, promoting, changing, inducing, or securing the acceptance of opinions, attitudes, action or behavior” (Martin 1958: 10). It can be argued that the rulers of empires and conquerors of nations throughout human civilization have used various forms of propaganda to persuade those whom they ruled or wished to conquer. This chapter, however, begins with the early 1900s since this era marked a significant increase in the size of the potential audience of cross-border messages and the speed with which the information can be disseminated to such audience. The 20th century’s technological advances in communications, as well as machinery, allowed news bulletins, pamphlets, posters, cables, and wireless broadcasts to be disseminated abroad, either in neutral, allied or enemy territory (Lasswell 1938), thus modernizing the ancient processes of propaganda (see Martin 1958). During WWI governments, namely the British, French, and German governments, and then later, the American government sought to establish official propaganda departments aimed at influencing foreign audiences. By the end of WWI there were three ways in which governments had structured themselves to conduct international/cross-border propaganda: “The press conference” (in Germany), “the committee of executives” (in Great Britain), and the “single propaganda executive” (in the U.S.) (Lasswell 1938: 193). The rise of the Nazi regime, and the advent of WWII, heralded an era of heavy international propaganda. The Third Reich recognized the importance of mediated messages and quickly established the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels. During the regime’s life, the ministry exerted itself abroad, including in Spain during the civil war and in British Imperial India (Waddington 2007). The anti-Komintern, an office whose sole objective was to promote anti-Bolshevik sentiment and to mobilize other nations in anti-Bolshevik sentiment, was established in the run up to WWII (Waddington 2007). The anti-Komintern was involved in the Spanish civil war, and prior to that had been working in other parts of Europe (Waddington 2007). Mounting antiBolshevik exhibitions, as in Norway, or providing assistance to other countries to establish their own anti-Communist units, as in Japan and Switzerland, are some examples of their work (Waddington 2007). The anti-Komintern also provided aid to fledgling anti-Bolshevik nations like Yugoslavia, and produced two regular newsletters, one of which was printed in both German and English, providing detailed and up to the minute accounts of what was happening inside the Soviet regime (Waddington 2007). In addition, they also printed a book, an internationally collaborative effort, detailing Germany’s efforts abroad to counter communism (see Waddington 2007). This latter work was considered so important that the German minister in Rome requested copies in Italian and French for him to disseminate in the Vatican (Waddington 2007). The Spanish Civil War was seen as a twofold opportunity: 1. as a place for the Germans to concentrate their anti-Bolshevik

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propaganda, 2. a launching pad to disseminate other anti-Bolshevik propaganda to other countries (see Waddington 2007). The Nazi regime also utilized newspapers and ex-patriots to spread their message abroad. In British Imperial India the Nazis were responsible for getting articles printed in local newspapers (D’Souza 2000). They were noted for reports which appeared harmless but contained Nazi ideology, such as an “… article on German flora and fauna sought to justify the annexation of Austria and Sudetenland by showing that the plants and animals found in those areas bear a close resemblance to those of Germany proper” (D’Souza 2000: 78). The German Club in Calcutta, which may have appeared as a recreation center, was also a means of spreading messages abroad. It served as “… the very centre of Nazi political organisation in Bengal” (D’Souza 2000: 7). Here, “German residents obtained their instructions, listened to lectures and attended party meetings” (D’Souza 2000: 7). Finally D’Souza also points to the radio being exploited by the Nazis who attempted to “… influence Indians through musical programmes” (D’Souza 2000: 7). More details on the use of propaganda as an impetus for disseminating crossborder messages will be provided in later sections of this chapter.

2.2 Technologies for the dissemination of ipcross-border mediated messages The invention and improvement of new communication and transportation technologies, such as the telegraph, radio and aviation allowed cross-border messages to be more easily disseminated, and not just to neighboring countries. Information could now easily travel from the UK to Japan, or to the United States. In addition, the technology allowed the messages to be current and regularly updated. The sections below will provide a brief description of the various technologies used in the transmission of cross-border mediated messages beginning in the early 20th century.

2.2.1 Balloons, blimps and photographs and leaflets The invention of flying technology allowed the widespread dissemination of leaflets. Leaflets consisted of messages printed on paper and distributed either by a country’s diplomatic missions abroad or dropped onto specific communities from the air. The advent of aviation vehicles (blimps, balloons and later on airplanes), the adaptability of the leaflet and the access granted by aviation vehicles, ensured the widespread use of leaflets in times of war (Lasswell 1938). Leaflets were sometimes coupled with photographs to convey stronger meanings. Leaflets were often used by armed forces, both against enemy troops and in spreading news in friendly and neutral territories (DeFleur & Larsen 1958). DeFleur and Larsen (1958) studied

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the diffusion of knowledge conveyed through the dropping of leaflets on unwarned communities. Their study demonstrated the power of the written word compounded by the interpersonal oral diffusion of what was read. Although deemed to be an effective means of disseminating messages across-borders, leaflets were associated with a specific set of problems. Such problems included “misinterpretation, misreading, or selective perception on the part of the readers,” and “… the ever present distortion that takes place whenever messages are passed on orally from person to person” (DeFleur & Larsen 1958: 16).

2.2.2 Cable and telegraph networks The electronic telegraph technology was first patented in 1837 by Morse in America and by Cook and Wheatston in England (Briggs 1858). This invention ushered in the era of cable interconnections among countries that progressively evolved into a worldwide network spanning the oceans and placing connection nodes across the entire terrestrial globe. In 1851 England and France got connected via a cable between Dover and Calais (Briggs 1858). After two failed attempts, in 1858 the trans-Atlantic cable was finally successfully laid between Trinity Bay in Newfoundland and Valentia Bay in Ireland (Briggs 1858). The first official exchanges of communication via telegraph by government representatives were between British Queen Victoria of England and U.S. President James Buchanan, and also between Daniel F. Tieman the Mayor of New York city and Sir Robert Walker Carden the Mayor of London (Briggs 1858). Briggs stated “England and America are placed within whispering distance of each other … the electric current binds two great nations together in bonds of amity: the world has made a gigantic stride in the path of progress … and a new era dates from the laying of a Cable in the Ocean” (Briggs 1858: 193–194). By the end of the 19th century international cables connected Great Britain and Ireland and Belgium in 1852, and Germany in 1858. In 1860 Denmark joined this cable network. Australia was connected to the cable network in 1872, India in 1870, Scandinavia in 1869, and Brazil in 1874 (Huurdeman 2003). The success of the trans-Atlantic cable spurred more underwater cable to be laid connecting countries further afield together (Huurdeman 2003). “Almost all of these cables were laid by only a few British companies,” thus rendering the majority of the control of the flow of information in the hands of the British (Huurdeman 2003: 135). Even if the cross-border messages were not intended for the British, they had to pass through England. Other international telegraph networks existed, including between Central and Southern America. The inception of this network and the resulting company, Central and South American Telegraph Company and its purchase of the Transandine Telegraph Company meant that communications, by 1890, no longer had to go via

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Britain (Huurdeman 2003). The telegraph revolutionized all aspects of daily communications. “… [M]any large organizations had their own telegraph offices. Electrical telegraphy caused a revolution in world communications, serving virtually every aspect of human activity: government, diplomacy, business, industry, railways, newspapers, military, and the people who had to exchange messages and greetings in everyday life” (Huurdeman 2003: 145).

2.2.3 News wires International news wires were crucial in communicating information among countries. News wires initially started in the form of news stories collected by a large organization and then distributed by a telegraph connection to newspapers around the planet (Winder 2010). The organization that disseminated this content had total control over what constituted newsworthy stories, which stories to distribute and which stories to refrain from distributing. These organizations acted as news gatekeepers and, as such, could determine what content newspaper readers around the world were digesting and thinking about. The British international news wire company, known as Reuters, traced its origins to 1851 and was initially perceived to be an imperial tool (Winder 2010). It played a major role in the international flow of news. The history of the news wires demonstrates the importance that governments had in determining the international news flow and thus, the messages they were willing to send abroad. Government influence, or control, could lead to the alteration of messages: “it is not a question of to what degree national governments have the means to control the news media but rather to what degree such control actually leads to distortion of the news” (Ostgaard 1965: 40). In addition, the news wire services were initially reliant on telegraph cables and wireless telegraphy (UNESCO 1969), thus limiting their services to countries from which they were able to send and receive this type of communication. Simply because information existed, or there was news, did not automatically make it worthy of crossing international lines. The news flowing out of a country would be different from the news flowing in; the former is likely to be more political in nature than the news coming in (Ostgaard 1965). “The reports out of a country and the degree to which they reflect the government's views are thus also for this reason to a large degree conditioned by the relations between the government and the news media within the country” (Ostgaard 1965: 41). Because of the expense of transmitting the information internationally, it was assumed that clients who were willing to pay for the information were likely to have a “… Western outlook on world affairs” (Ostgaard 1965: 42). In terms of country representation in foreign news content, researchers found that Europe and North America were

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present in a large proportion of foreign news while Africa was barely represented in news stories (Boyd-Barrett 1977: 152). A UNESCO historical report from 1953 split the world into seven categories, according to varying levels of news wire services. Places such as Liberia, Libya, British Somaliland, Sierra Leone, Haiti and other similar countries, as well as Andorra and Liechtenstein in Europe were classified as Category I, “(c)ountries or territories where there is no national agency, and where no world agency distributes its services direct” (UNESCO 1969: 185–186). These were the countries that the UNESCO report of 1969 had labeled as “very ill informed on outside events” (UNESCO 1969: 186). Category VII, “(c)countries or territories where there is one or more than one world agency which distributes its world news direct, or has contracts with the press or broadcasting stations,” in other words there is a plethora of ways that the news can reach the population (UNESCO 1969: 191). This category had countries such as Canada, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Norway, the UK, and others listed (UNESCO 1969). The US, and France, occupied their own category. Category IV, “(c)ountries or territories where one or more than one world agency supplies its world and home news services direct, these world agencies being also the national agencies of these countries or territories” (UNESCO 1969: 189). Although being categorized as such did not preclude other news agencies from selling to these countries, the majority of papers relied solely on the US news agencies, only some, such as The New York Times, receiving the Reuter world service (UNESCO 1969). The international flow of news was determined not only by clients that are willing to pay for such content, but also by the power hierarchy among these countries. Countries that sent news were found to be further up in the hierarchy (more powerful militarily and economically) than those that were on the receiving end of such news (Ostgaard, 1965).

2.2.4 Radio The first radio broadcast is said to have taken place on Christmas Eve of 1906 from Brant Rock, Massachusetts (Archer 1938). Radio ushered in a new era in mass communication as it brought about the possibility for households to wirelessly receive news, information and entertainment directly and instantaneously. However, radio broadcasting did not really begin to expand as a means of mass communication until 1920 (Archer 1938). During this decade a Dr. Conrad in Pittsburgh made regular radio broadcasting a reality by announcing that he would broadcast for two hours on Wednesday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 pm (Archer 1938). His two sons did not lag far behind and soon announced their own programs to be broadcast (Archer 1938). As word spread about this technology and individuals sought to listen to shows transmitted wirelessly, demand for radio sets grew rapidly (Arch-

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er 1938). The year 1920 also marked the first time the American Presidential results were announced on the radio; the election of Warren G. Harding was the first to be broadcast to thousands (Archer 1938). Although the radio did not truly come into its own until 1920, it had been previously experimentally used as a means of cross-border messaging. During the early 20th century the cable-based telegraph networks were the primary means of sending cross-border messages, and the telegraph cables that could potentially be useful to the Germans were severed by the British (Huurdeman 2003). During WWI, in order to circumvent the British dominance over the telegraph networks, the Germans attempted to exploit the wireless technology of radio to communicate (Lasswell 1938). The first greatest international radio achievement was the broadcasting in 1918 of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (Davison 1971; Archer 1938). The Fourteen Points speech embodied Wilson’s vision on how to achieve world peace after WWI and the contents of his speech ushered in a new era of international relations, including the advent of the League of Nations that eventually developed into the United Nations (Goodrich 1947). Another example of radio being a cross-border medium for spreading messages was the broadcast by the Bolshevik of the negotiations of the Brest-Litovsk treaty to expose Germany’s annexation plans (Davison 1971). Radio did not become a mass medium for cross-border messaging until the 1930s when the number of short wave radio transmitters grew in Europe (Church 1939). Radio became a dominant tool of propaganda during WWII, and capitals like London, Moscow, and Berlin all produced and emitted radio programs in different languages across the world (Davison 1971). Radio also presented a means to circumvent traditional print media censorship. Radio waves could not be easily blocked and the recording of broadcasts allowed them to be re-broadcast in other countries, and translated into other languages (Church 1939). Germany is perhaps the best example of a country utilizing the radio’s full potential to spread messages across-borders. In 1933 the German radio service to the U.S. began (Graves 1940). Speeches by both Hitler and Goebbels were transmitted abroad, translated, and rebroadcast prior to the outbreak of WWII (Church 1939). After 1939, the start of WWII, the German radio service began transmitting eleven hours of radio, most of it in English, to the American audience; many of these programs were talk shows and included news services and commentaries (Graves 1940). The Nazi efforts were not limited to North America. The Nazi External Service, which broadcast from Zeesen in Germany, was competing with other international broadcasters from other countries (Hale 1975). By the end of the war Zeesen was broadcasting in 55 different languages, with the primary aim identified as “to create a fifth column of convinced believers in the Nazi cause and the use them as a lobby to back up the work of the German embassies” (Hale 1975: 3). Hale (1975) identifies Sondermeldung as an unrivalled Nazi radio propaganda technique.

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This technique involved the sole broadcasting of the most important Nazi announcements combined with “… bombastic classical tunes and warrior songs interspersed with dramatic silences” (Hale 1975: 11). Hale (1975) describes this as being an element of the “perverted atmosphere of revivalist religion” that was characteristic of Nazi broadcasting (Hale 1975: 11). Primarily a style of domestic broadcasting, it was still valid for Zeesen programs, particularly those for German speakers living outside of the Third Reich’s borders (Hale 1975). Although the United States of America was late in joining the party, its expansion of international radio was brisk (Davison 1971). Initially much of its international radio transmission were directed at Latin America, however, by the end of WWII the United States’ Office of War Information had installed 14 government owned transmitters abroad (Davison 1971). The catalyst for America joining the radio movement was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942 (Hale 1975). The unexpected attack was responsible for the birth of The Voice of America (VOA), which began broadcasting 79 days after the bombs were dropped (Hale 1975).

2.2.5 Films as cross-border mediated messages Film exports began during WWI as a means to both preserve friendship between allies, such as the British and Americans, but also to promote negative feelings towards the enemy (see Lasswell 1938). A film, Britain Prepared, was circulated by the British Foreign Office to “… impress the neutrals with British strength” (Lasswell 1938: 135). In an effort to establish a “… connection with the man in the street … cinema pictures of the Army and Navy” were distributed (Lasswell 1938: 155). To export these films Britain relied on its diplomats in the same way that it had also relied on them in the past when disseminating information via leaflets (Reeves 1983). However, film propagandists were dissatisfied and concerned that diplomats, who were not specialists in the film industry, were not doing their best to make best use of the films. In 1917 a memorandum from the Department of Information explained the future of propaganda film exportation (Reeves 1983). In the future “film propaganda should be taken out of the hands of the diplomats and given to special cinema agents appointed by the Department of Information to act on its behalf” (Reeves 1983: 475). These agents, chosen for their knowledge of motion pictures, “would be sent out from London to supervise the work in the field … by the middle of 1918 cinema agents had been appointed for every European country except one” (Reeves 1983: 475). Although foreign audiences viewed British films, no data existed on whether and how these films influenced those who saw them. British diplomats wrote reports on public opinion in the countries in which they were stationed; these reports were neither regular nor frequent (Reeves 1983). The Nazis were quick to jump start propaganda filmmaking. After the declaration of War by Great Britain, Goebbels

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quickly ordered the writing of anti-British film scripts (Winkel 2009). For the Third Reich the film export industry could be “divided into three main sectors: occupied territories, independent countries that Germany befriended or influenced, and independents states that wished to remain absolutely neutral in the ongoing war” (Winkel 2009: 115). Ohm Kruger, a German propaganda film that was virulently anti-British, was based on South African statesman Paul Kruger and the role he played in the 1899– 1902 Boer War between the British and South Africa (Winkel 2009). The film projected “the contemporary military conflict against the background of British imperialism” and Britain’s attitude towards the Boers, including the building of concentration camps (Winkel 2009). The French premier of this film was of particular importance (Winkel 2009). The Germans hoped that the film would bring up and feed the old rivalry between France and Britain, thus persuading occupied France to support the Nazi cause (Winkel 2009). A report about the French premier of this film was sent to Berlin by the leader of the Referat Film who attended a screening anonymously. He described the auditorium as sold out and that viewers seemed to respond enthusiastically (Winkel 2009). In addition, there were no protests or demonstrations. Crucially, the viewers did not seem to relate their own lives to the story of the Boers as depicted in the movie (Winkel, 2009). This was distinctly different from when the film was shown in Luxembourg, a country that was defeated without much bloodshed (Winkel 2009). Here, many potential audience members refused to go, and those that did were found to stomp their feet and make other noises to protest the concentration camp scenes (Winkel 2009). The film’s international dissemination was spotty, and did not always produce the pro-Nazi, anti-British sentiment aimed at. However, it is an excellent example of how the Nazis used and exploited historical events to evoke emotional reactions and stir up old rivalries in a bid to bolster their own popularity and pursue their own agenda.

2.3 Initial thoughts about the impact of cross-border mediated messages Discourse surrounding the impact of cross-border propaganda onto their intended audiences emerged from the propaganda efforts of both the Triple-Entente (Russia, France, Great Britain) and the Triple-Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) during WWI and later Nazi propaganda prior to and during WWII. The resources that these countries placed on propaganda efforts prompted observers to believe that countries that engage in such efforts must have evidence that these efforts are very powerful and effective at achieving their goals. Scholars began theorizing about the impact of the media in light of the propaganda efforts that they witnessed. The most famous of the strong media effect theories to have emerged was the Hypodermic Needle Theory, also known as the Magic Bullet Theory (Bineham

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1988; DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach 1989). The theory was born as a result of combining two assumptions: the uniformity of basic human nature and the idea that mass society could be collectively manipulated through appropriately designed mass communication (see Bineham 1988). The essence of this perspective on media influence is that “… media messages are received in a uniform way by every member of the audience and that immediate and direct responses are triggered by such” (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach 1989: 164). Schramm (1972: 9) describes the thinking behind this perspective: “… the audience was considered relatively passive and defenseless, and communication could shoot something into them, just as an electric circuit could deliver electrons to a light bulb”. The Hypodermic Needle or Magic Bullet theory was dominant in both the 1930’s and 1940’s. A common example given to illustrate the strong power of media over audiences during that period of time is the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds which led to a mass panic stemming from listening to a radio drama that purported to broadcast a live alien invasion of planet Earth. Cantril (1972) acknowledges the accepted belief that radio was the favored means by which one can inform the population and arouse them into “… a common sense of fear or joy, and for exciting them to similar reactions directed toward a single objective” (Cantril 1972: 580). The Magic Bullet theory continued to be the dominant theory through the 1940’s. This was mainly due to the rapid rise of the popularity of radio, but also the rise of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s dominance of the media (Hale 1975). The Nazi regime engaged in systematic and blatant efforts to spread cross-border mediated messages that promoted its ideology. The very fact that they expended an inordinate amount of efforts to engage in these activities was taken as proof that these activities must be effective. This simply reinforced the prevailing belief about the strong and homogenous influence of messages that had crossed borders.

2.4 From magic bullet to a mix of media and interpersonal influence Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet (1968) conducted an investigation during the 1940 American Presidential Election into how people chose whom to vote for. The results of the investigation, and the conclusions drawn by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues dramatically changed the way in which the importance of mass mediated messages were evaluated. The theory that was put forward was the “Two-Step Flow Theory,” or “Personal Influence.” The initial publication of their findings in 1944 stated that it was the so called “opinion leaders” who were the most effective in communicating messages to the wider, and more passive, audience (Lazarsfeld, Berelson & Gaudet 1968). “[O]pinion leaders” were those who gained information and formed their opinions based on media and would then communicate their ideas and opinions to associates (Laz-

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arsfeld, Berelson & Gaudet 1968). Lazarsfeld and his colleagues theorized that because “opinion leaders”, who had similar aims, objectives, and values, were trusted by their associates, what they, the “opinion leaders” said was believed and must be of value (Lazarsfeld, Berelson & Gaudet 1968). Their theory was later expanded on in Lazarsfeld and Katz’s 1955 book Personal Influence. Hindsight allows us to see how the Nazi international propaganda technique: organizing anti-Bolshevik exhibitions in the Scandinavian countries (Waddington 2007), and the gatherings at the German Centre in Calcutta, India (D’Souza 2000) are in fact examples of Lazarsfeld and Katz’s theory of personal influence, rather than the Hypodermic Needle theory. While Lazarsfeld and his colleagues were the first to coin the two-step flow theory of influence, historical events that preceded their work embodied the mechanism of the two-step flow. For example, the Nazi exhibitions, detailed in a 1934 document (Waddington 2007), were instances where individuals can acquire influential information and then take back such information to others who did not attend the exhibition but who would become influenced by the information as transmitted through the individuals who attended them. Gatherings at the German Centre in Calcutta presented opportunities for “opinion leaders” to share their thoughts and disseminate information amongst their associates, and then these associates would be in a position to pass this information along. The presence of Nazi appointed individuals at the German Centre, perhaps armed with literature, further encouraged the two-step flow method as the literature could be removed and disseminated further. German ex-patriots would be able to interact with British ex-patriots and spread pro-Nazi messages to them. This is of particular note as Hitler had long heralded a desire to form an alliance with Great Britain (Kershaw 2000). One of the most important shifts in understanding the spread and influence of mediated messages, however, was conceptualizing the active and participatory audience, an audience who manipulates the message rather than simply being manipulated by it (see Schramm 1972). The active audience approach, however, had to wait until the 1990s before it began being integrated into the theoretical frameworks designed to understand how cross-border messages can potentially influence audiences.

2.5 Cross-border mediated messages and fears of cultural domination 2.5.1 International television flows The advent of television as a mass medium in the late 1950s brought with it a lot of attention to this new medium that delivered news and entertainment to the living rooms of millions of households. As television progressively spread overseas, so came with it a variety of imported TV programs (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974).

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Media scholars began raising concerns about the potential influence that this imported media content can have on domestic audiences. During the 1970’s a report for UNESCO was published regarding the international flow of television. An analysis of the hours of television programs imported into various countries demonstrated that there was, firstly “a one-way traffic from the big exporting countries to the rest of the world” and secondly a “dominancy of entertainment material in the flow” (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974: 40). In addition, the US and other Western countries were responsible for setting up television technology in other countries, especially in the developing world (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). This meant that countries had the technology to watch programs but not necessarily the ability to produce them, thus until domestic output increased they were reliant on foreign imports (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). Old colonial ties to the UK and France were of importance in the flow of exported television. French programs were predominantly exported to old African colonies, and the UK exported much to the Commonwealth countries (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). Latin America imported roughly half of all TV programs, most of which originated from the US, only 3 percent originated from Western Europe (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). Western Europe imported only 30–40 per cent of all TV programs, but it varied greatly depending on country. Iceland imported almost two thirds of all programming, whilst the UK, Italy and France a scant 10–15 per cent with the major supplied being the US, representing an average of 15–20 per cent of total transmission time (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). Again, the US was the main supplier of programs to the Asia Pacific region. Countries such as New Zealand and Malaysia import almost three quarters of their output (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). The Middle East also served as an excellent market for exported television programs. Almost half were imported, mostly from the US but also from the UK and other Arab countries (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). Almost a decade later Varis updated his original report. At the time he was writing, Varis (1986) noted that, although international communication was global, transmitters and receivers “are concentrated in a few regional centres” (Varis 1986: 236). Varis noted that the same patterns detected in the 1970’s study remained largely intact in the 1980’s. Such that, one third of programming was made up of imported television and the US was still the dominant exporter (Varis 1986). By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a different pattern of imported TV programs was observed in the domestic TV schedules of many developing countries. The pattern was a move away from the type of TV imports to which domestic audiences did not culturally relate, and a move toward TV imports that were imbedded with culturally relevant content (Straubhaar et al. 1992; Straubhaar 2003). Straubhaar (2003) refers to this phenomenon as “cultural proximity” (85). More recent trends have shown that television importation is now more concentrated on the ‘format’ i.e. the idea or concept of a program as opposed to the program itself (Tracey & Redal 1995). Countries have been exploiting the UK’s and

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other Anglo-Saxon countries’ catalogues of established shows, including game shows and soaps (Tracey & Redal 1995). In order to ensure these ‘format’ programs fit within the socio-cultural expectations they are localized for the audience (van Keulen & Krijnen 2013). Essentially the argument is that the localization of TV formats is a means of protecting cultural diversity (van Keulen & Krijnen 2013), or preventing cultural imperialism. When entertainment TV programs were produced primarily by the United States and found to be heavily present in the domestic TV schedules of developing countries, media critics sounded an alarm. These critics must have drawn parallels between the pattern observed in the context of imported entertainment TV programs and the heavy presence of political propaganda generated by a few countries during WWII and aimed at a large number of developing countries. While the purpose of political propaganda was clear, these critics wondered whether exported entertainment TV programs had a calculated purpose and, if such calculated purpose existed, they wondered about the purpose that it entailed.

2.5.2 Fears of cultural domination – back to the strong media effects perspective The term ‘cultural imperialism’ emerged during the 1960’s (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997) as an explanation for the perceived calculated purpose that might be at the heart of entertainment TV exports from the powerful countries to those that are less powerful. It became the dominant theory and rhetoric in international communication scholarship (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997). An attractive label that appears to refer to something very precise and accurate, it was in fact a “… concept [that] was broad and ill-defined, operating as evocative metaphor rather than precise construct, and has gradually lost much of its critical bite and historic validity” (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997: 49). Schiller (1976: 6) states that the power of cultural imperialism is characterized by the unidirectional flow of information from “core to periphery”, as does the promotion of English as a single language. Theorists who subscribed to the cultural imperialism paradigm, perceived the world as composed of a few powerful countries and many weaker countries, with the flow of information being unidirectional and overpowering (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997). As evidence, they used the patterns of television flows discussed in the previous section. Schiller (1976: 9) also defines cultural imperialism as when a “society is brought into the modern world system” and is then pressured into molding its social institutions to mirror or adopt similar or identical values of those of the dominant power within the core system. His perspective was that the mass media are central in achieving this process through its commercialization of broadcasting and the print media (Schiller 1976). Boyd-Barrett uses the term media imperialism to essentially encompass the same idea as cultural imperialism. In a nutshell, Boyd-Barrett states that the domi-

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nant country either “exports this influence as a deliberate commercial or political strategy, or simply disseminates this influence unintentionally”, whilst the receiving country “either adopts this influence as a deliberate commercial or political strategy, or simply absorbs this influence unreflectively” (Boyd-Barrett 1977: 119). A crucial part of the foundations of cultural imperialism is the concept of neocolonialism. Neo-colonialism was born out of the idea that “when colonialism was brought to an end, economic disparities among states remained” (Elasmar 2003: 12). The proponents of this world view believed that, although countries were no longer colonies, “the relationships of the past were maintained through a form that is subtler than forceful military control” (Elasmar 2003: 12). The control was essentially perpetuated through the use of cross-border mediated communication. Given the well documented history of colonialism and given the recent histories of WWI and WWII during which a few powerful countries were involved in invading and controlling many weaker countries, and given the documented efforts by these few powerful countries to export their ideologies through methodical and systematic cross-border mediated message campaigns, it is not surprising that cultural imperialism emerged when it did. The proponents of this theory in the 1960s and 1970s must have projected what they witnessed during the previous century onto contemporary events as a way of understanding and rationalizing what they were observing. This framework for understanding the influence of cross-border mediated messages, however, turned out to be unsubstantiated by empirical studies designed to capture the influence of cross-border mediated messages (see Elasmar & Hunter 2003). The cultural imperialism perspective advanced that strong and homogenous effect of mediated cross-border messages would be found among local audiences. The results of a meta-analysis conducted on studies that have investigated the influence of imported TV exposure revealed that there were “weak, positive correlations between exposure to foreign TV and viewers’ knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors” (Elasmar & Hunter 2003: 149). Weak overall effects are in sharp contrast with the expectations that one would derive from the cultural imperialism perspective. The strong media assumption of cultural imperialism, reminiscent of the notion of the hypodermic needle theory or magic bullet theory, proved to be too simplistic of an explanation for a much more complicated process. A later section of this chapter offers the new perspectives on the influence of cross-border messages.

2.5.3 Satellites and cross-border transmission The 1960s witnessed the advent and rapid evolution of a technology that allowed signals transmitted from a single point on Earth to be received by a satellite orbiting the planet and retransmitted to multiple points on the planet’s surface (Elasmar 1993). This ushered in the era of international satellite communication. Not surprisingly, the possibility of transnational broadcasting of audio and video via satellite

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prompted extensive debates and negotiations to regulate their usage. Loud concerns were also expressed about the potential social impacts that such cross-border communication transmissions might have on the citizens of countries on the receiving end of these signals (see Elasmar 1993). The technology of particular concern was known as the Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS). “DBS can carry television signals across-borders and continents. The small antennas used for signal reception enable individual households to receive the satellite signals directly …” (Elasmar 1993: 8). In the minds of some, satellite technology brought with it the promise of allowing the citizens of planet Earth to “see and know one another better” (New Worlds to Conquer 1961: 11) while others saw it as an extension of the media dominance of powerful countries over weaker countries or even an attempt at ideological persuasion that needed to be blocked. As such, many countries argued that DBS transmissions from one country to another should not occur without the authorization of the government of the receiving country, some going as far as stating that, if no government permission is received and transmission by DBS are made, governments should be able to use “all available means to counter such broadcasts” (USSR 1970: 27–28). Instead of collaborating on developing this technology, during the 1970s and 1980s, most governments opted to adopt a DBS regime of common aversion to inhibit its spread (see Elasmar 1993 for an extensive historical account). Rapid advances in DBS technology far surpassed any attempts by the international community to inhibit the spread of this form of media transmission. Unable to block signals transmitted from outer space, many governments of developing countries first attempted to ban the ownership of satellite reception dishes by their own citizens (Revolutionary principles prevail 1994; Malaysia to lift ban 1994), but rapidly decided to join the technological revolution by creating satellite TV channels of their own (see Chalaby 2005). Today, there are hundreds of entertainment and news audio-visual channels, in numerous languages, transmitted by satellites and available for direct reception by individuals in homes and cars around planet Earth (see Chalaby 2005). The advent of international DBS networks was revolutionary in taking away the traditional gatekeeping controls that governments had over audio-visual information that their citizens received instantaneously from other countries. In the case of DBS, though, the transmitters of such information still needed to be large organizations (governmental or private) as the costs of producing and distributing a signal by satellite was substantial. Further, DBS, on its own, does not have a mechanism that allows those who receive this signal to interact with those who are sending it.

2.5.4 The Internet: a true revolution in international communication Born in the 1960s as a technology primarily limited to the U.S. government and selected American research universities (Castells 2002), the Internet did not really

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become a major medium for the dissemination of cross-border mediated messages until the 1990s. It was in 1995 when the World Wide Web (WWW) forum was proposed, sparking the “www dot” format familiar in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Also in 1995 Microsoft launched its Windows 95 software with its browser Internet Explorer (Castells 2002) that became a software tool for accessing domestic and foreign information. The Internet, “a vast forum that encourages ‘many-to-many’ interaction, … makes it possible for citizens around the world to participate in public dialogue” (Shapiro 1999: 14). Since the mid 1990s Internet connections have exponentially expanded to span the distances across planet Earth. Various groups and agencies collect data to show the spread, penetration and access the world has to the Internet. The United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has collected data annually, beginning in 2000. Between 2005, ten years after the World Wide Web went live, and 2010 Internet usage doubled, and in 2012 there were 2.4 billion people using the Internet, or 34.3 per cent of the world’s population (Yang & Liu 2014). According to the ITU, in developed countries homes with access to Internet has increased from 44.7 per 100 people to 81.3 between 2005 and 2015; and in the developing world this has increased from 8.1 to 34.1 (International Telecommunications Union 2015). The Internet brought about a change in the model of international communication that planet Earth had known since the beginning of cross-border transmission and reception of mediated messages. The receiver of information could now also be a transmitter of information as the costs of producing the content became minimal and so did the costs of transmitting over the Internet via websites, blogs and chat rooms.

2.5.5 Social media: Empowering the individual to transmit internationally to segmented audiences The Internet is home to “social media”. Social media are platforms that allow humans to communicate by voice, word and pictures in ways that are very different than those that have been previously available. The early 2000s saw the explosion of various social media platforms. Comm and Taylor defined social media as “content that has been created cooperatively with its audience” (Comm & Taylor 2015: 3), or to be more precise, it is a “form of publishing in which people swap rather than publish stories and the exchange of content happens within a community, rather like a chat in a restaurant” (Comm & Taylor 2015: 4). A number of social media networks emerged over time. Prior to “MySpace”, which originated in 2003, there was “Six Degrees” that was launched in 1997, “Live Journal” in 1999, “Cyworld” in 2001, and “Friendster” in 2002 (Warf 2013). The four that are perhaps the best known in 2015 are, “LinkedIn”, “Facebook”, “Twitter”, and “YouTube” all

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of which were started between 2003 and 2006 (Warf 2013). The same few years also saw the birth of “Flickr” (Warf 2013). Outside of the English speaking world other Social media networks have sprung up, notably in China, where access to Facebook, Twitter and other sites are blocked. “Weibo”, a micro-blogging site like Twitter, was launched in 2009, and “Weixin”, a means to share short messages, photos and videos, was launched in 2011 (China’s Rival Social Networks 2013). Russia is another place where a copycat site is popular. “VKontakte”, literally meaning ‘in touch’ was launched in 2006 and has 35 million registered users (World’s top social networking sites 2009). Finland launched a social media site, Habbo, in 2000. It was originally aimed at musicians but has since expanded and now uses avatars to connect people (Hey, America, we have our own Facebooks 2009). Of these social media “Facebook” is the most popular, with an estimated 864 million users who are actively using the website and another 703 million mobile users (Comm & Taylor 2015), constituting a total of 1.567 billion users worldwide. “Twitter” users are estimated at 271 million, 78 per cent of whom engage with the social media platform on mobile devices (Comm & Taylor 2015). “Twitter” is also available in 35 different languages (Comm & Taylor 2015). Other social media platforms that offer alternative means of socially engaging with people are also popular. Approximately 1 billion “unique visitors each month” are watching “more than 6 billion hours of video content each month” on YouTube (Comm & Taylor 2015: 5). LinkedIn’s membership grew from 37 million at the start of 2009 to 347 million at the end of 2014 (Statista 2015). Social media represent a context in which individuals are empowered to speak their mind (in writing, verbally and/or visually) with those who share a common interest in a topic and/or with those who have made a decision to follow the individual making utterances. An individual can now be the sender of cross-border mediated messages to many individuals living around planet Earth and governments have very little control over what messages cross their borders. Even though some countries have put together measures to censor and block some social media networks, their citizens have always found a way to bypass such censorship (see Yang & Liu 2014; Flood of tweets: Turkey ban backfires 2014; Twitter makes changes in dispute with Turkey 2014; More Chinese circumvent government censors to access Facebook and Twitter 2012). The social media context enables individuals to potentially be very influential as they transmit their points of view to others who are a captive audience by their own volition as they’ve chosen to receive these points of view.

2.6 Contemporary perspectives on the potential influence of cross-border mediated messages Contemporary communication researchers no longer assume that the media have a strong and homogenous influence on members of their audiences. In the context

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of general media effects, the current perspective focuses on the notion of the active audience (Chandler & Munday 2011). The “active audience” denotes the idea that audience members will pick and choose from among available messages based on a plethora of pre-existing conditions and will selectively process and retain portions of messages to which they decide to be exposed. As a result, not every member of the audience will be exposed to the same message and even when they are, not all those exposed to the same message will process and retain the same aspects of that message (see Harris & Sanborn 2013). As was noted in an earlier section of this chapter, “Cultural Imperialism”, the long standing dominant paradigm that many had used to conceptualize the influence of cross-border mediated messages was shown to be a too simplistic explanation for a much more complicated process than was initially thought. A meta-analysis conducted by Elasmar and Hunter found that 177 articles had been written on the topic of cross-border TV effects, but only 36 of these were empirical studies (Elasmar & Hunter 2003: 139). The results of the meta-analysis revealed that there were “weak, positive correlations between exposure to foreign TV and viewers’ knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors” (Elasmar & Hunter 2003: 149). This meta-analysis strongly suggests that while the overall influence of crossborder mediated message might be weak, in reality the influence will vary across individuals as a function of various factors. What could these factors be? To address the need to identify preexisting factors, Elasmar (2003) introduced the susceptibility to imported media (SIM) perspective that focuses specifically on the variation that exists among individual audience members of imported crossborder mediated messages. The SIM model is designed to: 1. illustrate the process of imported media influence, 2. understand the conditions under which imported media can be influential, and 3. identify the type of effect (i.e., affective, behavioral, etc.) that imported media are most likely to achieve. The idea here is that some viewers are going to be less susceptible while others more susceptible to being influenced by imported cross-border messages. The viewers’ susceptibility will depend on their pre-existing beliefs and attitudes and on the interrelationships that exist among specific cognitive components. According to the SIM model, one needs to understand the interrelationships among specific cognitive components present in a viewer’s schema in order to determine whether this viewer will be affected when exposed to specific imported entertainment media messages. With respect to the type of effect likely to occur as a result of a viewer’s exposure to cross-border message content, the SIM model ranks effect types from those most likely to occur to those least likely to occur as follows: knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and values. For all these effect types, the literature suggests that the most likely impact of imported television programs would be that of reinforcing pre-existing states. The least likely impact would be to radically change these pre-existing states. Elasmar (2003) uses the SIM model to make predictions about the profile of the local TV viewer who will most likely be positively influenced by his/her exposure

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to imported TV programs. A positive influence, in this context, means that the viewer will hold a positive attitude and/or acquire positive beliefs as a result of exposure to these programs. According to Elasmar (2003), the viewers who are most likely susceptible for being positively influenced by imported TV programs are those who: a) Have a pre-existing positive attitude toward the country that is perceived to be the source of the imported TV program. b) Are compatible linguistically with the imported TV program. c) Have values that are compatible with the source and contents of the imported TV program. d) Are not negatively prejudiced against the source or content. e) Perceive one or more “utilities” for self in the content of the imported TV program and are involved in such content. f) Will frequently watch one or more imported TV programs stemming from the same foreign source (Elasmar 2003: 171–172). The contentions made by the SIM model were partially tested by Schlütz (2012). For the variables that she had at her disposal for analysis, her results were consistent with the contentions made by the SIM model. In another study, Elasmar (2008) reports the results of a series of structural equation models that analyzed data collected in 7 different countries. The results of these models provide an empirical confirmation of the notion that preexisting conditions among audience members moderate the influence that might stem from their exposure to imported mediated messages. The context of the study conducted by Elasmar (2008) was international public opinion about the U.S.-led war on terror in seven countries with substantial Muslim populations. Elasmar (2008) found that exposure to imported entertainment mediated messages played an important influence on the audience’s opinions about the U.S-led war on terror. While this was true in all countries that were studied, the influence of exposure to imported mediated messages was itself a function of other preexisting conditions that varied across countries. Table 23.1 shows the determinants of exposure to imported entertainment media for each of the seven countries studied. One can note from Table 23.1 that there was variation across countries in terms of what predicts whether an audience member will be exposed to imported entertainment mediated messages. Even when the same predictor is present in two difference countries, the direction of the relationship between the same predictor and exposure to imported entertainment media might not be the same. It is important to also note that exposure to imported entertainment mediated messages was also one of several competing explanations for the variation in the audiences’ level of support for the U.S.-led war on terror. So, one cannot only focus on cross-border mediated messages as a source of influence but also has to take into account other influences in order to gain an understanding of the whole pic-

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Tab. 23.1: Determinants of exposure to U.S. Entertainment Mediated Messages in seven countries as reported by Elasmar (2008). Consumption of U.S. Entertainment Media

Traditional values about the role of Islam in politics

+

–

Indonesia

–

Pakistani

Lebanon

–

Turkey

Egypt

Age

Senegal

Direction of Relationship Nigeria

Direct Predictor

–

–

Receptiveness to imported media Traditional Islamic values about the role of women

–

Exposure to international news networks Openness to global exchanges Preexisting affinity toward imported media content

+ +

+

+

+

+

Exposure to International News Channels

+ +

Tab. 23.2: Variables Present in the seven country models as reported by Elasmar (2008).

Education

X

Gender

X X

X

X

Traditional values about the role of Islam in politics

X

X

Traditional Islamic values about the role of women

X

X

Openness to Global Exchanges Receptiveness to Imported Media

Pakistan

X

Indonesia

X

Turkey

Egypt

X

Lebanon

Age

Nigeria

Senegal

Variables Present in the Country Models

X

X

X

Exposure to Int’l News networks Consumption of US Entertainment Media

X

Belief U.S. ignores other countries’ interests

X

Belief Terrorism is a Problem

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Attitude toward the US

X

Support for US-Led War on Terror

X

X X

X

X

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ture. Table 23.2 shows the influence of exposure to imported entertainment messages along with the influence of other factors within the context of the people’s support for the U.S.-led war on terror in 7 countries. For a more complete description of the relationships among these factors, please refer to chapter 11 of Elasmar (2008). In sum, the current perspective on the influence of cross-border mediated messages is that such communication might be influential depending on a number of preexisting audience-centered factors that are beginning to be identified.

3 Future directions in the study of cross-border mediated messages Tracking the rapid evolution of cross-border mediated messages through the historical and technological glimpses provided by in this chapter, the reader no doubt realizes that international communication has come a long way since the beginning of the 1900s. Cross border messages are now plentiful, easy and relatively cheap to transmit and receive, and mostly unencumbered by government gatekeepers. There is no doubt that the next decade will witness additional developments that bring about a different way of transmitting and experiencing cross-border mediated messages. Such developments could be in the form of virtual travel that allows individuals to immerse themselves in a place in real time while sitting in the comfort of their living rooms. The beginnings of this phenomenon can already be seen at a basic level through the use of Skype video interactions. One can easily imagine the possibility of virtual travel by simply coupling the technology at the heart of Skype with 3D TV or a virtual reality goggle and super-fast wireless Internet connection. There is also no doubt that some critics will always point at the potential negative social impact that existing and emerging cross-border mediated communication will have on their users. One of the biggest challenges that researchers face is to develop new theoretical models of influence that take into account the emerging technologies that are at the heart of transnational communication. As researchers strive to develop such theoretical models they should keep in mind that not all potential impacts of new transnational communication technologies are negative. Recent studies demonstrate some positive benefits of technologies that facilitate the transmission and reception of cross-border mediated messages. A study of Facebook users conducted by Elasmar (2014) finds that exposure to status updates of Facebook friends living in distant countries is very likely to result in a shrinking of a Facebook user’s cognitive distances pertaining to locations on planet Earth. Social media users who are aware that they have friends living in other countries and who regularly see updates provided by these friends were found to have a

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mental image of planet Earth as a smaller place, a sort of a shrunken planet, as opposed to those who don’t. The reader might ask why is perceiving the planet as a smaller place considered to be a positive outcome of social media use? Perceiving the planet as a smaller place might get individuals to care more about the planet as they might better relate to it and feel more connected to it. This line of research addresses one of many questions that future scholars can ask when it comes to studying the impact of cross-border mediated messages within the context of social media. In another study, Groshek, Elasmar and Wu (2015) focused on modeling the volume of communication via Twitter, a popular social medium. The authors focused on identifying the determinants of the volume of tweets transmitted about various countries over a period of one year. The structural equation model reported by Groshek, Elasmar and Wu (2015) shows that while economic power is still one explanation for country mentions on Twitter, population size, irrespective of economic power is another explanation. This is in sharp contrast with the long history of cross-border mediated communication documented earlier in this chapter that shows that a country’s economic and military power were the major determinants of being a transmitter of and being a prominent subject of cross-border mediated messages. One takeaway from the Groshek, Elasmar and Wu’s (2015) study is that, within the context of country mentions, there is a democratization effect brought about by social media. This outcome can also be considered a positive effect stemming from the social media context. While no one can predict for certain what the future holds within the context of cross-border mediated communication, the future definitely promises to be a departure from the past when it comes to the ease of transmitting and receiving such messages. New theoretical frameworks are needed to illustrate the process of transmitting and receiving cross-border mediated messages, identify the factors that influence how such mediated messages are processed and illustrate the various relationships that, altogether, determine the influence that such mediated messages have on their audience members. These are some of the exciting challenges that the next wave of cross-border mediated communication researchers will face and, hopefully, their findings will usher in a new era of knowledge within this field.

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Hale, Julian. 1975. Radio power. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Harris, Richard J. & F. W. Sanborn. 2013. A cognitive psychology of mass communication. New York, NY: Routledge. Hey, America, we have our own Facebooks. 2009. Bloomberg Business. Retrieved from http:// www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb20090715_921142.htm (accessed Decemeber 2015). Huurdeman, Anton. 2003. The worldwide history of telecommunications. New York, NY: J. Wiley. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/servlet/opac?bknumber=5236535 (accessed July 2015). International Telecommunications Union. 2015. ICT facts and figures 2015. Retrieved from http:// www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx (accessed 22 July 2015). Kershaw, Ian. 2000. Hitler: 1889–1936 hubris. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Keulen, Jolien van & Tonny Krijnen. 2013. The limitations of localization: A cross-cultural comparative study of Farmer Wants a Wife. International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(3). 277–292. doi: 10.1177/1367877913496201 (accessed July 2015). Lasswell, D, Harold. 1938. Propaganda technique in the World War. New York, NY: P. Smith. Lazarsfled, Paul F., Bernard Berelson & Hazel Gaudet. 1968. The people’s choice. How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign, 3 rd edn. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Malaysia to lift ban on use of satellite dishes in 1996. 1994, April 21. The Straits Times. Retrieved from www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic (accessed July 2015). Martin, L. John. 1958. International propaganda. Its legal and diplomatic control. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. More Chinese circumvent government censors to access Facebook and Twitter. 2012, October 4. AFP – RELAXNEWS. Retrieved from www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic (accessed July 2015). New Worlds to Conquer. 1961, August 6. New York Times, 11. Nordenstreng, Kaarle & Tapio Varis. 1974. Television traffic – a one-way street? France: UNESCO. Ostgaard, Elnar. 1965. Factors influencing the flow of news. Journal of Peace Research 2(39). 39– 63. doi: 10.1177/002234336500200103 (accessed June 2015). Reeves, Nicholas. 1983. Film propaganda and its audience: The example of Britain's official films during the first World War. Journal of Contemporary History 18(3). 463–494. Revolutionary principles prevail as Iran puts ban on satellite dishes. 1994, December 28. The Age. Retrieved from www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic (accessed July 2015). Roberts, Donald F. & Wilbur Schramm (eds.). 1980. The process and effects of mass communication, rev. edn. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Schiller, Herbert I. 1976. Communication and cultural domination. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences. Schlütz, Daniela. 2012. Cross-border media effects. The ‘susceptibility to imported media’ (SIM) model and US-American TV series [Der Prozess grenzüberschreitender Medienwirkungen. Das susceptibility to imported media (SIM)-Modell am Beispiel US-amerikanischer Fernsehserien]. Medien & Medienkommunikationswissenschaft 60. 183–201. Schramm, Wilbur. 1972. The nauture of communication between humans. In W. Schramm & D. F. Roberts (eds.), The process and effects of mass communication, 3–53. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Shapiro, Andrew L. 1999. The Internet. Foreign Policy 115 (Summer). 14–27. Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle. 1997. The many cultural faces of imperialism. In P. Golding & P. Harris (eds.), Beyond cultural imperialism. Globalization, Communication and the New International Order, 49–59. London: Sage.

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Statista. 2015. Numbers of LinkedIn members from 1 st quarter 2009 to 1 st quarter 2015 (in millions). STATISTA. Retrieved from http://www.statista.com/markets/424/topic/540/ social-media-user-generated-content/ (accessed 26 July 2015). Straubhaar, Joseph. 2003. Choosing national TV: Cultural capital, language, and cultural proximity in Brazil. In Michael G. Elasmar (ed.), The impact of international television, 77– 110. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Straubhaar, Joseph, Consuelo Campbell, Sug-min Youn, Karen Champagne, Luis Ha, Scema Shrikande, & Michael Elasmar. 1992. Regional TV markets and TV program flows. Paper presented at Telecommunications Policy Reseach Conference, Solomons Island, September 1992 and at International Association for Mass Communication Research. Guaraja, Brazil, August 16–21. Tracey, Michael & Wendy W. Redal. 1995. The new parochialism: The triumph of the populist in the flow of international television. Canadian Journal of Communication 20(3). Retrieved from http://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/rt/printerFriendly/883/789 (accessed July 2015). Twitter makes changes in dispute with Turkey. 2014, April 17. International New York Times. Retrieved from www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic (accessed July 2015). UNESCO. 1969. News agencies. Their structure and operation. New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers. USSR. 1970. Model general principles for the use of artificial earth satellites for radio and television broadcasting. Paper presented by the delegation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the Working Group on Direct Broadcast Satellites. (A/AC.105/83 Annex IV). New York, NY: United Nations. Varis, Tapio. 1986. Trends in international television flow. International Political Science Review/ Revue internationale de science politique 7(3). 235–249. Waddington, Lorna L. 2007. The anti-komintern and Nazi anti-Bolshevik propaganda in the 1930s. Journal of Contemporary History 42(4). 573–594. Warf, Barney. 2013. Global geographies of the Internet. New York, NY: Springer. Winder, Gordon M. 2010. London’s global reach? Reuters news and network, 1865, 1881, and 1914. Journal of World History 21(2). 271–296. Winkel, Roel Vande. 2009. Ohm Kruger’s travels: A case study in the export of third-reich film propaganda. Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 35(2). 108–124. World’s top social networking sites. 2009, July 15. Bloomberg Business. Retrieved from http:// www.bloomberg.com/ss/09/07/0715_social_networking_sites/index.htm (accessed Decemeber 2015). Yang, Qinqhua & Yu Liu. 2014. What’s on the other side of the great firewall? Chinese web users’ motivations for bypassing the Internet censorship. Computers in Human Behavior 37. 249– 257.

Yunying Zhang

24 Stereotyping and Communication Abstract: Stereotyping, a printing technology invented in China, is now widely and figuratively used to refer to mental images we have about different social groups and the trait associations imprinted in our head. We cannot not stereotype at certain point of time in our social cognition when we put things into categories. Studies show that we can grow beyond stereotyping when we care about cognitive accuracy, endorse the egalitarian values and social-equality norms, and live free of stereotype threat. Following Lasswell’s communication process model, who → says what → in which channel → to whom → with what effect, taking goals and contexts into consideration, and turning it into a process model of stereotype communication, who → stereotypes → whom → in which channel → with what effect, the chapter examines stereotyping and communication. Stereotype control and stereotype change are discussed using the stereotype communication framework. Gaps for future research are suggested from a communication perspective. Keywords: stereotyping, communication, stereotype communication model, stereotype control and stereotype change

1 Introduction Stereotyping had been part of human history before journalist Walter Lippmann (1922: 30) introduced it into media studies, and defined stereotypes as “pictures in our heads” when we think about a particular social group. Invented by ancient Chinese over two millennia ago as a printing technology, one might be surprised that some people are still using the ancient stereotyping technology to print even when we are many decades into the digital world. Stereotyping, nowadays, is more often used to refer to the cognitive process that we human beings experience when we process incoming information by putting things into categories (Fiske & Russell 2010). Its end-products, stereotypes, are the labels we tag to different social categories. Stereotyping as a cognitive mechanism is largely neutral; as a social phenomenon, however, it is often value-loaded relating to our social and cultural needs (Tajfel 1981a, 1981b). If Lippmann’s (1922: 30) “pictures in our heads” still relate somewhat to the printing business by telling us what is printed, or imprinted, in our head about other social groups in the communication process, Allport (1954: 191) first relates those “pictures,” called “exaggerated belief[s] associated with a category,” to their social psychological functions such as justifying our behaviors toward people from different groups. We communicate by talking, printing, televising, and broadcastDOI 10.1515/9781501500060-024

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ing stereotypes besides many other cognitive and cultural artifacts; we consume them to meet our social, political, economic and cultural needs (see Katz 1959). To examine stereotyping and communication, this chapter includes four sections: 1. definitions of stereotyping, stereotypes, and communication, 2. communication approaches to stereotyping, 3. communication and stereotype change, and 4. gaps to be filled in stereotype research: a communication perspective.

2 Definitions of stereotyping, stereotypes and communication Schneider (2004: 16–17, 24) provides us with perhaps the most comprehensive list of definitions of stereotyping and stereotypes, including the earliest (Katz & Braly 1935), the latest (Jones 1997), and his own, “stereotypes are qualities perceived to be associated with particular groups or categories of people.” According to these definitions, stereotypes are “beliefs,” “impressions,” “preconceptions,” “generalizations,” “traits,” “attributes,” “qualities,” and “characteristics” associated with social groups. For example, studies find that Americans are perceived as intelligent, Germans as industrious, and African Americans as lazy (Karlins, Coffman & Walters 1969). Communication researchers (e.g., Bresnahan & Lee 2011; Tan et al. 2001; Zhang 2010) refer largely to social psychologists’ definitions (e.g., Allport 1954; Hilton & von Hippel 1996; Perse 2001) when they study stereotyping and stereotypes. Some focus on traits, attributes, or characteristics (e.g., Tan, Fujioka & Lucht 1997); others center on general beliefs, impressions, images, or portrayals (e.g., Bresnahan & Lee 2011; Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005). They find that stereotypes and the associated beliefs (e.g., Allport 1954) are cultivated and imprinted not only by the media (Greenberg, Mastero & Brand 2002), but also through interpersonal communication (Dong & Murrillo 2007; Mastro & Tropp 2004; Tan et al. 1997). Stereotypes are also studied in a much broader social context such as in intercultural communication (e.g., Fujioka 1999; Tan et al. 2010; Zhang & Tan 2011). Gudykunst and Kim (1992) relate the cognitive characteristics of stereotyping to its affective connections, that a few social psychologists find stereotypes all fall into (Fiske et al. 2002). Stereotypes are not just cognitive representations of a social group; they also arouse feelings about the group based on those cognitive beliefs. Sociologist Schaefer (2007) points out especially the relationship between stereotype and prejudice in his definition, a view shared by both social psychologists (e.g., Dovidio et al. 2010; Tajfel 1981a) and communication scholars (e.g., Fujioka 1999; Ramasubramanian 2010). Stereotypes as cognitive beliefs are not only associated with, but also distinguished from attitudinal feelings of prejudice and behavioral demonstrations of

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discrimination (Ajzen & Fishbein 2000; Dovidio et al. 2010). As widely held beliefs, stereotypes serve such functions as defending at the individual level one’s ego system (Snyder & Miene 1994) and value system (Tajfel 1981a), and justifying at the societal level the status quo for the dominant group (e.g., Fiske 1993a; Jost, Burgess & Mosso 2001). As such, the in-group is associated with mainly positive qualities whereas the out-groups are labelled with mainly negative qualities (Howard & Rothbart 1980). Therefore, “we” are good, and “they” are bad (Duckitt 2003). What is more, stereotypes often imply antipathy toward out-groups (Allport 1954). In this sense, stereotypes are related to prejudice. That is why social psychologists sometimes use stereotypes interchangeably with prejudice (e.g., Allport 1954; see Fiske & Tablante 2015). When the in-group favoritism and out-group derogation tendency (Pratto & Glasford 2008) elevates into dehumanizing out-group members as “parasite” or “disease” or any other derogatory terms (e.g., Maass, Suitner & Arcuri 2014) in a strong ethnocentric or authoritarian condition (e.g., Altemeyer 1998, 2004; Sumner 1906), any discriminatory behaviors toward them are justified (e.g., Dovidio, Gaertner & Kawakami 2010), including avoidance, exclusion, hate crime, manslaughter and genocide, to name a few, at both the individual level (Alden & Parker 2005; Bobo 1999; McDevitt, Levin & Bennett 2002) and the organizational or national or cultural level (Feagin 2006; Ray & Smith 2004). Communication as a practice is perhaps as old as human history. Of the more than 120 definitions Dance (1970) reviewed and newer ones since, communication is mainly defined by 1. the components in the communication process (e.g., Lasswell 1948), 2. characteristics such as its symbolic, dynamic and contextual nature, 3. functions such as transmitting information and creating shared meaning, and 4. levels from inter-personal to group, mass, and inter-cultural communication. The first three dimensions are largely integrated in Tan’s communication model (1985). Following this model, the next section looks at stereotyping and stereotypes in the contexts of interpersonal, group (including inter-cultural), and mass (including institutional) communication.

3 Communication approaches to stereotyping 3.1 Components approach The communication process model by Lasswell (1948) can be reworded as, who → stereotypes → whom → in which channel (taking the goals and contexts into consideration of stereotyping) → with what effect, therefore turning it into a process model of stereotype communication. Although the model is yet to be tested as a whole, all the individual components in the model have been well studied respectively or in association in psychology, sociology, political science, women’s studies and communication.

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3.1.1 Who Associated with the first component, “who,” in this model is social prejudice (including stereotyping), an intrapsychic phenomenon, which was conceptualized as “natural,” “normal,” and “inevitable” responses of the “superior” race to other “inferior” races, by the 19th century European and U.S. race theorists. Around the 1950s, group bias, with racism as its extreme manifestation, was conceptualized as a social pathology due to its fundamental irrationality and injustice (e.g., Duckitt 2010). Since then, it is believed that dysfunctional personalities, such as those prone to authoritarianism (Adorno et al. 1950), right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer 1996, 1998), or social dominance orientation (Sidanius & Pratto 1999), lead to biased social perceptions including stereotypes. In the 1970s and 80s, cognitive process theories such as the schema theory (Bartlett 1932) or the associative network model (e.g., Anderson 1972, 1983) conceptualized stereotyping as a universal, natural and neutral cognitive process when people sort things into categories; social categories is one typology. We stereotype, or associate certain traits to certain social groups, to simplify the myriad of information in our social environment, according to the “cognitive miser” theory (Taylor 1981). In other words, we all stereotype, whether aware of it or not (Devine et al. 1991), as it has evolutionary significance for human beings (Schaller, Conway III & Peavy 2010). The wide existence of stereotypes, particularly racial ones, can be revealed by such sophisticated measures as implicit association test (IAT) (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz 1998).

3.1.2 Whom The third component “whom,” the target of stereotyping, in the stereotype communication process model, involves all social categories. Among the most targeted in a society are the ‘big three’ (Quadflieg, Mason & Macrae 2010: 69): race, gender and age. In the first scientific study of stereotypes, Katz and Braly (1933) asked 100 Princeton students to choose from a list of 84 adjectives those that they believed to be most characteristic of each of the 10 racial/ethnic groups under study. They found that 1. Germans were stereotyped as “scientifically-minded,” 2. Italians as “artistic,” 3. Irish as “pugnacious,” 4. English as “sportsmanlike,” 5. Jews as “shrewd,” 6. Chinese as “superstitious,” 7. Japanese as “intelligent,” 8. Turks as “cruel,” 9. African Americans as “lazy,” and 10. (white) Americans as “industrious.” Gilbert (1951) and Karlins, Coffman and Walters (1969) continued this line of research, known as the Princeton trilogy, all confirming the negative stereotypes about African Americans, the most studied minority group at least in the United States. A recent replication by Madon et al. (2001) found half of the words their respondents used to describe African Americans were still negative. Even the apparently positive traits were actually rated rather negatively in the stereotyping

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context. Among all minority groups, even the “model minority,” a label assigned to Asian Americans, is stereotyped with a positive and negative mixture. They are often perceived as hard-working, intelligent and competent, but at the same time, as shy, passive and socially awkward (e.g., Lin et al. 2005; Zhang 2010). Gender is another big category of stereotype. However, empirical gender stereotypes are documented mostly in recent decades (e.g., Seem & Clark 2006; for a review, see Wood & Eagly 2010), following the theoretical framework of racial/ ethnic stereotypes (Eagly & Wood 1982). Men are stereotyped as strong, tough, adventurous, aggressive, active, dominant and independent whereas women are stereotyped as weak, affectionate, emotional, attractive, sexy, sensitive, submissive and dependent, in Williams and Best’s (1990) study of college students from 25 nations across five continents. When the gender stereotypic traits (more than double those listed above) were submitted to the Big Five personality (McCrae & Costa 1996) analysis, men were higher than women in four of the five factors, namely extraversion, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience. Women scored higher only in the agreeableness factor (Williams, Satterwhite & Best 1999). Stereotypes fall largely into the sex roles societies prescribe: nurturing and communal women vs. domineering and agentic men (for a review, see Wood & Eagly 2010). Age, a continuum category, is different from the other two since “we will (if we are lucky and live right) become members of the various age categories” (Schneider 2004: 473). As a biological property, age puts people on a time continuum. However, as a social concept, it divides people into young vs. old, with middleaged taken into account sometimes. Most research from early on (e.g., Tuckman & Lorge 1953) is about how old people are stereotyped, whereas little is about how the young are stereotyped, not to mention the middle-aged. Among the few, young college students are usually the target population with a handful of stereotypes. In comparison, many more beliefs are held about the old, from “They worry about unimportant things,” and “They are afraid of death,” in the early findings (Tuckman & Lorge 1953) to such common construes as “shrew/curmudgeon” and “perfect grandparent” in recent studies (e.g., Liu et al. 2003). When the trait words to measure old age stereotypes are applied to young college students to find possible young stereotype categories/construes (Hummert 1990: 190), “perfect friend,” “athletic/extrovert,” “mature young professional,” “underclass,” and “redneck,” etc., showed up. The paradox is that when we stereotype others because of their age, we lived/live/will be living with those stereotypes because of our age. The same stereotyping-stereotyped mechanism also works with race, gender and perhaps any other social property that people are categorized by.

3.1.3 Stereotype as an act and as a message The second component, “stereotype,” is both an act and a message in the stereotype communication model. Stereotyping is a cognitive act in the thinking process.

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Its products, stereotypes, become messages communicated in the social interaction processes. As an individual, we all stereotype, at least at some point (for a historical review, see Duckitt 2010). In this sense, we cannot not stereotype since the human brain has evolved to be doing that (Schaller, Conway III & Peavy 2010). Only with conscious effort can we choose not to use those stereotypes, for reasons such as self-image (Fein & Spencer 1997), social norms (Sechrist & Stangor 2001), or ideological concerns (Sears & Henry 2005). It is at the collective and cultural level, when we put individuals into their respective social categories or boxes judging by the labels we tab to their categories (Allport 1954), that stereotypes become social products (Tajfel 1981a, 1981b) and are messages. Labelling a social group as “intelligent” sends out a message; being labelled as “less intelligent” is a different message. They have different implications for the sender and receiver respectively. The next two sections take a close look at the individual/cognitive and the collective/cultural approaches to stereotyping, focusing on what we do when we stereotype and why we do it (for a comprehensive review, see e.g., Schneider 2004).

3.1.3.1 Individual/cognitive approach to stereotyping The individual/cognitive approach to stereotyping treats stereotyping as a matter of information processing and, thus, largely as an act. Stereotyping happens when the information about a member or members of a social group is received, whether through direct (Allport 1954) or indirect/mediated (Schneider 2004) contact and experiences, encoded, put into one category or another, and retrieved when the group label becomes salient. Three models are often used to explain stereotyping as cognitive or knowledge structures (For a review, see Hilton & von Hippel 1996): schemas, group prototypes and exemplars at the intrapersonal level of social cognition.

3.1.3.1.1 Schemas For the schema model, stereotypes are abstract knowledge structures that people have to specify the defining features and attributes of a target group (Hamilton 1981). The abstract nature of cognition decides that the abstract trait adjectives, such as “honest,” “musical,” or “aggressive,” are stereotypes in our social group schemas rather than the concrete act or behavior verbs, such as “tell exactly what happened,” “listen to a lot music,” or “push” corresponding to these traits respectively (e.g., Maass et al. 2005; Semin & Fiedler 1991). This explains why children do not stereotype until a certain age (Killen, Richardson & Kelly 2010). The attributional or dispositional associations with different social groups are illustrated in all the stereotype content studies, employing the checklist measure (Katz & Braly 1933), attribute ratings (Brigham 1971), the trait assignment task (Schmidt & Boland 1986), the string of letter recognition or sentence completion task (Wittenbrink, Judd & Park 1997), scale measures (e.g., Tan, Fujioka & Tan 2000), the traits in the

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stereotype content model (SCM) (Fiske et al. 2002), IAT (Greenwald et al. 1998), or free responses (Monteith & Spicer 2000). For example, Germans were associated with “scientifically-minded” and Jews were associated with “shrewd” (Katz & Braly 1933). Such associations are schemas in stereotyping.

3.1.3.1.2 Group prototypes Hilton and von Hippel (1996: 241) define the group prototype as “an ‘averaged’ representation of the category across many attributes, with no set of group attributes seen as defining.” Prototypes are also associations between group labels and the features ascribed to the social groups. Instead of the associative networks of the cognitive and linguistic building blocks constituting stereotypes in the schema model, they are the presumed “typical” or “average” person in a social category, judging by the traits assigned to the group, that an individual from that group is pit up to compare with (Cantor & Mischel 1979). As such, stereotyping takes place in our mind when we can conjure up, or imagine, a “typical” American, athlete, or a typical one from any social group. Those who fall off our presumed or imagined typical or average type are a-stereotypical, labelled as “subtypes.” In prototyping, there are stereotypes, subtypes and some other hierarchical types (Devine & Baker 1991; Johnston & Hewstone 1992). Free responses are most often used as a measure of stereotyping in the prototype model (e.g., Monteith & Spicer 2000).

3.1.3.1.3 Exemplars If the group prototype creates, out of the traits-group association, a typical person in a given social category, the exemplar model of stereotyping specifies that person as a result of direct contact or indirect experiences and registers him/her as a case that is likely to be retrieved when his/her group label is salient (Smith & Zarate 1992). Different from the group prototype model in its focus on the imagined “average,” this model bases stereotyping on the perceptions of the individuals one has experiences with, whether real or virtual. For example, if Michael Jordan comes to one’s mind when the stereotype of African Americans as being athletic is activated, he is an exemplar (Hilton & von Hippel 1996), whether one actually met him in person, or only watched him play on television, or got to know him from other sources, that he is an excellent basket-ball player. Studies fall into this category that measure stereotyping or generate words of stereotypes by asking respondents to describe a person that they know very well in their life (e.g., Wigboldus, Semin & Spears 2000). In summary, these theories assert that stereotypes are the natural products of information processing, the result of encoding concrete acts and behaviors into abstract attributional knowledge, being able to conjure up a “typical” person from a social category that some individuals in that group may not actually match up to, and/or knowing an exemplar when a social group becomes salient. The associative

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networks of the abstract traits for groups, of imagined “typical” others, and the actual or virtual individual exemplars one has become stereotypes once such associations are carved in one’s mind under a group label. They perpetuate by virtue of cognitive economy, saving one’s energy as cognitive short-cuts (Lang 2000). Perpetuation of stereotypes at the collective/cultural level also has to do with motivations and goals, to be discussed next.

3.1.3.2 Collective/cultural approach to stereotyping As social products, stereotypes are the encoded messages the cognitive act of stereotyping communicates at all levels of social interactions. Acknowledging the cognitive roots of stereotyping, Tajfel (1981a, 1981b) notes the socially shared nature of stereotypes in the Social Identity Theory (SIT). Being part of the defense system for one’s group identity, personal identity included (Turner 1982), stereotypes lead to consequent group behaviors (Tajfel & Turner 1979), whether in an immediate threat or a perceived threat, realistic or symbolic (e.g., Stephan, Ybarra & Rios 2016). For SIT, stereotypes are social norms (Hogg & Abrams 1988) that serve the dominant or majority group by assigning negative and undesirable traits to minority and less powerful groups, thus depersonalizing and dehumanizing them (e.g., Sidanius & Pratto 1999). However, in the U.S. at least, the overt and blatant stereotypes and old-fashioned prejudice have gone underground and are expressed in subtle or implicit ways (e.g., Bobo 2001; Sears & Henry 2005). In encoding of a message, the cognitive nature of stereotyping determines that stereotypes are presented in abstract terms, abstract trait adjectives specifically in a message (e.g., Maass 1999; Semin & Fiedler 1991; von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa & Vargas 1995), whether the stimuli is verbal or non-verbal, texts or signs or images (Maass 1999). In this sense, the more one uses adjectives to attribute the observed behavior to a person’s personality, the more likely a stereotype message is being constructed-language is only the tool used to convey messages. Our attribution of what is observed to the personality itself is the origin. It is a cognitive virtue to be able to think in abstract terms. This virtue, however, could be tainted with the “fundamental attribution error” (Ross 1977), and results in an overstatement of the dispositional characteristics and an understatement of the situational constraints in judgements about an observed behavior. Some suggest that the fundamental attribution error is probably only pertinent to individualistic cultures (e.g., Kunda 1999). Stereotypes may be positive or negative (e.g., Fiske & Tablante 2015). That outgroups are often stereotyped negatively reveals the social and cultural function of stereotyping, as SIT posits (Tajfel & Turner 1979), while group identity provides a sense of security. To protect one’s self-esteem at the individual level and transport it to the protection of one’s group identity at the collective level, it is natural and therefore normal to associate others and other groups of people to negative qualities. That we-are-good-and-they-are-bad mentality could not manifest any better

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than the positive stereotypes about one’s in-group but negative stereotypes about out-groups (Dovidio, Gaertner & Pearson 2005). In-group favoritism and out-group negation is found, in particular, in attributing the positive behaviors of in-group to their dispositions than to the situations, and in attributing the negative behaviors of in-group in reverse to the situations than to their dispositions, committing the “ultimate attribution error” (Pettigrew 1979), presumably because one’s self-esteem or ego (Hamilton & Sherman 1994) or group identity (Tajfel 1981a, 1981b) or belief or value system (Sears & Henry 2005) is challenged or is under some kind of threat (e.g., Stephan, Ybarra & Rios 2016). The need for control leads to such patterns of stereotyping. The stereotypes are well revealed in the IAT (Greenwald et al. 1998), in which people make quicker responses to the positive trait associations with their in-group but the negative trait associations with an out-group; conversely, they have slow responses to the negative trait associations with their in-group but the positive trait associations with an out-group. Stereotypes, as messages with positive valence for the in-group and negative valence for out-groups, are often shared by receivers of the messages in decoding, therefore perpetuating such biased social/cultural beliefs that function to serve status quo for the dominant groups and their ideologies (e.g., Fiske 1993a; Jost et al. 2001). Stereotype messages are shared and maintained not only among the dominant groups, presumably to justify the existing social system that in fact benefits them most, but also by members of minority groups who fall into the stereotypes self-fulfilling prophecy, therefore, justifying on their part the ruling group’s dominance over the dominated minorities, as recent studies found (Jost, Banaji & Nosek 2004). Most research on stereotype examines content (e.g., Katz & Braly 1933; Fiske et al. 2002; Tan et al. 1997, 2010). For example, Katz and Braly (1933) focused on the adjectives most frequently used by their respondents to describe different race/ ethnic groups. Devine (1989) and her colleagues (e.g., Devine et al. 1991) studied how the prevalent stereotype of African Americans as being aggressive was automatically activated among both their prejudiced and non-/less prejudiced respondents even though the latter appeared to have succeeded in controlling their stereotypes out of such possible motives as upholding the egalitarian values, presenting a good self-image, or simply not to be prejudiced as called upon by the new social norm, therefore demonstrating stereotypes as prevalent cultural phenomena. Fiske et al. (2002) found that warmth and competence are the two fundamental dimensions of stereotype contents, establishing the SCM with both national and international samples (Cuddy, Fiske & Glick 2008). Groups with a high social status are regarded as competent but cold whereas those with a low social status are perceived as warm but incompetent, therefore showing “the link between socialstructural dimensions (competition and status) and perceptions of social groups” (Devos 2014: 349). A recent replication suggests that besides the emotional reactions (i.e., the warmth dimension gauging the intention of the target group to see

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how much it can be trusted in a relation or cooperation) and behavior tendencies (i.e., the competence dimension addressing the target group’s ability to enact its intention to see how much it could change the current power relations), morality (Wojciszke 2005) as a third dimension is also crucial in our social perceptions (Cuddy et al. 2009), therefore bringing the need for values into play. Tan et al.’s (2000, 2009, 2010) studies about African American stereotypes, using both U.S. and foreign samples, resulted in three dimensions, named “work ethic,” “aggression” and “attractiveness.” The relatively stable stereotype contents and dimensions prevail in different social interactions, through different channels, or at different levels of communication and are examined next.

3.1.4 Channel or media-levels of influence The fourth component of the stereotype communication model is “channel” or “media” through which stereotypes are shared or communicated. The individual/ cognitive approach to stereotyping concerns largely the intrapersonal activities. It remains the most productive field of stereotype research, especially in psychology. However, human social cognition never stays only at the intrapersonal level. Our minds are for society (Turner 1985). As part of a large system, we interact or communicate with others face-to-face, or through some other channels or media, mass media being one kind. As Ehrlich (1973: 35) states, social stereotypes “appear as part of the social heritage of society … No person can grow up in a society without having learned the stereotypes assigned to the major ethnic groups.” They often come from interpersonal and/or media sources, especially when direct contacts with members of other groups are rare (Islam & Hewstone 1993). Besides, they are also examined at the social system level and the cultural system level (see Tan 2015). Taken together, they constitute the cultural evolution (Schaller, Conway III & Peavy 2010) of stereotypes.

3.1.4.1 Interpersonal level of influence Parents, teachers, and political and religious leaders are perhaps the most significant others in one’s life and are important socialization agents. They can shape one’s stereotypes of other groups of people especially when one is young (e.g., Stephan & Rosenfield 1978). Parents’ social perceptions can be passed on to their children (Edmonds & Killen 2009), especially when their children show strong identification with them (Sinclair, Dunn & Lowery 2005). As children grow older, their stereotypes can also be influenced by those of their peers whose opinions become increasingly important and influential (Dong & Murrillo 2007). At school, students are influenced by their teachers’ stereotypes (e.g., Riley & Ungerleider 2012).

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Snyder, Tanke and Berscheid (1977) examine the mechanism that the stereotypes perceivers have about their targets are confirmed by the latter’s behaviors in interpersonal communication. Their study demonstrates that people’s erroneous stereotype-based beliefs about their social interactors, when perceived in their stereotyped targets, confirm the stereotypes. This self-fulfilling nature of stereotypes explains to a large degree the formation and perpetuation of stereotypes in the interpersonal communication even though they often start in one’s mind as inaccurate social beliefs. Stereotyping is found in message encoding as well as in message decoding when we communicate. To the extent that in a study the mere instruction, that what we learned from the stories (that are balanced) will be communicated to others, suffices to prompt the communicators to construct or reconstruct the messages at a more abstract level, usually positive about in-group and negative about out-group members (Wenneker, Wigboldus & Spears 2005), and more stereotypeconsistent than stereotype-inconsistent (Lyons & Kashima 2006). Stereotypes perpetuate through a chain of communication from one person to another so that not only is the stereotype-consistent information judged as more communicable (e.g., Schaller, Conway III & Tanchuk 2002) because of its social connectivity function, but such information is in effect also passed from one person to another when it is believed to be widely endorsed in the community (Clark & Kashima 2007), and they seem to be largely tolerated at the interpersonal level in the current cultural environment in spite of the changing social norm of not communicating them in public, at least in the U.S. (Kurylo & Robles 2015).

3.1.4.2 Group/cultural level of influence Studies of stereotypes at the group/community level find their heritages in historical materials (Ehrlich 1973; Feagin 2006). The commonality dimension of stereotyping tells about the nature of cultured/cultural or public stereotypes, which often start at the basic social organizations of home and school, as discussed above. They are also seen at work, even though often at the implicit level. At mockery job interviews, research subjects (college students) showed not only greater physical avoidance (e.g., having less eye contact, sitting farther away) from their Black interviewees (confederates), but also committed more errors in their speeches when interviewing Black confederates face-to-face than when interviewing White ones (Word, Zanna & Cooper 1974). The observed behavioral differences could be explained as resulting partly from the activated racial stereotypes, or stereotype knowledge, in terms of cognition or thinking. Feeling, or prejudice, is possibly the other important factor. Three key determinants of intergroup bias are category salience, status, and attribute relevance. Salience explains in-group bias – the smaller the in-group, the stronger bias they hold toward out-groups; status explains intergroup bias – ingroup with higher status shows greater in-group bias. Attribute relevance does not

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explain intergroup bias by itself, but it interacts with status to produce an in-group bias on more relevant attributes (Mullen, Brown & Smith 1992). Salience is also demonstrated in that some groups are thought to be highly entitative while others are not. Thus, differences are accentuated, and high entitativity groups are more likely stereotyped with more dispositional inferences (e.g., Hamilton et al. 2009). The power of status on stereotyping has been repeatedly confirmed in the SCM research with U.S. samples, in which middle class, Christian, White Americans have been perceived as both high in warmth and competence whereas most “outgroups are stereotyped as high on either competence or warmth but low on the other” (Fiske et al. 2002: 880), or low on both dimensions (e.g., Cuddy et al. 2008; Rogers, Schröder & Scholl 2013). However, such an in-group bias is moderated in collective cultural samples (Cuddy et al. 2009). Power itself matters in stereotyping. Those with more power seem to stereotype more than those with less (Fiske 1993a). There is little wonder that minorities, women and the elderly are often stereotyped with a negative valence. It is theorized that those in a less powerful position have to take good care of individuating information so as to avoid possible risks caused by overgeneralizations, or stereotyping (e.g., Goodwin et al. 2000). Recent research found that members of minorities groups also describe themselves in the negative stereotypes, thus supporting the status quo (e.g., Johnson, Trawalter & Dovidio 2000).

3.1.4.3 Media influence “[T]he media are probably the most powerful transmitters of cultural stereotypes, at least in Western societies” (Mackie et al. 1996: 61), as “major socialization agents and their reach and consequent influence are even greater today because of the Internet” (Tan 2015: 133). This section focuses first on media contents for stereotypes about different social groups in the U.S., then it discusses theories used in stereotype research to explain media effects. Media portrayals of minority groups are stereotypical and negative (e.g., Tan 2015; Wilson, Gutiérrez & Chao 2013) – Asian Americans are portrayed as exotic, appearing “foreign” to “true Americans” (Tan 2015); Native Americans are often portrayed as “noble savages” in Western movies (Wilson & Gutiérrez 1995), and they are over-represented as criminals in television news programs (Dixon & Linz 2000), stereotyped as “tricky” or “deceptive” in the popular media (McLaurin 2012). Besides, Latino Americans and African (Black) Americans are over-represented in the media as lawbreakers and under-represented as defenders such as police officers (Dixon & Linz 2000). Arab Americans, Arabs and Muslims, since they are rarely differentiated in the U.S. popular media, are often stereotyped as “fundamentalists,” “radicals,” “terrorists,” and a threat to the U.S. (e.g., Shaheen 2003; Sides & Gross 2013). About age and gender, older women are often portrayed as villains in Disney movies and public television cartoons while older man are casted as authority fig-

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ures, such as clergymen, mentors or rulers (e.g., Robinson et al. 2007). Women are under-represented in the popular media and also negatively stereotyped in traditional domestic roles in family movies. In comparison, men are casted in family movies in prestigious and powerful roles, such as investors and developers, chief justices and district attorneys, and editors-in-chief – the three types are 100 % occupied by men (Smith et al. 2014). The under-representation of different social groups in the media, except for the dominant majority group in the U.S., and presumably in other countries as well, and the over-representation of these groups in predominantly negative stereotypes contribute most likely to the cultural stereotypes the public hold about these groups. This and next paragraphs focus on cultivation theory, social cognitive theory, cognitive processing theory, and priming theory about media effects on stereotyping and stereotypes. Cultivation theory (Gerbner et al. 1986) explains media effect at the societal level, thus applicable to the media influence on public stereotypes. Just as heavy television viewers believe that the world is a dangerous place, called the mean world syndrome, heavy media users are more likely influenced by media stereotypes than light users. As far as media consumption is concerned, this theory regards media a socialization agent – The more media use, the greater influence of media stereotypes on the media public. Social cognitive theory (Bandura 1986) posits that people can learn by observation, in other words vicariously. According to this theory, media representation, such as the negative stereotypes of minority groups, is likely to become the audiences’ perceptions, too. For example, from 2004 to 2005, the appearance of Latinos in crime news more than doubled in U.S. network news, mostly as perpetrators (Montalvo & Torres 2006). Subsequently, 71 % of the non-Latino respondents in a national random sample survey said that they “very often” or “sometimes” see Latinos as criminals or gang members in the media (Barreto, Manzano & Segura 2012); the 2012 Associated Press Racial Attitude Poll, using a national random sample, found Americans believe Hispanics, among all the racial/ethnic groups in the U.S., are least “law abiding.” These dots can be connected, using the social cognitive theory (Bandura 1986), and illustrate media’s role in stereotype formation and development. Cognitive processing theory (Tan et al. 2010) fleshes out the social cognitive theory by introducing information evaluation variables in between media use and stereotype formation. “What matters, at least in stereotype development, is not how much information one has but how one evaluates the information” (Tan 2015: 147). Media information is evaluated on its “valence (positive or negative) and realism/believability, dimensions of the information evaluation that increase cognitive involvement, identification credibility, and self-efficacy” (Tan 2015: 147). According to this theory, positive media stereotypes lead to positive stereotypes among the media consumers when they believe those media stereotypes are real and believable. Negative media stereotypes lead to negative stereotypes among the consumers when they believe those media stereotypes are real and believable (Tan et al. 2010).

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Finally, priming theory, defined as “the incidental activation of knowledge structures, such as trait concepts and stereotypes, by the current situational context” (Bargh, Chen & Burrows 1996: 230) focuses on the unconscious cognitive activities. It explains the mechanism of automatic activation of stereotypes in social psychology. In media effects research, it is used to address the role media play in reinforcing existing stereotypes. In other words, media research treats media as the situational priming context. For example, Weisbuch, Pauker and Ambady (2009) found clear nonverbal racial bias in 11 popular television shows that were watched by millions of people: The shows are predominantly pro-White, meaning that White characters elicit more positive nonverbal responses from other characters than Black characters do in the shows, for only 2 out the 11 shows are pro-Black. Those who were exposed to the pro-White clips showed strong pro-White associations as measured by IAT (Greenwald et al. 1998) while those exposed to the proBlack clips demonstrated strong pro-Black associations, even though respondents in both conditions were not conscious of the implicit nonverbal media racial bias. Media priming works obviously on people’s existing stereotypes at the unconscious level (Mutz & Goldman 2010).

3.1.5 Effects of stereotyping and stereotypes The “effect” component of the stereotype communication model is examined, especially in the field of sociology, following Goffman’s (1963) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, by focusing on the targets of stereotypes. That racial/ethnic minorities, women and older people are often negatively stereotyped renders them consequently suffering from stereotype threat that Steele and Aronson (1995: 797) defined as “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.” In one study, African-Americans were stigmatized when they were told that the test they were to take was to evaluate their intellectual ability, turning their self-conscious stereotype about African Americans as “not intelligent” into effect (Steele 1997) and performed worse than their White peers. However, their fellow African Americans who were told that the task was a laboratory exercise did as a good job as their White peers. In another study, simply priming the test takers with their race before a test was sufficient to produce stereotype threat effects on African Americans, resulting in their performing worse than not only their White peers in the same race-prime condition but also their fellow African Americans in the no-race-prime condition. Female Asian students performed inadequately in a math test when their gender was made salient (Shih, Pittinsky & Ambady 1999), presumably because the gender stereotype of women– not-good-at-math was activated. In comparison, they performed well when their ethnicity was clearly primed, presumably because the stereotype of Asians–goodat-math was at work. Social class is another well-documented variable. “For obvi-

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ous ethical reasons, experimental research has focused on positive expectations, the so-called ‘Pygmalion effect’” (Schneider 2004: 216) with respect to teacher expectancies in self-fulfilling or self-confirmation prophecy research. Besides academic/cognitive performance, people’s performance in other domains, such as sports (Stone et al. 1999), driving (Yeung & von Hippel 2008) and inter-racial interactions (Richeson & Shelton 2012) are found to suffer from stereotype threat. Four features explain the presumable ubiquity of stereotype threat in our society (Steele 1997): 1. Any person could experience it as long as a negative stereotype is associated to his/her social category – gender, age, race/ethnicity, social class, culture, religion, profession, sexuality, or physical or health condition, etc. 2. It happens in a situation in which a stereotype is to be validated, whether by the perceiver or the perceived or both, in a conscious manner or not. 3. Different social groups suffer from stereotype threat to different degrees and in different domains (Shapiro & Neuberg 2007). Individuals who are aware of their group stereotypes likely suffer most in the stereotype-relevant domains which they identify with. 4. A person may experience stereotype threat whether or not he/she believes the stereotype assigned to his/her group. The stereotype threat model (Schmader, Johns & Forbes 2008: 343) systematically explicates its causes and specifies three major pathways underlying stereotype threat effects on performance. In the physiological stress path, high stress levels impair the target’s performance the most, as stress-induced physiological arousal taxes working memory and information processing. In the performance monitoring path, such thoughts as “Will I do well, consistent with my personal link to the domain?” and “Will I do poorly, consistent with the negative link to the domain suggested by the stereotype?” create a cognitive imbalance between group concept, ability domain, and self-concept for the target to cope with before focusing on the task at hand. In the self-conscious suppression path, the target makes an effort to put the negative emotions and thoughts under control, thus underperforming on the task at hand than those who are not taxed this way. Stereotype threat can lead to dis-identification with the stereotype-relevant domain in the targeted group members, which bears motivational consequences and ends up in avoidance behaviors (Steele 1997). Schmader, Hall and Croft (2015) suggest the absence of similar others in a domain as one (of three) cause of dis-identification. Women expressed less interest in learning math and science and in playing leadership roles after watching feminine women characters in TV commercials (Davies et al. 2002). Another is direct or indirect biases one encounters, in the underrepresentation of the target group in a domain in reality (e.g., Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev 2000) or in media (e.g., Dixon & Linz 2000). After watching a video of MSE (math, science and engineering) conference with 3:1 male-female ratio, women not only showed less interest in participating in the conference, but also had a weaker sense of belonging to the MSE conference than women who were exposed to a genderbalanced conference (Murphy, Steele & Gross 2007). Repeated stereotype threat is

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suggested as the third cause. A field experiment at the natural work environment (Holleran et al. 2011) shows stereotype threat could be experienced by the target individuals or groups on a daily basis. In summary, stereotypes about different social categories are natural products of our social cognition, are cultural products that feed our needs and reflect our social structure, and prevail through different channels and media from generation to generation (e.g., Martin et al. 2014). Stereotyping as a cognitive mechanism and stereotypes as messages have implications for both the perceiver and the target. Besides the different levels of influence stereotyping has in communication (see section 3.1.4), research on stereotype effects focuses mainly on negative stereotypes, namely stereotype threat, to address the socially constructed racial differences. Hundreds of studies that have demonstrated stereotype threat effects (for “stereotype lift” effects found among those not experiencing stereotype threat, see Walton & Cohen 2003) still likely understate the actual impact stereotype threat has on individuals and various social groups in real life. The related social consequences beg for reconceptualization of stereotyping and for the change of stereotypes, to be discussed next.

4 Communication and stereotype change Stereotyping as part of human cognition pinpoints the difficulty in changing it. Besides, some stereotypes contain a kernel of truth (Schneider 2004), even though the large truth is that, as a schema, a prototype, or an exemplar, it hardly applies to most, let alone all, individuals in that social category. Worse still, stereotypes are cultural means to social, economic and political ends (e.g., Jost, Banaji & Nosek 2004). Worst of all, everyone is likely to suffer from stereotype threat as long as he/she is aware of a negative stereotype associated with his/her social group (see section 3.1.5). To overcome the limits set by stereotyping and to reduce stereotype threat, re-conceptualization of stereotyping is called upon. This section focuses on the approaches to stereotype reduction relating to its threat, and stereotype control or stereotype change relating to perception bias and social norm. An evolutionary model of stereotyping is suggested to re-conceptualize this cognitive and social phenomenon toward the end.

4.1 Who changes, or controls at least, his/her stereotypes? Human cognition is malleable. Although we all stereotype as part of social cognition and our stereotypes can be automatically activated (e.g., Bargh 1999), they can also be put under control when needed (e.g., Gilbert & Hixon 1991), especially in a society that cultivates “personal and societal norms that speak against the

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appropriateness of stereotypical thinking” (Bodenhausen & Macrae 1998: 43). The cognitive and automatic processes tell the difficulty in changing stereotypes (Bargh 1999), but the motivational and deliberate processes speak of stereotype control and shed light on stereotype reduction (e.g., Kunda & Spencer 2003). Some people succeed in putting stereotypes under control so their subsequent social perceptions or behaviors are not impaired by stereotypes while others fail to do so (e.g., von Hippel, Silver & Lynch 2000). People inhibit their stereotypes when 1. they choose to process individuating information out of the need for accuracy instead of focusing on the target’s category membership (e.g., Fiske & Neuberg 1990), 2. they have cognitive resources, or not cognitively deprived, to suppress activated stereotypes (e.g., Gilbert & Hixon 1991), 3. they are motivated to avoid prejudice, due to internalized egalitarian and/or impartiality values or such social norms (e.g., Devine et al. 2002; Fazio et al. 1995), and 4. their self-worth is not threatened, for example receiving positive feedback from the stereotype target (Sinclair & Kunda 1999; for a theoretical framework about goals, motivations and stereotypes, see Kunda & Spencer 2003). In addition, research on stereotype change has demonstrated a few other successful strategies for social perceivers, including stereotype negation or non-stereotypic association training or educational diversity programs (e.g., Kawakami, Dovidio & van Kamp 2005), cognitive (re)construction of a “common group identity” (Gaertner & Dovidio 2000), and perspective-taking (e.g., Galinsky & Moskowitz 2000). Recent research (Crisp & Turner 2009) showed that mere imagining having contact with an out-group member might reduce stereotypes.

4.2 Do stereotyping and stereotypes change? Stereotyping as an act that takes place in human social cognition has hardly changed, presumably ever since human brain evolved to be able to process information in a categorical fashion. In other words, we stereotype and perhaps still will as long as we process information categorically. However, we do not need to dwell on stereotyping; societies have evolved to recognize the limitations and harms of stereotyping. As a result, social norms in perhaps most cultures are not to stereotype, at least not in public, while research has focused on how to control stereotyping and how to change stereotypes. In line with the two approaches to stereotype formation are two approaches to stereotype change: the individual level/cognitive approach and the group level/cultural approach (Schneider 2004). This section introduces the four cognitive models that explain the mechanisms of stereotype change at the individual level related to target characteristics and discusses changes in stereotypes as social messages. The cultural approach to stereotype change in regard to channels or media appears in section 4.4.

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4.2.1 Individual level/cognitive approach to stereotype change Conversion. The conversion model of stereotype change (Rothbart 1981) suggests that stereotype change can happen relatively quickly – when someone is suddenly enlightened by a special experience or event, his/her belief system consequently undergoes such a drastic change that he/she no long sees the other group through stereotypic eyes. For example, Terkel’s (1992) interview with a Ku Klux Klan member showed how the person experienced radical changes in his understanding of African Americans through direct contact with an African American woman who happened to serve on the same committee. He realized that they had a lot in common and ended up supporting integration in his area. In this study, the African American woman who served on the same committee with this former Ku Klux Klan member served as an extremely disconfirming exemplar of the type that Rothbart (1981) mentioned as a necessary condition for sudden and radical changes to happen. Bookkeeping. Bookkeeping (Rothbart 1981) works in a different way, whereby any stereotype-disconfirming information that leads the perceiver to make adjustments in his/her former mental images of another group is considered stereotype change. Research on this incremental and gradual change model finds that the more frequent exposure to disconfirming information, the more likely stereotype change occurs (Fried & Holyoak 1984). Change also depends on the perceiver’s need for accuracy. Little concern over accuracy would never offer a chance for stereotype-disconfirming information to be so processed (Neuberg & Fiske 1987). Both strong disconfirming information and the need for accuracy are necessary conditions for stereotype change to occur in this model. Subtyping. The third stereotype change model is subtyping (Weber & Crocker 1983). According to this model, people are most likely to put an atypical group member to a distinct subtype. It is the “He is not one of them” phenomenon. Such is subtyping that it protects stereotypes instead of changing them (Schneider 2004). One’s stereotypes change only when he/she realizes how diverse the target group is (e.g., Johnston & Hewstone 1992). In other words, it is the diversity in the target group that breaks through its assigned stereotypes. Exemplar. Finally, there is the exemplar model of stereotype change (Hewstone & Lord 1998). As discussed above, the exemplar model has good theoretical power in explaining how stereotypes are formed. When it comes to stereotype change, the exemplar model suggests that new exemplars that disconfirm the existing stereotypes can lead to stereotype change when accessed in information processing. For example, when Barack Obamas was elected as the first Black president in the U.S. history, therefore serving as a salient exemplar in people’s mind, stereotypes about African Americans changed both in the U.S. and China (Zhang & Tan 2011).

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4.2.2 Stereotype change Stereotypes as social messages in human interactions (direct and indirect) and as cultural products in human societies have changed over the years. As cultural products, some stereotypes have changed while others stand deeply rooted, as demonstrated in a limited number of longitudinal studies. Among them, the above cited Princeton trilogy shows that stereotypes about African Americans have changed from predominantly negative in the 1930s to a mix of negative, neutral and positive in the 60s. In the 80s (Rothbart & John 1993), the most frequently mentioned stereotype about this group becomes “athletic,” “group-oriented” and “proud” instead of “superstitious,” “lazy” and “happy-go-lucky” (Katz & Braly 1933). African American stereotypes changed over the decades, even though Rothbart and John (1993) concluded that they stayed more or less the same in their 4year panel study. In the 1990s, a national study still found “lazy,” “unintelligent” and “violent” as public stereotypes of this group (Wilson 1996). Revisiting the Princeton trilogy, Madon et al. (2001) found that African Americans were most frequently described as “listen to a lot of music,” “noisy,” “athletic,” “masculine,” “sing and dance well,” “cultural,” “have an attitude,” “prejudiced,” “democratic,” “angry,” “opinionated,” and “outspoken.” Of these, the last six reflect some facets of the U.S. social, economic and political landscape. A recent poll (Associated Press Racial Attitude Survey 2012) demonstrates that African American stereotypes stay relative stable from 2010 to 2012 and that they are not much more negative than White stereotypes, although implicit measures (e.g., IAT by Greenwald et al. 1998; Nosek et al. 2007) continue showing that African (Black) Americans are associated with negative stereotypes in people’s mind. In general, the cultural stereotypes about the dominant majority group remain positive and stable over time while those about minority groups have changed from predominantly negative to neutral and somewhat positive. Next, we focus on the stereotype target.

4.3 What can the target do to remove or reduce stereotype threat? Several coping strategies have been found effective in reducing or removing stereotype threat for the target (e.g., Tan 2015), thus possibly changing cultural stereotypes. 1. Reframing the task to make it no longer stereotype-relevant. Reassuring women that the test was gender-fair and African Americans that it was race-fair reduced stereotype threat among them (Good, Aronson & Harder 2008). 2. Positive role models in the stereotype-target domain. Primed with positive female role models, women, including girls, did well in math (Huguet & Régner 2007). 3. Selfaffirmation. Stereotype threat was eliminated among research subjects who affirmed themselves of their own strength in the stereotype-relevant domain (Cohen et al. 2006). 4. Group-affirmation. Besides enhancing self-worth or self-integrity,

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affirming individuals of the positive characteristics of their group also helped them alleviate stereotype threat (McIntyre, Paulson & Lord 2003). 5. Strategic choice of identity. As Shih, Pittinsky and Ambady’s (1999) study demonstrated, Asian women performed their good ability when primed with their ethnicity; when their gender was primed, they under-performed themselves. Of the different identities (Turner 1982), thus, we can choose the one that boosts a positive stereotype, or at least the one that renders the performance domain stereotype-irrelevant. Confronting someone who makes a biased statement could provide an educational opportunity for that person, therefore communicating or promoting antiprejudice social norms to that person (Czopp, Monteith & Mark 2006). Among the stereotype targets, those who believed that people’s personalities could change were more likely to confront the biased individuals (Rattan & Dweck 2010), making it possible for cultural stereotypes to change at the individual level. Stereotype change at the cultural level is discussed next in terms of channels, media and contexts of stereotype changes and of the effects.

4.4 What role does the media or channel play in stereotype change? Stereotyping as a social phenomenon has a social context, as does stereotype change. The context is the focus of the group level/cultural approach (e.g., Schneider 2004; Tan 2015). This section looks at the media or channel of stereotype change in social contexts of contact. The Contact Hypothesis (Allport 1954) posits that the lack of sufficient knowledge about an out-group leads to prejudice, stereotypes included, toward it. Direct contact with out-group members will lead to increased liking and subsequently increased knowledge about the group, especially when the following key conditions are met: “a) equal status within the contact situation; b) intergroup cooperation; c) common goals; and d) support of authorities, law, or custom” (Dovidio, Eller & Hewstone 2011: 149). The hypothesis has been well tested over time, and its predicted stereotype change is evident (e.g., Pettigrew & Tropp 2008; Tausch & Hewstone 2010). The Contact Hypothesis is most widely applied to the direct face-to-face contact, for stereotype change at the personal level. Its branch-out, the Extended Contact Hypothesis (Wright et al. 1997) better explains the group dynamic in stereotype change when direct contact is either impossible or people are not willing to do so. This hypothesis indicates “knowledge that an in-group member has a close relationship with an out-group member can lead to more positive intergroup attitudes” (Wright et al. 1997: 73). The three mechanisms underlying this model are 1. positive in-group exemplar that sets a new norm for intergroup attitudes and relations, 2. positive out-group exemplar that modifies “a negative prototypic image (or stereotype) of the out-group” (Wright et al. 1997: 75), and 3. inclusion of others in the self (Aron et al. 1991) that ends up in blurring group lines (i.e., “my friend’s friend is my

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friend;” Dovidio et al. 2011: 150). All these mechanisms pull an individual out of his/her intrapersonal social perceptions in direct contact and push him/her toward interpersonal and ultimately intergroup relations out of social norm concerns. The predicted stereotype change is well documented (e.g., Vezzali et al. 2014). Besides the extended contact via an in-group member who has an outgroup friend, the Extended Contact Hypothesis also includes a second type of indirect contact, namely vicarious contact by “observing an ingroup member interacting with an outgroup member” (Vezzali et al. 2014: 315). Media contact, or “parasocial contact” (Schiappa, Gregg & Hewes 2005), is of this kind. It leads an individual from his/her immediate and direct observation sphere into the media domain with chances to observe and experience intergroup contact with many more out-group members from many more out-groups in the media world. Just as the media cultivate public stereotypes of different social groups, so they play a critical part in changing stereotypes in today’s media-connected world. According to the media contact hypothesis, positive social interactions between members from different groups in the media lead to stereotype change in people’s mind, as people associate out-groups with more positive traits and feelings (e.g., Vezzali, Stathi & Giovannini 2012; Weisbuch, Pauker & Ambady 2009). Good news is that media appear to be less blatantly stereotypic in their presentation of minority groups (Wilson et al. 2013); some media organizations have been making discerned efforts to change their media messages. For example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation launched its “Overcoming Stereotypes” programming by telling stories from each group’s perspective since the 1980s (see mediasmarts.ca).

4.5 What are the effects that stereotype change brings? By and large, our society has evolved to be a more openly egalitarianism- and equal opportunity-oriented. At the individual level, our social perception is more accurate when we see people as who they are instead of which social category they are in. When our beliefs about people are well in alignment with such social values as egalitarianism and equality that we uphold, we suffer less from cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957), and we may all be free from stereotype threat, be it intelligence, sports, music or some other domain. At the societal or cultural level, old-fashion blatant racism, sexism, or ageism are no longer accepted as social norms (see Fiske & Tablante 2015). Instead of the traditional Jim Crow racism, it is in a laissez-faire state (Bobo 2001). In general, racial/ethnic stereotypes for minorities are ambivalent, with a mix of negative, neutral and positive stereotypes, including those for Asian Americans, the so-called “model minority” in the U.S. By the same token, ambivalent sexism is more often found in today’s society than the old-fashion sexism. The anti-discrimination law in the U.S. holds companies and organizations accountable in their hiring and promotion decisions (Bartlett 2009), even though minorities, women and older people

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still suffer from the notorious statistical discrimination (Massey 2007; also see Bobo & Charles 2009). For research, implicit stereotype measures are available (e.g., IAT by Greenwald et al. 1998) to better capture subtle stereotypes. As far as racial ideologies are concerned, dominant social groups, such as White Americans in the U.S., largely endorse color-blindness (e.g., Neville et al. 2000) whereas minority groups, such as those in the U.S., advocate multi-culturalism (e.g., Park & Judd 2005). Research finds that “color blindness predicts greater bias” (Plaut, Thomas & Goren 2009: 444) among dominant group members whereas multiculturalism “predicts lower bias” (Plaut, Thomas & Goren 2009: 444). Just as stereotyping has gone through several stages of conceptualization, our take on stereotype control and racial ideologies may go through a process in which 1. we see color and make it a big deal, 2. we choose to be color-blind, and 3. we see color and live with it in a multi-culturally peaceful society.

5 Gaps to be filled in stereotype research: A communication perspective Stereotyping is now widely and figuratively used to refer to mental images we have about different social groups and the trait associations. We cannot not stereotype at certain point of time in our social cognition as long as we put things into categories. However, we can certainly grow beyond stereotyping when we care about cognitive accuracy, endorse the egalitarian values and social-equality norms, and live free of stereotype threat. Related to the reconceptualization of stereotyping as a three-stage development process, 1. not being able to stereotype when very young, 2. being able to stereotype, and 3. being able not to stereotype, are stereotype control and stereotype change issues. Although the five components in the stereotype communication model, who → stereotypes → whom → in which channel or media → with what effect, have been studied, some aspects of the last two have hardly been explored in stereotype or stereotype change research. For example, even though “contemporary researchers clearly abandoned the sharp distinction between individualistic (or termed “individual/cognitive” here) and social approaches” (Yzerbyt 2010: 149), an overwhelming number of studies are at the individual/cognitive level. Much research needs to be done at the social/cultural level, such as beyond the interpersonal and at the small group, organizational/institutional, or societal or cultural level (e.g., Weber et al. 2014) in our increasingly diverse society. The channel or media component in both stereotype communication and stereotype change models in this chapter could be treated in its narrow sense as the actual physical means used in communication transactions. However, the channel or media in its broad sense includes the social context or cultural landscape against which stereotyping or stereotype change takes place. Communica-

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tion is where not only communication researchers but also researchers from other fields could study stereotyping, stereotypes and stereotype change by putting “things,” “states” (Smith 1998) and/or processes into context. Regarding the effect component in the stereotype communication model, much research looks into stereotype threat at the individual (or intrapersonal) level, little is done at the other levels of communication, namely interpersonal, small group, organizational/institutional, and societal/cultural levels. It is hard to imagine orchestrating future stereotype research endeavors in different areas, nonetheless, continued research at all levels and in all fields should come up with a better explication of stereotyping and communication.

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Panagiotis Sakellariou

25 Translation as intercultural communication: Survey and analysis Abstract: The issue of culture in the scientific study of translation was first raised in the early postwar period. Initial discussion, in the 1950s and 1960s, addressed the issue from a linguistic point of view and focused exclusively on the extralinguistic influences on translation equivalence. From the 1970s onwards, various intradisciplinary developments paved the way for a radical reorientation of translation studies. The issue of culture was raised anew in the 1990s, mainly under the influence of cultural studies, and provided a basis for experimenting with different perspectives and redefinitions of translation. The exclusive focus on the relation between the source and the target text was abandoned, and translation was now seen as mediation between different structures of beliefs, norms, attitudes and ideologies. Mediation was thus foregrounded as a key topic in subsequent debates, and special attention was given to the manipulation of cultural differences in translation. The translator’s role as mediator was initially associated with the facilitation of communication. However, an increasing interest in situations of unequal power relations and cases of politically engaged translation activity led to an awareness of various contrasting aspects which, taken together, have revealed a greater diversity in translation’s potential as a means of intercultural communication. Keywords: cultural difference, equivalence, intercultural understanding, mediation, politically engaged translation, power

1 Introduction One popular theme in Western translation studies from the 1980s up to the present day has been the idea of translation as intercultural communication. Intuitively, this idea evokes the fact that human beings’ forms of life and thought crucially affect their linguistic behavior and hence also affect the process of translating from one language into another. This fundamental fact about translation can be dealt with from different perspectives and for diverse purposes, on the basis of scientific or pre-scientific conceptions of language, communication, society, etc. It can thus be said to transcend specific thematizations. In the period that concerns us here, the institutionalized scholarly study of translation in the West put forward a particular thematization which, at least in the academic world, decisively determined standard approaches to the issue of extralinguistic influences on interlingual communication. I will refer to this as the DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-025

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thematization of translation as intercultural communication. Naturally, it is not a coincidence that this thematization emerged in the West during the last third of the twentieth century. A complete account of the conditions of its emergence would require an in-depth investigation of the development of the humanities and social sciences and the major sociopolitical and cultural events that shaped the period. Obviously, even an attempt to outline such an account is beyond the scope of this chapter. I will therefore make only some essential remarks on the conditions of the emergence of this thematization at the micro-level of translation studies, before proceeding later to a survey and analysis of the most important topics in the relevant debates. The key intradisciplinary development for the systematic study of translation as intercultural communication was the so-called cultural turn in translation studies. The term appeared in 1990 in a collection of essays edited by Bassnett and Lefevere, and has ever since been used to refer to certain stages in the development of the discipline during the 1980s, under the influence of cultural studies. In their introduction to that volume, the editors advocated moving beyond the linguistic approaches of the past and redefined the object of translation studies, with the focus thenceforth being on “the text embedded in its network of both source and target text cultural signs” (Lefevere & Bassnett 1990: 12). It has been acknowledged that the cultural turn was mainly propelled by general trends outside the discipline (Bassnett 2007: 16; House 2012: 498; Schäffner 2003: 85) and by major sociopolitical developments in the 1960s and 1970s (Tymoczko 2007: 43). But it is also dependent on intradisciplinary developments. The first crucial link identified is with descriptive translation studies. With its theory of polysystems and the emphasis on the target culture, the descriptive approach paved the way for the cultural turn (Bassnett 2007: 16; Snell-Hornby 2006: 47–50). Tymoczko (2007: 43) goes even further, arguing that the cultural turn was actually part of a later phase of descriptive translation studies. Other intradisciplinary links include key approaches of the 1970s and 1980s (Snell-Hornby 2006: 47– 63), such as the major functional theories in West Germany (Hönig & Kussmaul 1982; Reiss & Vermeer 1984; Vermeer 1978, 1986), the study of the manipulation of literature in translation (Hermans 1985), the theory of translatorial action (HolzMänttäri 1984), and the so-called cannibalistic approach in Brazil (Arrojo 1986). Despite their partial differences, these approaches share some features that eventually came to characterize the intellectual climate within the discipline during this period. These features include the reorientation of the study of translation towards the target text and culture, the emphasis on the function(s) of the translated text, and the rejection of the primacy of the source text (ST) over the target text (TT). This shift in perspective entailed a different conception of translation as meaning-assignment and an enlargement of the scope of translation research. Thus, when Lefevere and Bassnett heralded the cultural studies approach in 1990, translation studies was at a crucial turning point, and the main strands of development

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during the preceding decades were further pursued from an ever-increasing number of perspectives. Bassnett and Lefevere’s introduction to Translation, history, and culture attributed an explicitly anti-linguistic character to the cultural turn. As Bassnett (1998: 123) later stated, this was “a kind of manifesto of what we saw as a major change of emphasis in translation studies”. The criticism of the linguistic accounts of the past was mainly directed at their failure to move beyond the textual level, and their latent positivism, which foreshadowed the view that all standards of translation assessment are relative (Lefevere & Bassnett 1990: 3–4). Against this kind of approach, the essays in that volume emphasized the sociohistorical character of the practice of translation, foregrounded the multiple functions of the translated text in different cultural contexts, and highlighted the ideological forces and manipulative mechanisms involved in translating. Furthermore, these works anticipated a subsequent development that Gentzler and Tymoczko (2002: xvi) dubbed “the power turn”. From the early days of the cultural turn onwards, there was an increasing entanglement between the issue of culture and various ideological and political concerns in translation studies, which eventually led – through the postcolonial approaches, the studies of gender and translation, and the work of Lawrence Venuti – to a sustained focus on “issues of agency, the ways translation can effect cultural change, and the relation of translation to dominance, cultural assertion, cultural resistance, and activism” (Tymoczko 2007: 44). In short, it could be said that the cultural studies approach entered the discipline “as a tactical move to redirect theoretical discussion. It was a negation, an anti-concept, defined by what it was not: culture as anti-language; the cultural paradigm as anti-linguistic” (Koskinen 2004: 150). Early on, some scholars felt that the reason for this anti-linguistic stance was that “cultural studies is not just about giving primacy to cultural issues as such. One of the main features of cultural studies […] is to add a strong political dimension to whatever happens to be the object of study” (Baker 1996: 9). Thus, the main idea behind the cultural turn was “to use translation, and the study of translation, as a weapon in fighting colonialism, sexism, racism, and so on” (Baker 1996: 14). To this politically engaged aspect I would add an ethically engaged one. The so-called return to ethics (Pym 2001) occurred about the same time, was largely influenced by the same approaches (postcolonial theories, gender studies, etc.) and brought to the fore ethical concerns regarding the social role of both translators and translation scholars as experts on intercultural mediation. Thus, a strong current of parallel and mutually supporting developments brought about a radical reorientation of translation studies at the turn of the twenty-first century, and provided the general framework within which emerged the study of translation as intercultural communication.

2 Equivalence, meaning and culture The issue of culture in the scientific study of translation was first raised in the early postwar period. In the West, Eugene Nida was a pioneer in this field. Culture enters

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Nida’s theory via a conception of linguistic meaning that assigns primary importance to the context of language use (Nida [1945] 1964a: 97, 1964b: 244, 1975: 28). In the light of this conception, translation equivalence appears to be determined by a wide range of factors, both linguistic and non-linguistic. A vivid illustration of the different ways in which these factors affect the pursuit of equivalence is provided in a series of examples from Bible translation (e.g. Nida [1959] 1975: 25– 26, 1964b: 216–217). Nida portrays translation as a complex process of interlingual communication that aims at producing equivalent texts across different forms of life and experience. Casagrande (1954) follows the same line of thought and draws analogous conclusions. The influence of culture on linguistic meaning means that “[t]he attitudes and values, the experience and tradition of a people, inevitably become involved in the freight of meaning carried by language”, and so “[i]n effect, one does not translate LANGUAGES, one translates CULTURES” (Casagrande 1954: 338; emphasis in the original). Translation is thus substantially conditioned by cultural discrepancies. But cultural diversity is only one side of the coin; the other side comprises the universal categories of culture. If cultural diversity accounts for the character of the process of translation, cultural universals account for the very possibility of translation. As Casagrande (1954: 338) argues, “[t]hat it is possible to translate one language into another at all attests to the universalities in culture, to common vicissitudes of human life, and to the like capabilities of men throughout the earth, as well as to the inherent nature of language and to the character of the communication process itself”. It is this “inherent nature of language” that is particularly highlighted by Jakobson in his influential On linguistic aspects of translation. In this essay, Jakobson (1959: 263) attacks the so-called dogma of untranslatability and its Whorfian premises, arguing that “[a]ll cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language” and thus “[n]o lack of grammatical devices in the language translated into makes impossible a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original”. Admittedly, no explicit thematization of the intercultural aspect of translation is offered here. Nonetheless, it is the relation between cultural diversity and translation equivalence that forms the backdrop against which the issue of translatability is discussed. Significantly, some of Jakobson’s (1959: 265–266) examples are about cultural differences as manifested in concrete instances of intercultural interaction. In a sense, Jakobson’s account is an implicit reminder that equivalence is not an a priori correspondence between linguistic structures, but a relation established in concrete situations of verbal communication. The importance of the situations of language use for the practice of translation is brought into relief by two other influential linguistic approaches. The first one was offered by Vinay and Darbelnet and the other by Catford. In Vinay and Darbelnet’s famous Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais, the concept of situa-

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tion occupies a prominent position and, together with the concept of metalinguistics, serves to capture the various extralinguistic factors involved in translating. Already in the preface, translation is informally defined as a passage between two languages aimed at describing the same piece of reality, and a few paragraphs later it is stated that text equivalence depends on situation equivalence (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958: 20, 22). “Situation” is defined as the reality that is evoked each time by the words used in different instances of human communication (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958: 28). “Metalinguistics”, on the other hand, covers the various ways in which the linguistic structures relate to social, cultural and psychological facts (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958: 259). That conceptual pair is actually the backbone of this approach and plays a key role in distinguishing different translation methods (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958: 46– 54) and classifying the translation problems caused by cultural gaps (Vinay & Darbelnet 1958: 260–265). It is through the classification of these “metalinguistic divergences”, which range from different segmentations of reality to urban design, social institutions and even everyday habits, that culture is brought to the fore. But the extremely varied facets of culture discussed throughout the book are uniformly approached from the perspective of the problem of representing the same or an equivalent situation in a different language. Catford (1965) addresses the relation between culture and translation in a similar way. Once again, the key concept is “situation”, but this is no surprise, given the Hallidayan influence on Catford’s view of language. The concept of situation lies at the heart of both the linguistic theory underpinning his approach to translation (Catford 1965: 1–19) and the (largely Firthian) conception of meaning incorporated therein (Catford 1965: 35–37). “Situation” or “situation substance” is defined as the set of “features of situations […] which are related or relatable to language behaviour” (Catford 1965: 4–5). The situational elements that are each time “found to be relevant to a given linguistic form constitute the contextual meaning of that form” (Catford 1965: 36; emphasis in the original). Contextual meaning is crucial for the passage from a source to a target language (SL and TL), since “translation equivalence depends on the interchangeability of the SL and the TL text in the same situation – ultimately, that is, on the relationship of SL and TL texts to (at least some of) the same relevant features of situation-substance” (Catford 1965: 93). Difficulties in attaining translation equivalence may be due to both linguistic and cultural factors. In the latter case, problems arise “when a situational feature, functionally relevant for the SL text, is completely absent from the culture of which the TL is a part” (Catford 1965: 99; emphasis in the original). Such problems may simultaneously involve factors from different aspects of culture. For instance, when discussing the problem of translating into English the Finnish word “sauna” or the Japanese “yukuta”, Catford (1965: 99–100) highlights both the material aspect of the referents of these words and the social functions, habits or cultural values associated with them. But the diverse extralinguistic factors discussed by Catford are

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considered from a perspective strictly restricted to the ways in which the relevant situational features can be variously represented in different languages. Catford’s specific viewpoint is best exemplified in his suggestion that so-called cultural untranslatability may after all be a type of linguistic untranslatability, since in many cases “the use in the TL text of any approximate translation equivalent produces an unusual collocation in the TL” (1965: 101; emphasis in the original). This brief exposition suffices to identify the basic assumptions held and the particular perspective adopted in these preliminary attempts to address the issue of culture in connection with translation. The first thing to note is that culture is almost exclusively discussed from the point of view of translation equivalence. The reason for this lies in the specific conception of translation incorporated into the respective accounts. Culture enters the scene via a broad definition of linguistic meaning and covers all significant aspects of social life. But not all facets of the cultural impact on translation are examined. Rather, attention is restricted to the problem of finding in the target language the equivalent means for representing the situations, artifacts, attitudes etc. expressed in the source text. Thus, in a sense one could say that the various cultural factors in this case are assigned a role analogous to that of circumstantial selections in Eco’s (1976: 106) semantic model; that is, they are roughly treated as markers that restrict the range of possible interpretations of linguistic signs. However, in itself the concept of culture makes the analysis of the relation between the source and the target text more complex. Once it is acknowledged that linguistic meaning is co-determined by extralinguistic factors, the equation of translation equivalence is instantly turned into a polynomial function. If complexity goes beyond a certain level, the concept of equivalence proves inadequate to capture all the aspects of the interrelation between the source and the target text that are increasingly foregrounded. In that respect, the restricted perspective of the accounts of the 1950s and 1960s impeded a possible disruption of the concept of equivalence and, in that way, temporarily prevented the collapse of the dominant conception of translation at the time. Yet, in its astonishing multifariousness and fundamental significance, the issue of culture provided an excellent ground for experimenting with different perspectives and redefinitions. The developments that led to the cultural turn and beyond gradually shifted the focus from the relation between the source and the target text to the encompassing cultural contexts, thus allowing for the interpolation of an open set of heterogeneous factors between the two texts.

3 Mediation, cultural filters and power The cultural turn triggered a rapid expansion of the research horizon of translation studies. A result of this was that the source and the target text ceased to be the

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privileged object of study and were henceforth viewed as a pair of nodes in a vast network of intertextual relations (Sakellariou 2015: 42–43). Moreover, the relation of the translator to both texts was now taken as multiply mediated by diverse structures, norms and conditions. This called for posing anew, from different perspectives, the question of the role of the translator. A convenient starting point for addressing that question was the idea that the translating subject mediates between cultures. An early mention of the mediating role of the translator can be found in Hatim and Mason’s (1990) linguistic approach. Drawing on text linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, Hatim and Mason investigate translation as a communicative process that is variously influenced by the contexts of use of texts. From this point of view, a distinctive feature of the translators’ activity is that they mediate between text producers and readers from different sociocultural communities. Hence, it is argued that generally “[t]ranslators mediate between cultures (including ideologies, moral systems and socio-political structures), seeking to overcome the incompatibilities which stand in the way of transfer of meaning” (Hatim & Mason 1990: 223). The precise sense in which the role of mediator is invoked here refers to the “bi-cultural vision” of translators and to the fact that “they are ‘privilege readers’ of the SL text” (Hatim & Mason 1990: 224). The theme of the translator as privileged reader is taken up again by Katan (1999: 141), this time presented against the backdrop of a basically cognitive approach to culture and translation. Katan (1999: 1) holds that “[e]ach culture acts as a frame within which external signs or ‘reality’ are interpreted” and thus it can be seen as “a system for orienting experience”. In a word, culture constitutes a filter that together with language, human physiology and the particular traits of each individual conditions the perception of reality (Katan 1999: 88–90). In this respect, translation is intercultural communication primarily in the sense that it is performed through a multilevel interaction between different cultural filters or frames. Culture comprises myriads of diverse factors that can be classified according to the varying degrees to which they fall within or beyond the awareness of social agents. Following Hall (1959: 83–91), Katan (1999: 30–33, 2009: 78–87) distinguishes between technical, formal and informal culture. The succession between these levels represents the transition from the most manifest aspects of culture to norms, habits, values, and ultimately unquestioned beliefs and assumptions. From the point of view of translation, this transition entails progressively greater challenges and thus an increasing need for mediative interventions. In order for these challenges to be met, the translator “will need to be able to demonstrate cognitive flexibility, be able to change viewpoint (disassociation) and be able to mind-shift” (Katan 1999: 66). Accordingly, the need for cognitive flexibility calls for a “third perceptual position […] disassociated from both the contexts of ST and from those of the virtual TT”, from which the translator “can ‘objectively’ manipulate the text” (Katan 2009: 89). It goes without saying, of course, that even from such a position translators cannot remain completely unaffected by their own ideology. Yet it is argued

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that the special role, or “mission”, of translators as mediators is “to improve mutual understanding between people” (Katan 1999: 66–67), and so only their “beliefs about the (communicative) needs inherent between texts and their readers” (Katan 2009: 89) are considered pertinent from this perspective. Later, however, Katan (2009: 87–88) acknowledges a further, sociological dimension in which “translators intervene between competing (and unequal) power systems, no longer to facilitate but to take sides, aware that texts (and they themselves) are carriers of ideology”. Thus, ultimately Katan discerns two basic possibilities. Translators can either facilitate communication or engage in ideological struggles. In both cases, mediation is portrayed as a complex cognitive process of sorting out the diverse layers of signification in the source text. House (2015: 3–4) arrives at the same pair of possibilities but from a different path. In her approach, the cardinal issue is functional equivalence, that is, equivalence at the level of the source and the target texts’ application within their respective sociocultural environments. The importance attributed to functional equivalence implies a particular concern for the relation between text and context, which in turn entails a special interest in translation as a process of recontextualization. Two types of recontextualization are discerned, which correspond to two different kinds of translation equivalence. Both pairs are intertwined with House’s wellknown distinction between overt and covert translation. An overt translation bears visible traces of deviation from the norms of the target language and culture. It is articulated in such a way as to be received as a translation and not as a second original in the target culture. As a rule, overt translation is required when the source text is both culture-specific and of (potential) transcultural significance. On the contrary, source texts that are not culture-specific call for covert translation. In this case, the translated text is presented as an original in the target culture (House 2012: 502–503). In overt translation, the “target culture addressees are quite ‘overtly’ not being addressed” and thus simply “an equivalence of a ‘removed’ nature can be achieved: its function is to enable access to the function that the original has (had) in its discourse world or frame” (House 2012: 502). Real functional equivalence is said to be achieved only in covert translation, since in this case the source and the target text “are pragmatically of equal concern for source and target language addressees. Both are equally directly addressed. A source text and its covert translation have equivalent purposes; they are based on contemporary equivalent needs of comparable audience in the source and the target language communities” (House 2015: 66). Equivalence in needs and purposes, however, does not in itself guarantee the unhindered attainment of functional equivalence. Producing a second original presupposes the effacement of cultural difference, which in turn calls for employing a cultural filter. In that way, “[c]overt translation often results in a very real cultural distance from the original text, since the original is transmuted in varying degrees” (House [2009] 2014: 17). On the other hand, overt translation

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results in a “genuine cultural transfer” in the sense of a contact that brings about “deviations from the norm of the target language/culture through the influence of another language and culture” (House 2012: 502). Thus, there are three interrelated dichotomies underpinning House’s approach to translation. At the level of the use of language, two basic options are distinguished: (i) a purposive deviation from the norms of the target language and culture, and (ii) the application of a compensative cultural filter. At the level of the application of the source and the target text, real functional equivalence is distinguished from second level equivalence. Finally, at the level of recontextualization, cultural transfer is opposed to cultural accommodation. The distinction between overt and covert translation relates to the ways in which cultural differences are foregrounded or concealed in the translated text. In that respect, it is reminiscent, as House (2014: 13) acknowledges, of Schleiermacher’s ([1813] 2004) famous distinction of translation methods. A popular reinterpretation of this distinction was Venuti’s (1995) dichotomy between domestication and foreignization, which has been variously used and criticized in translation studies. In theorizing translation as intercultural communication, a specific application of the distinction is offered in Cheung’s four types of interaction in translation. Cheung’s typology is predicated on an analogy between the attitudes of agents to different cultural groups or settings and the attitudes of translators to source texts and cultures. Thus, in translation, too, one can speak of assimilation, cultural convergence, adaptation and separation (Cheung 2014: 181). Assimilation is a type of interaction associated with domestication and involves all changes effected in order for a translated text to conform to the norms and expectations of the target culture. Cultural convergence involves a “productive hybridity”, whereas adaptation is associated with the deliberate use of target texts as symbolic weapons in ideological struggles. Finally, separation is achieved by means of foreignization and aims at resisting the imposition of alien cultural values. It is interesting to note that these types correspond to different degrees of resistance to cultural difference. In that sense, the typology could be taken as defining a continuum that ranges from the “erasure of difference”, in the case of assimilation, to the “enhanced cross-cultural understanding” in cultural convergence, the “deliberate and triumphant miscommunication” in adaptation, and the “self-exoticization or exoticization of one culture by another” in separation (Cheung 2014: 181). Cheung’s typology captures translation methods applicable for both political and non-political purposes and classifies them according to the ways in which the translator can treat cultural difference. In effect, this is a typology of the manipulation of difference in translation. The use of the concept of interaction as a criterion for classification allows the focus of attention to shift from the micro-level of the textual surface to the macrolevel of the large-scale effects of translation. Cheung’s (2014: 181) unmistakeable concern for the macro-level is reflected in her view that translations “are the ideal

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site for the analysis of cultures in contact, conflict, contest or collision”. A similar view is held by Bassnett (2007: 19). It is surely no coincidence that an epistemological issue is raised in this connection. The argument about the epistemological value of translation is an integral part of the attempt to reorient translation studies from textual analysis to the study of cultural interaction (cf. Lefevere & Bassnett 1998: 6). The interest in the macro-level of translation characterized the discipline from the 1980s onwards and was accompanied, from the very beginning of the cultural turn (Tymoczko 2007: 44), by a concern for situations of unequal power relations and cases of politically engaged translation activity. The special stress on such cases seeks to emphasize that “[t]ranslation always carries with it the capacity to challenge what is socially established, to expand or overturn what is known, and to foster rebellion against the constraints of local ethical, ideological, and political standards and hierarchies” (Tymoczko 2014: 170). It seems reasonable to assume that the capacity of translation to challenge and subvert stems from the fact that it inevitably involves the interplay of social and cultural differences. For Tymoczko, however, it is specifically the partiality inherent in translating that accounts for this capacity. From the over-determination of textual meaning Tymoczko (2000: 24) deduces that translation always results in partial representations of the source text, and argues that this partiality enables the translated texts “to participate in the dialectic of power, the ongoing process of political discourse, and strategies for social change” (emphasis in the original). From this perspective, translation is portrayed as “a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication – and even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret codes” (Gentzler & Tymoczko 2002: xxi). The idea of mediation as facilitation of communication is, then, openly challenged. The antipode is the view that translation is “an activity where discourses meet and compete; translation negotiates power relations, shifting in complex ways to meet the imperatives of specific historical and material moments” (Tymoczko 2007: 45). The ongoing interrogation of translation as communication across cultures disclosed various contrasting aspects which, taken together, constitute a diversified potential of translation. A lucid outline of these aspects and their interconnection is offered in Davies (2012). Interestingly, Davies constructs a balanced account of translation by means of a skillful use of the well-worn metaphors of bridge and barrier. The bridge metaphor of translation is typically associated with the idea of overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers in communication and, therefore, with the aim, hope or aspiration of eradicating prejudices and promoting genuine understanding between human beings. Such a view of translation is neither totally deceptive nor adequately representative. It captures only part of the whole image. Its validity is seriously challenged even before the question of the different translation methods is raised. For the very selection of the source text crucially affects the

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effects of translation. There is, in principle, an extremely wide range of motives behind the decisions about what to translate. It is plainly unrealistic to assume that all conceivable motives are uniformly congruent with promoting intercultural understanding. On the contrary, in many cases the selection of source texts may even result in strengthening prejudices (Davies 2012: 370). If one adds to this the inevitable recontextualization involved in translating and the numerous possibilities for manipulation that it offers, then the idea of translation as a bridge turns out to be less simplistic than it seems at first sight. Thus, the passage that translation creates between members of different sociocultural communities or groups can be equally used for promoting understanding or misunderstanding: “what crosses the bridge via translation may not necessarily be something which helps one culture to understand better another” (Davies 2012: 372). This brings us to the opposite metaphor, that of barrier. If translation has the potential to strengthen or create prejudices and misconceptions, then it can be reasonably said to pose obstacles to intercultural understanding. Yet it can function as a barrier without necessarily bringing about misunderstanding. The case of Serbians and Croatians, mentioned by Davies, is extreme but telling. Prior to 1991, members of the two communities typically communicated with each other without resort to translators. But after Croatia declared its independence, there has been an increasing need for translation services. In this case, translation has been primarily used “to affirm a division which is more political and psychological than linguistic” (Davies 2012: 372). Thus, there emerges a further range of functions which are more of the character of symbolic exploitation. Translation is normally performed at the interface of languages and cultures, and this suffices to make it a potential instrument for drawing demarcation lines and introducing or expanding divisions. Admittedly, such uses are exceptions; nonetheless, they bring into sharp relief the Janus-faced nature of translation as mediation.

4 Translation as a medium of social interaction The preceding survey suggests that the single most important recurring theme throughout the various accounts of translation as intercultural communication is mediation. In a sense, it is a platitude to say that translation is mediation. So, it may seem surprising that this platitude has attracted so much attention in translation studies in recent decades. Has the discipline perhaps been following, wittingly or unwittingly, Foucault’s (1982: 210) suggestion that “[w]hat we have to do with banal facts is to discover – or try to discover – which specific and perhaps original problem is connected with them”? In that case, what could be the original problem connected with translation as mediation? If we want to understand why the idea of mediation gained currency and how it came to be a dominant theme in transla-

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tion studies, we should start by placing its emergence in the proper context, namely, in the cultural turn and its aftermath. I have already referred to the general character of that turn, its aspirations and the new paths that it opened for theorizing translation at the turn of the twentyfirst century. For the present study, it is important to dwell a little more on why, from the 1980s onwards, culture in translation has been assigned a new value. In the linguistic approaches of the first postwar decades, the concept of culture was primarily used for refining the concept of translation equivalence and thus for constructing an (ideally) elaborated analytic instrument for addressing various problems in the practice of translation. Within that context there were also some attempts to deal with the issue of translatability. In those early approaches, then, the concept of culture was used as a parameter rather than as a definiens of translation. The situation changed with the advent of the cultural studies approach. The aim now was to disengage translation studies from linguistics and establish it as an autonomous discipline. To this end, a major reorientation was sought, which would lead to a substantial redefinition of translation as an object of scholarly study. It was in the context of this development that the revaluation of culture occurred. The new approach adopted an explicitly anti-linguistic stance, since the previous linguistic approaches were considered as the major obstacle in the way of the discipline’s reorientation. Given that the opposing approaches’ distinctive perspective and particular conception of translation depended on the concept of translation equivalence, the cultural studies approach aimed a considerable part of its attack at the idea of equivalence itself. This entailed an altogether different way of viewing the relation between culture and translation. Thus, whereas in the linguistic approaches culture was seen largely through the prism of its actual or potential linguistic representation in the source and the target text (cf. Catford’s functionally relevant situational features), in the cultural studies approach it was this textual pair that was viewed from the perspective of the encompassing cultures. In the first case, translation was analyzed from the viewpoint of a relation between texts; in the second case, it was projected against the background of two open sets of heterogeneous factors. Despite this striking difference, the two ways of representing translation share a structural feature: they both portray translation as occupying an intermediate position between two parts. The key difference between them has actually to do with how this intermediate position of translation should be construed. The contrasting construals offered are predicated not only on different methodological assumptions, but also on different views about the character of translation studies and its proper object. It ultimately appears, then, that the real contested ground between the two rivals is the idea of translation as mediation. One of the most important consequences of the cultural turn is that it explicitly foregrounded the issue of mediation as a key topic in translation studies, thus

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allowing for a proliferation of alternative approaches and perspectives in subsequent decades. As regards the concept of mediation itself, it should be noted that it has some basic features that make it particularly suitable for current concerns and debates in the discipline. First of all, “mediation” is a very flexible concept that is not tied to specific types of relation. Furthermore, it can be equally well applied to diverse kinds of elements such as structures, processes, actions or social agents. It is for this reason that it can be very attractive to those interested in the issue of agency in translation. For it can easily be used to shift the focus to the interaction between agents, including their encompassing contexts. Ever since the cultural turn, the concept of mediation was variously applied for precisely this purpose. Needless to say, such applications were not based on thoroughly evaluated theoretical analyses of the concept’s potential. It was, rather, the very logic and nature of the unfolding of the dominant debates in the discipline during the last decades that established “mediation” as a definiens of translation. On the other hand, it was the concept’s flexibility that allowed for its diverse applications to the problem of translation. Finally, it was the concept’s pertinence to a most crucial aspect of the practice of translation that accounted for the ongoing debates about the definition of translation as intercultural mediation. The particular movement of translation studies towards the revaluation of mediation was contingent on the sociopolitical, ideological and intellectual factors that affected its development in the last third of the twentieth century. In this sense, the path that leads from the disruption of “equivalence”, by means of a politically oriented conception of culture, to issues of power relations and ideological struggles is only one of the potential options available. The eventual prevalence of this option is dependent on the prevalence of certain approaches to translation. Under essentially different circumstances, other options might seem more attractive or promising. One could imagine, say, a reverse course that would take as its point of departure a descriptive affirmation of translation’s mediative character, in order to provide a basis for both purely descriptive and value-laden definitions of translation. For instance, the old sociological definition of communication as a medium of social interaction (Park & Burgess 1921: 341) logically entails that translation, too, is a medium of social interaction. Such an affirmation of translation’s mediative character is not tied to any particular approach, and thus can be used for developing diverse conceptions, depending on which features of translation are each time singled out as distinctive. The thematization of translation as intercultural communication has highlighted the cultural factors in translating, focusing in particular on cultural differences. In effect, cultural difference has been the key criterion of the typologies and distinctions offered. Specifically, the different types of translation have been distinguished according to the ways in which (i) culture determines the production and interpretation of texts, and (ii) translators treat or manipulate cultural differences. Yet what is still needed is an equal or at least comparable emphasis on the shared

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ground on which such differences are identified in the first place. On the other hand, the category of cultural difference has often been treated as an open set that can be freely expanded in various ways. The particular political concerns of the cultural studies approach and its successors favored an expansion toward the realms of politics, power relations and ideological struggles. However, neither a general specification of the relation between culture and politics nor a clear distinction between power, politics and ideology has always been provided. Obviously, political relations inevitably involve the culturally saturated use of symbolic systems, insofar as communication is taken as the medium of all social interaction. But this does not in itself entail that the signs and symbols that people use invariably have a predominantly direct political character. From a socio-ontological point of view, political relations represent a subset of social relations that refers to human society as a whole, and especially as a necessarily ordered and cohesive whole. Specifically, political relations aim at determining the particular form and content of order and cohesion in a given society. Not all social relations are political; but political relations represent that special subset that has as its object all social relations (Kondylis 1999: 207). This is what Kondylis (1999: 210) calls “the political” (das Politische) in contradistinction to “politics” (Politik), which denotes the concrete sociohistorical substantiations of the political. Political relations do not form a closed set; non-political relations may turn into political ones, inasmuch as they enter the struggle for the well-being of society as a whole (Kondylis 1999: 209). In the light of the above distinctions, it appears that it is not simply “the partial nature of translations [that] makes them […] political” (Tymoczko 2000: 24). Partiality is a necessary but not sufficient condition. In order for a translation to acquire a genuine political character, it has to be used as a symbolic means in a chain of political relations, especially as a means specifically employed for the attainment of political purposes. It would also be helpful to distinguish here between the political use of translation processes and target texts. The two cases overlap only partially, for target texts that were produced precisely for political purposes may also in different contexts be used for non-political purposes, and vice versa. Moreover, not only is the political use of translation not confined to political texts (however these may be defined), but also texts that are taken to be of an undeniable political character may be used for diverse purposes. Not all translations of Pericles’s famous Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2009: 90–96) have been used politically, even if some of them may have been produced for that purpose. Finally, the possibility of mixed purposes and uses should always be taken into consideration. The distinction between process and product and the investigation of their multilevel interconnection might, hopefully, allow for more precise descriptions of the relation between politics and translation. As regards the issues of power and ideology, a similar set of questions needs to be addressed, with a special focus on their relation to politics.

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A careful delineation of the realm of political relations facilitates the specification of their relation to culture in connection with the problem of translation. As all surveyed accounts implicitly or explicitly acknowledge, culture is both a fundamental condition of human life and an all-pervasive force that gives concrete content to social relations and actions. In fact, the nature of human beings is culture (Kondylis 1999: 207), in the sense that human activity is inherently meaningful (Kondylis 1999: 552). Social relations, then, are relations between beings whose nature is culture; as such, they are infused with meaning. The particular content of relations and actions is culturally determined, but it is always shaped by the specific dynamics of the unfolding of social relations. The fluid character of culture, intracultural heterogeneity and variability, and the ceaseless intercultural interactions throughout the history of human societies, suggest that the supposed primacy of cultural factors over social relations does not correspond to the real facts of social life. The logic and dynamics of social relations transcend the particular cultural meanings of actions, and thus each culture can substantiate its meaning-assigning potential in diverse ways, under the influence of the dynamics of concrete social interactions. It should also be noted that the continuous interactions between human beings have a crucial impact on the cultural potential of different societies. Thus, strictly speaking, there can be no contact of cultures as such (in their entire range), but only contact between concrete social agents who substantiate on each occasion certain aspects of their cultures (Kondylis 1999: 631). In this respect, it is the specific sociohistorical grid of social relations that determines which cultural aspects and particular factors will be considered relevant in a given case of translation, and what their relative import will be. And this brings us back to the issue of cultural difference. It is absolutely reasonable for translation scholars to focus on cultural differences in their accounts of translation as intercultural communication. Admittedly, there have been many attempts not only to identify new types of cultural difference and draw finer distinctions between them, but also to construct more sophisticated typologies of the ways translators treat such differences. However, when addressing the issue of cultural difference, it is essential not to lose sight of the fundamental fact that similarity and difference, in general, do not exist in abstracto but always emerge through concrete chains of actions and interactions. In this sense, similarity and difference should be taken, not as ontological, but rather as functional concepts. Whether a given element is perceived as an instance of (cultural) similarity or difference ultimately depends on the series of interrelated purposeful interactions in which such perception is fully integrated. The fact that we are used to conceiving of cultural similarities and difference as fixed properties of intercultural relations is due to certain regularities in the patterns of interaction between members of different cultural communities. Such a hypostatization, however, may conceal their essentially sociohistorical nature, and this may prove detrimental for a comprehensive account that aspires to capture structurally all the conceivable possibilities of intercultural interaction in translation.

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5 Conclusion The study of translation as intercultural communication constitutes a special chapter of the history of translation studies. It comprises the crucial developments in the ongoing construction of scholarly representations of both the practice of translation and the social roles of translators. It also comprises the key stages in establishing a specific ideological orientation in the discipline, under the influence of dominant ideological currents in the humanities. Thus, apart from intradisciplinary developments and interdisciplinary affiliations, a comprehensive account of the thematization of translation as intercultural communication should also investigate why certain conceptions of culture, communication, understanding, mediation and ideology have prevailed in the discipline, and in what particular ways translation studies is involved in current ideological struggles in the academic world. In this survey and preliminary analysis, I have presented the key themes and interconnections in this thematization in a way that will hopefully provide some useful hints concerning the guidelines that such a comprehensive account might follow.

6 References Arrojo, Rosemary. 1986. Oficina de tradução. A teoria na prática [Translation workshop. Theory in practice]. São Paolo: Editora Ática. Baker, Mona. 1996. Linguistics and cultural studies: Complementary or competing paradigms in translation studies? In Angelika Lauer, Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast, Johann Haller & Erich Steiner (eds.), Übersetzungswissenschaft im Umbruch: Festschrift für Wolfram Wilss zum 70. Geburtstag, 9–19. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Bassnett, Susan. 1998. The translation turn in cultural studies. In Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere (eds.), Constructing cultures. Essays on literary translation, 123–140. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bassnett, Susan. 2007. Culture and translation. In Piotr Kuhiwczak & Karin Littau (eds.), A companion to translation studies, 1–12. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Casagrande, Joseph Bartholomew. 1954. The ends of translation. International Journal of American Linguistics 20(4). 335–340. Catford, John Cunnison. 1965. A linguistic theory of translation: An essay in applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheung, Martha P. Y. 2014. Translation as intercultural communication: Views from the Chinese discourse on translation. In Sandra Bermann & Catherine Porter (eds.), A companion to translation studies, 179–190. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Davies, Eirlys E. 2012. Translation and intercultural communication: Bridges and barriers. In Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling & Elizabeth S. Rangel (eds.), The handbook of intercultural discourse and communication, 367–388. Chichester, West Sussex: WileyBlackwell. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1982. The subject and power. In Hubert L. Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, 2 nd edn., 208–226. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Gentzler, Edwin & Maria Tymoczko. 2002. Introduction. In Maria Tymoczko & Edwin Gentzler (eds.), Translation and power, xi–xxviii. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Hall, Edward Twitchell. 1959. The silent language. New York: Doubleday. Hatim, Basil & Ian Mason. 1990. Discourse and the translator. London & New York: Longman. Hermans, Theo (ed.). 1985. The manipulation of literature. Studies in literary translation. London & Sydney: Croom Helm. Holz-Mänttäri, Justa. 1984. Translatorisches Handeln. Theorie und Methode. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Hönig, Hans G. & Paul Kussmaul. 1982. Strategie der Übersetzung. Ein Lehr- und Arbeitsbuch. Tübingen: Narr. House, Juliane. 2012. Translation, interpreting and intercultural communication. In Jane Jackson (ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and intercultural communication, 495–509. London & New York: Routledge. House, Juliane. 2014 [2009]. Moving across languages and cultures in translation as intercultural communication. In Kirstin Bührig, Juliane House & Jan D. ten Thije (eds.), Translational action and intercultural communication, 7–39. London & New York: Routledge. House, Juliane. 2015. Translation quality assessment: Past and present. London & New York: Routledge. Jakobson, Roman. 1971 [1959]. On linguistic aspects of translation. In Roman Jakobson, Selected writings II: Word and language, 260–266. The Hague & Paris: Mouton. Katan, David. 1999. Translating cultures: An introduction for translators, interpreters and mediators. Manchester: St Jerome. Katan, David. 2009. Translation as intercultural communication. In Jeremy Munday (ed.), The Routledge companion to translation studies, revised edn., 74–92. London & New York: Routledge. Kondylis, Panajotis. 1999. Das Politische und der Mensch. Grundzüge der Sozialontologie, Bd. 1: Soziale Beziehung, Verstehen, Rationalität. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Koskinen, Kaisa. 2004. Shared culture? Reflections on recent trends in translation studies. Target 16(1). 43–56. Lefevere, André & Susan Bassnett. 1990. Introduction: Proust’s grandmother and the thousand and one nights. The ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies. In Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere (eds.), Translation, history and culture, 1–13. London: Pinter. Lefevere, André & Susan Bassnett. 1998. Introduction: Where are we in translation studies? In Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere (eds.), Constructing cultures. Essays on literary translation, 1–11. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Nida, Eugene Albert. 1964a [1945]. Linguistics and ethnology in translation problems. In Dell Hymes (ed.), Language in culture and society. A reader in linguistics and anthropology, 90– 100. New York: Harper & Row. Nida, Eugene Albert. 1964b. Toward a science of translating. With special reference to principles and procedures involved in Bible translating. Leiden: Brill. Nida, Eugene Albert. 1975 [1959]. Principles of translation as exemplified by Bible translating. In Eugene Albert Nida, Language, structure and translation, 24–46. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Park, Robert Ezra & Ernest Watson Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the science of sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pym, Anthony. 2001. Introduction: The return to ethics in translation studies. The Translator 7(2). 129–138. Reiss, Katharina & Hans J. Vermeer. 1984. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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Sakellariou, Panagiotis. 2015. The appropriation of the concept of intertextuality for translationtheoretic purposes. Translation Studies 8(1). 35–47. Schäffner, Christina. 2003. Translation and intercultural communication – similarities and differences. Studies in Communication Sciences 3(2). 79–107. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2004 [1813]. On the different methods of translating. In Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The translation studies reader, 2 nd edn., 43–63. London & New York: Routledge. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 2006. The turns of translation studies: New paradigms or shifting viewpoints? Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Thucydides. 2009. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian war. Trans. Martin Hammond. Intro. and notes P. J. Rhodes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tymoczko, Maria. 2000. Translation and political engagement. The Translator 6(1). 23–47. Tymoczko, Maria. 2007. Enlarging translation, empowering translators. London & New York: Routledge. Tymoczko, Maria. 2014. Cultural hegemony and the erosion of translation communities. In Sandra Bermann & Catherine Porter (eds.), A companion to translation studies, 165–178. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The translator’s invisibility. A history of translation. London & New York: Routledge. Vermeer, Hans J. 1978. Ein Rahmen für eine allgemeine Translationstheorie. Lebende Sprachen 23(3). 99–102. Vermeer, Hans J. 1986. Übersetzen als kultureller Transfer. In Mary Snell-Hornby (ed.), Übersetzungswissenschaft – Eine Neuorientierung. Zur Integrierung von Theorie und Praxis (UTB 1415), 30–53. Tübingen: Francke. Vinay Jean-Paul & Jean Darbelnet. 1958. Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Paris: Didier.

Jian Wang

26 Consuming nations − Brand nationality in the global marketplace: A Review Abstract: This review aims to provide a broader context and framework for understanding the role of national identity in the consumption process. It represents a continued effort to capture and explain the mechanisms and consequences of the salience of national identity and consumer advocacy in moments of contentious international politics. The review first lays out the conceptual premises for the discussion of the role of national identity in consumption, followed by an examination of the subjectivity and objectivity of brand nationality. Next it provides an overview of the mainline research streams in this area of inquiry. Given the varying conceptual departures in the existing studies, the review calls for conceptual coherence and analytical integration in future studies, which points to a key challenge in inter-disciplinary inquiry. Keywords: brand nationality, consumer nationalism, consumer ethnocentrism/animosity, country image, brand country-of-origin

1 Introduction Brands, like people, have their own identities anchored around a variety of attributes in the mind of the consumer. One such identity anchor – a brand’s nationality – often becomes visible and salient in today’s global marketplace. Brand nationality, broadly defined as the perceived national association of a brand, can be an organization’s strategic asset or its competitive liability. In the discussion here we are primarily concerned with the latter. Specifically, we are interested in exploring how the public’s negative perceptions and attitudes toward a certain country affect their perceptions and preferences of the brands associated with said country. Granted, the underpinnings of such country-based perceptions and attitudes are diverse and dynamic, ranging from economic and social-psychological, to political and demographic (Shankarmahesh 2006). Our focus is on the political factor of international frictions as a driver in the context of country image perception. Trade and economic relations are a crucial aspect of contemporary international relations. They have become increasingly prominent with the globalization of the world economic system, driven by the mobility of information, capital and people. One manifestation of this is the growing number of bilateral, multilateral and regional trade pacts as well as ever-expanding cross-border e-commerce. Brands are visible symbols in these exchanges and relationships, while their consumers DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-026

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situate in a political, cultural system that, thus, also impacts brands. An example of negative interaction between international relations and consumer attitudes toward international brands would be how American companies and brands were implicated and suffered from negative publicity in a number of crisis situations in the Chinese marketplace in light of the tensions in U.S.-China relations (Gries 2005). So we are interested in the social phenomenon of consumption as a site of international politics. On this site expressions of nationality, public or private, are fraught with commercial as well as political consequences. For the consuming public, such advocacy provides a platform for asserting their national identity and allegiance, as a form of political consumerism (Micheletti 2003). For brands, it presents a threat to the highly prized intangible asset of brand image and corporate bottom line if consumers boycott and protest brands (Wang 2005). Not the least, it may influence and impact international relations; as such consumer expression and action is often vocal and visible, contributing to a disenabling opinion environment for effective foreign policy pursuits. Our discussion of the dynamics between international relations and brand nationality is premised on the presence and salience of the spatial imagining of a country and its linkage to brands. Some argue that with globalization a brand’s nationality has become so ambiguous that contemporary consumers may not care where a brand is from or even know the “country-of-origin” information of the brands they purchase (Liefeld 2004). However, as various researchers have shown, all spatial associations or perceived national originations are not created equal, and they still matter in a wide range of circumstances (Pike 2015), and the interest over the years in researching and analyzing this phenomenon has not abated either. Given the expansion of emerging economies, the global marketplace is ever more varied and diverse in terms of brands and players. Global Fortune 500 companies were represented by 36 countries in 2015 (Fortune 2016), whereas the list had earlier been dominated by only a few countries. The United States has recently increased the threshold of import duties for American consumers to buy overseas goods online, allowing more incoming products and further widening the marketplace (Stevens 2016). Meanwhile, geopolitical shifts and instabilities are plentiful, making the “political ecology” of the marketplace far more fluid and complex. Political ecology as used in this context refers to transactions based on social legitimacy and authority rather than goods and monetary resources (Hutt, Mokwa & Shapiro 1986). In this context, negative public sentiments and perceptions concerning a country can function as a form of non-tariff barrier (Jeannet & Hennessey 1995) in the market process. While globalization continues to accelerate and intensify, there is no doubt about the concomitant rise of assertive nationalism in many parts of the world. Hence our conceptual expectation is that as a place-based association, brand nationality, which usually remains invisible or latent in the production and consumption process, will be activated and made pronounced in times of international frictions. It is an example of conflicts being transferred from the

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international political realm to the commercial realm and, more aptly, a manifestation of the interwoven dynamics of “the role of the market in politics and the role of politics in the market.” (Micheletti 2003: 3) The possible sources of such international frictions range from trade disputes, diplomatic clashes and military incursions, to religious and ethnic conflicts, and historical grievances. The broad phenomenon of the inspiring role of country-based attributes and characteristics in the consumption process has been dissected in several dimensions in the extant literature. In international marketing studies, the focus has been on analyzing the antecedents and consequences of place-based perception in consumption behavior, such as brand perception and purchase intent, mainly through the research streams of country-of-origin/product-country image (PCI) (e.g., Papadopoulos & Heslop 1993), consumer ethnocentrism (e.g., Shimp & Sharma 1987), consumer affinity (Oberecker, Riefler & Diamantopoulos 2008), and consumer animosity (e.g., Klein, Ettenson & Morris 1998). A series of studies under the rubric of “consumer nationalism” have examined how global brands and international relations intersect, with an emphasis on the crucial role of communication and media in the encounter (e.g., Wang 2006). Meanwhile, in tourism destination marketing, countries are treated as a consumer product and brand in themselves (e.g., Beerli & Martin 2004; d’Astous & Boujbel 2007). In this particular case, countryrelated associations are at their most direct and visible, and are highly accessible to consumers in formation and expression of their social, political identity. The general perception of the country and the brand image the country hopes to project are shown to be intimately intertwined. In short, all these studies examine the same general phenomenon but from different conceptual starting points and with different analytical emphases. The purpose of this chapter is to review these ideas and concepts. It represents a continued effort to capture and explain the mechanisms and consequences of the salience of national identity and consumer advocacy in moments of contentious international politics. Our conceptual departure is the role of country image perception among foreign publics in the arena of international relations, where international frictions may cast a shadow on brands in the marketplace. Drawing on previous research and writings, the review is meant to provide conceptual contours for future inquiries. It focuses on examining the core ideas – their premises and intersections – rather than critiquing specific constructs and methodologies, which several previous reviews have amply discussed in their respective areas.1 In what follows, we first lay out the conceptual premises for the discussion of the role of national identity in consumption. The centrality of the nation and national consciousness in this age of a global consumer society needs to be explained rather than taken as given. We then explore the subjectivity and objectivity of brand na-

1 As this is not meant to be an exhaustive review, we only include some of the key articles in each research area and those articles contain a more complete set of respective references.

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tionality, an issue that forms the foundation of the phenomenon under study. We discuss the complexity and ambiguity in what constitutes a brand’s nationality. Next we provide an overview of the mainline research streams in this area of inquiry. The phenomenon has been examined in various disciplines through multiple concept lenses. As we juxtapose these different streams of work, we note the broader challenge typical in such an inter-disciplinary endeavor of arriving at coherent frameworks by weaving together disparate conceptual threads.

2 The Role of national identity in consumption: Conceptual considerations A “consumer society” is characterized by the elevated role of goods in giving meaning to people in their everyday lives (Cross 2000). With the rapid expansion of a global middle class lifestyle, a “consumer society” revolution is clearly under way around the world. “In the rich world – and in the developing world increasingly, too – identities, politics, the economy and the environment are crucially shaped by what and how we consume,” noted the cultural historian Frank Trentmann (2016: 1). In contemporary times, branding has become a main vehicle for creating organizational value. A brand is more than a product; it is a perceptual entity consisting of a set of properties and associations that help to identify a product or its producer and differentiate it from its rivals for competitive advantage. As the branding consultant Allen Adamson put it, “[p]eople use brands as shortcuts to make purchase decisions.” (2006: xviii) Besides price, quality and functionality, brands and their identities are embedded in the political and social context; as such, consumers are also political and social actors in the process (e.g., Cohen 2003; Micheletti 2003). This discussion of the role of national identity in the consumption process is grounded in several conceptual developments, including social identity in consumption, the rise of political consumerism, the resilience of nationalism in the global age, and national identity as a symbolic and communicative act. In a sense, brands become effective social, symbolic and indeed political resources. National identity is one such meaning transference between the consumer and the brands, as can be seen from four vantage points. First, consumption has always been both material and figurative, for it includes the acquisition and use of goods and services as well as their underlying narratives. Mundane as they may be, these goods and services are powerfully communicative as well as symbolic. As part of our possessions, material objects become our “extended selves,” shaping and reflecting our identities (Arnould & Thompson 2005; Belk 1988; McCracken 1986). In what Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmor call the “experience economy,” businesses now grow and thrive by “the

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time customers spend with you,” rather than selling just tangible things (Pine & Gilmore 2011: 1, 2). In a word, brands exist not only for differentiation purposes but also to embody consumers’ emotional connection to products and firms. Brands are carriers of meaning, and that meaning is constituted discursively. Consumption is the process by which these meanings are created, organized, and circulated. It fulfills one’s vital need for self-definition (Douglas & Isherwood 1996; Lury 1996). Viewed from this vantage point, as Craig J. Thompson has asserted, “the practices of consumption are indeed productive ones” (Thompson 2014: 3). And these practices have a long history and are manifested across geographic spans (Trentmann 2016). Second, we see the invocation and projection of national identity in the consumption process as part of the larger phenomenon of political consumerism. Political consumerism rests on the key arguments of the market as a site of politics and consumers as political actors. “Shopping involves more than just economic considerations …,” as Michele Micheletti contends. “There are social, ethical, and political issues embedded in shopping decisions as well.” (Micheletti 2003: viiii) Similarly, Craig J. Thompson has argued that “consumer identity work becomes a mode of identity politics” through consumers’ mobilization of marketplace resources (Thompson 2014: 3). Although the work about political consumerism is concerned primarily with consumer choice to advance political causes of justice and fairness, the broader framework is applicable to the current discussion, as it shifts the venue of politics (and in our case international relations) to the marketplace, making consumption and political identity (national identity in our case) interconnected and interdependent. Nowadays, expressions and actions of political consumerism are facilitated and amplified by digital technologies in forming groups and networks. For instance, consumer boycotts (and buycotts) are ubiquitous, be they short-term or sustained efforts, marketplace-oriented or media-driven (Friedman 2004). While consumer boycott is an extreme form of consumer expression, others may involve just switching brands and choosing other alternatives, as an expression of disapproval. One of social identities embodied through the process is one’s national identity vis-a-vis that of the brand. Campaigns for or against products based on brand nationality are a potent expression of the consuming public’s political and cultural solidarity. Billig (1995: 6) frames such affirmation of one’s own national identity as a form of “banal nationalism,” in which “nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’ in the lives of its citizenry.” This leads to the third conceptual argument which asserts that the nation-state remains a vital form of social classification in global affairs. As Reinhold Niebubr wrote many decades ago, “nations are territorial societies, the cohesive power of which is supplied by the sentiment of nationality and the authority of state.” (Niebuhr 1932: 83) With intensified globalization in wide-ranging social spheres, the governing capacity of the nation in the international system has been challenged

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and indeed undermined in many instances. Some have contended that globalization has significantly weakened the function and strength of the nation-state (Strange 1995: 57). Others, however, maintain that nation-states continue to be one of the most significant organizing principles and entities. As Anne-Marie Slaughter has observed, the state is not disappearing in the face of accelerating globalization; rather “it is disaggregating into its separate, functionally distinct parts … creating a web of relations that constitutes a new trans-governmental order.” (Slaughter 1997: 184) In Jessica Mathews’ view, “nation-states are not simply losing power, but rather sharing power,” with such new actors as diasporas and non-governmental organizations in international relations (Mathews 1997: 50). Giulio M. Gallariotti (2010: 3) has also argued, “the power of nations continues to be the principal instrument for determining our collective fate as a planet.” As a relational concept, national identity only becomes meaningful in an international or transnational context. The contemporary movement toward economic and cultural globalization at the same time awakens and sharpens national consciousness (Friedman 1990; Giddens 1990; Robertson 1995). Nationalism broadly refers to “that outlook which gives an absolute priority to the values of the nation over all other values and interests.” (Hroch 1996: 62) In this realm, social relations and transactions are beyond the levels of individuals but oriented towards the nation-state. In international affairs such nationalism is anchored around collective self-interest. As Anthony Smith noted, nationalism is in fact “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining the autonomy, unity and identity of an existing or potential ‘nation’.” (Smith 1996: 108) In an increasingly connected world, there is constant tension between national self-interest and international common good. Finally, nation-state and its consciousness are symbolic and cultural as well as territorial and political. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted, a nation is a corporate entity held together by “force and emotion.” (Niebuhr 1932: 88) Indeed, according to Anthony Smith, territorial unity is only “the first step to the much more important kind of social and cultural unification of the members of the nation.” (Smith 2001: 26) Nation-state outlook and devotion are evident in the passionate displays of national pride and dignity (Pye 1993), as individuals partake in constructing and reinforcing these “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983). For established nations, such popular emotion is principally to reproduce and reaffirm one’s national identity, while for new and emerging nations it is to forge a shared identity (Billig 1995). Either case entails endeavor of high intensity; communication situates at the center of this enterprise, creating and sharing national imaginings through discourses and actions that shape and re-define our identities. In sum, as brands compete globally, they must grapple with the “political ecology” of the marketplace, an aspect of which is the presence, and sometimes the prominence, of brand nationality during the transaction. This exploration of the role of national identity in the process of consumption focuses on the tension and dynamics in making national identity visible for both the consumer and the brand.

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It looks at whether and how nation-state consciousness is implicated in public discourse and consumption choice, and how individuals assume the dual identity of citizen and consumer. As Cohen stated, “[r]ather than isolated ideal types, citizen and consumer were ever-shifting categories that sometimes overlapped, often in tension, but always reflected the permeability of the political and economic sphere” (Cohen 2003: 8). Although they may be latent or fleeting, sentiments and behaviors concerning a brand’s nationality could be a potent expression and affirmation of political solidarity and social cohesion, reflecting the deeper currents of being national as a condition of contemporary human existence.

3 Brand nationality and its ambiguity While the world of business becomes increasingly connected and integrated on the global scale, the nationality of a brand at times attains growing political significance. Yet the notion of brand nationality is fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. The sources of a brand’s nationality are varied and complex. Brand nationality is sometimes perceived and defined primarily by the firm’s own history. Consider the example of McDonald’s, which is viewed principally through the lens of its distinctly American roots. Despite McDonald’s operational model of franchising, localizing efforts in its overseas stores and the fact that most of its revenue are now generated from international sales, the myth of the brand’s American identity lives on. For some brands, their international expansion through cross-border mergers and acquisitions or direct investment results in their taking on multiple geographic identities. After the Chinese technology firm Lenovo acquired IBM’s ThinkPad/Personal Computer Division in 2004, it sought to maintain its megabrand status in the Chinese domestic market while evolving a global brand identity overseas. German automakers, such as BMW and Mercedes Benz, build cars in the United States for the U.S. market, and they are also seen as “local” (to the U.S.), given the prevalent employee nationality in these locales. The diversification and fragmentation of the global supply chain over the past decades have rendered the “made in” label meaningless in determining a brand’s country of origin. Apple offers a prime example in this respect. While the company originated from the “local” geographical context of Silicon Valley, California, U.S., Apple’s operations around the world are unified and seamless, and its brand attributes are truly “global” and “de-nationalized.” (Pike 2015) The nationality of a brand is now more elusive and transient than ever. There is no one agreed-upon objective criterion to determine a brand’s nationality – for example, should it be defined by the location where decisions are made, the shareholder or owner’s nationality, or employee nationality? Indeed, brands often take on multiple and shifting local, national and global identities. Their geographical identities have become situational and contingent.

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For some brands, country-based product attributes are closely linked with the country’s general image. Positive associations include, for instance, German engineering and Japanese quality; negative ones include the perception of Chinese brands and products as being cheap and of poor quality. Notwithstanding these general perceptions, there are advantages and disadvantages of the brand’s perceived national association. There is hardly any one-size-fits-all strategy and approach in the global marketplace that can transcend regional differences in consumer attitudes, values and behaviors. There are strong incentives for brands to localize so as to avoid being seen as too foreign. On the other hand, maintaining a consistent brand voice across varied markets is crucial for operational efficiency. But when international tensions flare up and awareness of the brand’s origin becomes heightened, the corresponding negative national association presents an obstacle in the marketplace.2 A brand’s nationality is more a subjective construct than an objective property. There may be imperatives for the brand to be perceived as global or local under differing circumstances. However, the consuming public evokes the brand’s nationality based on their preconceived convictions and appropriates it to fulfill their own needs, whether it is in their private consumption or public expression. It is important that such brand perception be noted at three different levels. The first level is consumers’ overall perception of the brand’s foreignness. Consumers often do not have complete product knowledge (Alba & Hutchinson 2000), since they are not always acutely awareness of products’ country of origin. However, for a domestic public that reject foreign brands, it suffices to inspire consumer nationalism with the simple perception of the brand’s being non-domestic. Next, it is useful to decipher the extent to which a brand’s national association or identity is in fact clear to the consumer and what aspect of the national association is most recognized. Several issues may complicate such identification and interpretation. For one, many companies use different brand names for their corporate brands and product brands (e.g., Alphabet and Google, Sony and Columbia Pictures). As noted above, consumers seldom have complete knowledge about the family tree of brands, so it is likely that they may not be able to identify the brands’ national linkages. Moreover, most brands today are geographically hybrid in terms of their ownership and business process. Notwithstanding such multiplicity in brand national identities, consumers still form and cling to perception of a singular national association of certain brands. Perhaps the most significant aspect to understand is the strength of these national associations. For some brands, national association is a defining element of the brand’s core identity (e.g., McDonald’s, Harley Davison); while other brands lack such compelling national connections (e.g., Starbucks, Google). It is expected

2 Consider, for instance, the Japanese brands in China during the tense moments in Japan-China relations in recent times.

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that the stronger and more prominent a brand’s national association is, the more susceptible it becomes to the type of consumer advocacy as discussed in the context of contentious international politics. On the other hand, a weak and less visible national association may allow the brand more room to shield its image from consumers’ nationalistic antipathy in such crisis situations.

4 Analytical approaches In this section, we review three main strands of studies on the role of brand nationality in the consumption process. In international marketing literature, this phenomenon has been framed as how country-related attributes may shape consumers’ attitudes toward foreign goods and their willingness to purchase them. The concept of “consumer nationalism” was advanced to specifically examine the process by which brand nationality is defined through consumers’ communicative actions that link national consciousness with consumption. In destination marketing, the country becomes a product brand in itself so that the brand’s nationality is front and center in the mind of the consumer. First, international marketing research has produced several core concepts related to brand nationality. The research on product country-of-origin (COO) effects (or product-country image [PCI]) seeks to understand how perceptions about COO, as one of the information cues in consumers’ decision-making, affect their product evaluation and purchasing intent (Bilkey & Nes 1982; Chao 1992; Papadopoulos & Heslop 1993; Phau & Chao 2008). Some have questioned the relevance of the COO concept and more broadly the role of place-based attributes in the consumption process, as they argue that consumers, more often than not, lack the knowledge of a brand’s country-of-origin; nor do they care about COO in brand consideration. But as others have shown, COO still matters, but does so selectively; it becomes relevant in certain product categories and at various times (Papadopoulos, Banna, Murphy & Rojas-Méndez 2011). There are two other related concepts that focus on country-based factors beyond consumer perception of product features: consumer ethnocentrism and consumer antipathy. Consumer ethnocentrism refers to the beliefs consumers of one nation hold about the “appropriateness, indeed morality, of purchasing foreign products” (Netemeyer, Durvasula & Lichtenstein 1991; Shimp & Sharma 1987). Consumers’ ethnocentric tendencies are measured by way of CETSCALE – the consumer ethnocentrism tendencies scale (Shimp & Sharma 1987). These studies suggest that highly ethnocentric consumers tend to emphasize the virtues of domestic products and discount those of foreign products, and that those whose jobs are threatened by foreign competition display more ethnocentric tendencies than others. The concept was investigated in several national contexts and was found relevant, but its impact on purchase intentions varied from country to country.

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Mahesh Shankarmahesh provided an integrative review of the studies using this construct. By examining the variables investigated in relation to consumer ethnocentrism, the author categorizes antecedents into socio-psychological, political, economic and demographic factors and identifies direct consequences of purchase intent as well as indirect consequences through mediators and moderators (Shankarmahesh 2006). On the other hand, the animosity model of foreign product purchase investigates the strong feelings of antipathy that consumers have toward certain countries that in turn negatively affect their brand preferences and purchase behavior (Klein 2002; Klein, Ettenson & Morris 1998). Consumer antipathy in this context is related to a country’s historical experience or current political and economic events. A major review by Riefler and Diamantopoulos (2007) of the related studies highlighted several conceptual and methodological issues in this line of research. For instance, the review pointed out that, while many studies claimed to find evidence of consumer antipathy, animosity country targets should not be viewed as a given and noted that the causes for animosity often differ. The phenomenon should be viewed as more situational and context-driven than is acknowledged in the existing research. Clearly these two concepts of consumer ethnocentrism and consumer animosity are related, but each has its own analytical focus. Consumer ethnocentrism underscores consumers’ general beliefs about foreign products, whereas the animosity model is country specific. The concept of consumer ethnocentrism is revealing about the larger climate of consumer opinion about foreign products. However, merely expressing and affirming one’s consumption choice based on one’s own national identity does not necessarily reflect antipathy towards any specific foreign country. On the other hand, as consumers’ nationalistic outlook and conduct are typically targeted at certain countries, the animosity model is useful in illuminating the nature and sources of consumer antipathy. Consumer ethnocentrism also suggests a normative dimension beyond the affective and cognitive dimensions of consumer behavior. Their varying emphases aside, the concepts of country-of-origin, consumer ethnocentrism, and consumer animosity all examine how country-related variables influence consumer brand evaluation and purchasing intent. A recent study (Carter & Maher 2014) attempted to apply all three concepts in an effort to evaluate consumers’ willingness to buy foreign brands and found different effects in different stages of the decision process.3 Research on “consumer nationalism” provides a different approach to examining the phenomenon of brand nationality in the consumption process. The concept was advanced to explore the mechanism by which international crises bring forth

3 The study found that country-of-origin image influences the product evaluation and attitude formation stages, while consumer ethnocentrism and animosity affect purchasing intent.

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foreign public’s nationalistic expressions and actions in the consumption realm (Wang 2005). While the concept was defined generally as the invocation of consumers’ collective identities based on their nationality to accept or reject products from other countries, its point of departure was specific: the impact of consumers’ nationalistic sentiments and expressions on international brands and firms, as triggered by “focusing events,” and in particular the implications of such consumer advocacy for corporate and brand reputation. The assumption is that a brand’s nationality is in general peripheral in the consumer decision-making process and is only elevated to prominence under certain event-driven circumstances, typically a crisis situation involving an international controversy. It is also assumed that consumer protests and boycotts are commonplace these days; so unless consumers take sustained action, the direct financial impact on the corporation as a whole may be limited. But corporate image and reputation (or its “halo effect”) may be damaged as the brand is cast in a negative light owing to its perceived national association. This negative exposure may weaken the brand’s market presence, and in a competitive marketplace such weakening may empower rivals in their strategic responses. Here the analytical focus is placed on event-driven situations where a brand becomes a casualty between the encounters of various nations. A “focusing event” refers to a sudden, unpredictable event that garners public attention and mobilizes affected communities to action (Birkland 1997). An analytical framework has been proposed to illustrate how a focusing event facilitates the linkage between a consumer base with nationalistic beliefs and tendencies and an international corporate concern that is at risk of such a consumer backlash (Wang 2005). The vulnerability of a brand in this type of situation is driven by a number of factors, including the marketplace structure and the brand’s competitive position, the brand’s presence and valence in the consumer mind, and the strength of its national association. This framework highlights the media’s role in shaping a focusing event, thereby catapulting a brand into a crisis of consumer nationalism. Several case studies have illustrated how the emotional power of nationalism is a critical component in, for instance, Chinese consumers’ relationship with global brands and the role of the media in the formation and expression of Chinese consumer nationalism (e.g., Wang & Wang 2007). A case study of a 1999 incident involving Japan’s Toshiba Corporation in China demonstrates the complex role of the media in shaping Chinese consumers’ expressive practices of nationalism (Wang 2006). The international friction, as embodied in this instance by Chinese public’s collective memory of Japan’s past aggression and atrocities in China, was transferred into the consumer realm via sponsor activities of advocacy groups and the changing Chinese media practices. The third strand of research is represented in destination marketing. The rapid expansion of an increasingly mobile global middle class has been an important factor in the remarkable growth of the tourism sector in recent decades. As noted

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earlier, in the case of destination marketing, the country itself becomes the brand to be defined and promoted to a consumer public. Some nations have embraced and applied branding principles and techniques in managing country image, hence the rising popularity of such terms as “nation branding” and “place branding.” As Philip Kotler (2004) pointed out, there are two fundamental impulses driving the growing importance of place branding, including citizens of a place possessing an innate sense of pride of the place and the need for a place to remain competitive with other places given the increasing mobility of human and other resources. One key principle of destination marketing is that the most important criterion for choosing whether or not to visit a place is “destination image” (Buhalis 2000). A positive image of a destination (or a country in this case) is expected to attract in-bound tourism. The factors influencing the perceptions of destination image are wide-ranging. For instance, a review of the literature by Beerli and Martin (2004) suggests nine dimensions, including natural resources, general infrastructure, tourism infrastructure, tourism leisure and recreation activities, culture, history and art, political and economic factors, natural environment, social environment, and atmosphere. Others have looked into socio-psychological concepts, such as destination attachment and destination personality, to uncover symbolic meaning and emotional bonds one may develop with a place (d’Astous & Boujbel 2007; Yuksel, Yuksel & Bilim 2010). However, little published research exists that analyzes the role of national identity in individuals’ attitudes toward a country as a tourism destination. In a 2009 study of the impact of consumer ethnocentrism and animosity on trade and travel concerning emerging markets, the research team of Chan, Chan and Leung (2010) found that animosity can have a direct negative influence on visit intention, as well as attitudes toward imported products, whereas consumer ethnocentrism exercises an indirect influence through negative perception of country image. As Nicolas Papadopoulos and his colleagues have observed in their review of the research on the role of place in international marketing, the study of destination marketing is fragmented with various conceptualizations of place image (Papadopoulos, Banna, Murphy & Rojas-Méndez 2011).

5 Conclusion This review aims to provide a broader context and framework for understanding the role of national identity in consumption. It lays out a fuller picture of how such a phenomenon has been approached and analyzed, drawing on a multidisciplinary literature, including globalization and nationalism studies, international consumer marketing, and media studies. While national identity is not always the defining element in consumers’ relation with products and brands, it does from time to time serve as a sub-text of that relationship, and is often conflated with other concerns,

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such as product price and quality or larger social and political controversies. The phenomenon seems both significant and transient at the same time. This line of inquiry requires both further conceptual development and empirical evidence to achieve a contextualized and integrated understanding. The consumer nationalism research has focused on the process dynamics, but we need more case studies to illuminate the manifestations of the phenomenon. The marketing literature attempts to examine the potential consequences of nationalistic sentiments on consumption behavior. It is also in need of more studies to refine the analytical framework and operationalization (Carter & Maher 2014). Moreover, as consumer nationalism is often triggered by conflicts in international relations, it is important to gain a better understanding of how such consumer expressions and actions shape public opinion and impact policy pursuits. Finally, as the review shows, this area of research is fragmented, with various strands and conceptual departures. It therefore calls for conceptual coherence and analytical integration in future studies, which points to a large challenge in this inter-disciplinary inquiry and of which this essay has taken a first step.

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27 Intercultural communication in the world of business Abstract: Globalization and talent flow around the world have resulted in greater demands on managers and leaders to adapt to different cultures. This chapter explores the role of intercultural communication in the world of business. Intercultural competence refers to the interaction that occurs when two or more cultural groups come together and is part of a broader set of global management competencies, which includes culture and communication. We document how intercultural communication, as a part of intercultural competence, is crucial for facilitating international trade and business and managing a multicultural workforce in an era of globalization. Multinational firms benefit when leaders and managers demonstrate intercultural competence in international business activities such as expanding to foreign market expansion, negotiating with host country nationals, and in managing foreign subsidiaries. Intercultural competence is also essential for managing a multicultural workforce and realizing the benefits of diversity such as greater creativity and innovation. We conclude with emerging issues in intercultural communication and identify ways to develop intercultural competence for managers and leaders. Keywords: globalization, international business, intercultural communication competence, cross-cultural management, multiculturalism

1 Introduction Two important trends affecting the world of business in the 21st century are globalization and immigration of workers (Burke & Ng 2006). As firms expand their operations abroad, there is increasing need for company assigned expatriates to be interculturally competent. Greater labour market mobility among self-initiated expatriates (Al Ariss & Syed 2011) also requires managers to be competent in managing a multicultural domestic workforce (Tung 2008). For managers and expatriates, intercultural communication facilitates interactions across cultural and linguistic differences to enhance organizational success (cf. Groutsis, Ng & Ozturk 2014). Intercultural communication is also important when developing products and services for foreign markets, and in marketing and promotional efforts (e.g., advertising and messaging) across different cultures (De Mooij 2013; Demangeot et al. 2013). Often products and services are conceived and designed in one country, but are produced in multiple countries, and then further marketed to hundreds of nations DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-027

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worldwide (Triandis 2006). According to Caligiuri and Lundby (2015: 123), firms will need a cadre of managers who can navigate complex foreign environments, negotiate cultural challenges, and understand stakeholder demands in the foreign country. This chapter explores the role intercultural communication plays in facilitating international business and trade. We begin by first reviewing and delineating the difference between cross-cultural and intercultural communication, followed by a brief account in the evolution of cultural theories in international business communication. We then examine four distinct roles intercultural communication plays in the world of business. Our chapter will also include research on intercultural awareness, intercultural sensitivity, and related attitudes as they are part of a broader conceptualization of intercultural competence (Bücker & Poutsma 2010). Finally, we conclude with some current issues related to intercultural communication and identify ways to develop intercultural competence.

1.1 Definition of cross-cultural and intercultural communication Although popular press and scholars have often used the terms “cross-cultural” and “intercultural” communication interchangeably in the literature (e.g., Aneas & Sandin 2009; Gudykunst 2003), they are separate forms of interaction. Cross-cultural communication refers to the comparison of (face-to-face) communication between two or more cultures, whereas intercultural communication refers to the interaction that occurs when people from two or more cultural groups come together (cf. González 2011; also see Gudykunst 2003). Although intercultural communication may also refer to communication between different social groups, such as intergenerational communication (see Chapter 17 on intergroup communication and Chapter 13 about aging across cultures), we will restrict our discussion to communication between different ethnocultural groups arising from racial and ethnic differences (Cox 1991). Intercultural communication includes all aspects of culture and communication, thus an understanding of intercultural communication also requires an understanding of culture and its related dimensions (Gudykunst 2003). Intercultural communication is also part of a broader set of global management competencies which includes intercultural sensitivity, cross-cultural skills, and cultural intelligence (Bücker & Poutsma 2010). For the purpose of this chapter, we will use intercultural communication and intercultural competence interchangeably depending on the context (see also Chapter 13 that discusses intercultural communication competence). Intercultural competence is composed of cognitive, affective, and behavioural components (Lloyd & Härtel 2010). Cognitive competence includes an ability to sense and interpret a different culture; affective competence includes empathy for others who are culturally different; and behavioural competence includes an ability to engage with someone who is culturally different. Thus, individuals who have the ability to successfully communicate and interact with people from other cul-

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tures are said to be interculturally competent (Demangeot et al. 2013). Interculturally competent individuals demonstrate cultural sensitivity and adaptability (Williams 2005), which in turn enable them to interact and communicate with relative ease in cross-cultural diverse settings (Caligiuri & Lundby 2015).

1.2 The evolution of cultural theory in intercultural business communication Culture and communication have a symbiotic relationship, which and its outcomes can be amplified in the world of business. Attempts to define culture, as well as research examining cultural differences have been conducted for over a century (Berry et al. 1992; Matsumoto & Yoo 2006). Attempts to systematize cultural comparisons can be found as early as 1949 (Cattell 1949; Minkov & Hofstede 2011). However it is often said that Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s (1961) taxonomy has substantially influenced the current developments surrounding cultural variation within the organizational literature (Adler 2002; Bertsch 2012; Miroshnik 2001; Thomas & Peterson 2015). Seminal writing on culture and values based on the anthropological work of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) examined value orientations (Singh 2004). This study of culture orientations paved the way for future taxonomies to be developed. It has been approximately thirty-five years since the management literature has seen an etic, foundational framework that provided a fairly comprehensive and variable method of comparing cultures. Hofstede’s initial comprehensive study, produced in his work Culture’s Consequences (Hofstede 1980, 2001) has been influential by shaping the field of cross-cultural management by redefining the view of culture in a meaningful, comparative manner, as well as igniting debate and controversy in the field (Peterson 2003). Such research has grown along with the emergence and domination of global migration and workforce integration. Other frameworks have arisen, that have revealed dimensions validating elements of Hofstede’s framework and Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s taxonomy of value orientations, but also revealed additional dimensions. Hall’s high and low context determination of culture is centered around how much emphasis (or lack thereof) societies place on verbal aspects of communication rather than on the contextual environment around them (Hall 1976; Samovar et al. 2013). Additional cultural communication frameworks that have been more expansively developed in the organizational literature include the Schwartz Value Survey (Schwartz 1992, 1994; Thomas & Peterson 2015), Trompenaars’ study of value orientations (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner 1993), and the most recent and most comprehensive global study, relating the observation of culture in relation to organizational behavior and leadership, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project (House 1998; House et al. 2004; House, Javidan & Dorfman 2001).

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2 The role of intercultural communication in the world of business In the following section, we review existing studies and document how intercultural communication and competence is important for expatriate assignments, fostering a global mindset, managing a multicultural workforce, and a component of leadership competence.

2.1 Intercultural communication and expatriate assignments As firms continue to expand their international operations, the use of expatriate managers will continue to rise (Sweeney and McFarlin 2014). Despite a long history of sending expatriate managers abroad, multinational firms continue to experience high rates of expatriate failures (i.e., when expatriates return home prematurely or when they fail to accomplish their goals overseas) (Okpara & Kabongo 2011). In the past, spouses/family and a lack of organizational support were the major reasons behind expatriate failures (Shay & Tracey 1997; Tung 1987). As the selection of employees for expatriate assignments improves (Peltokorpi & Froese 2012), the lack of intercultural competence – i.e., an inability to relate and work with those who are culturally different – is a more prevalent cause for failed expatriate assignments (Lenartowicz, Johnson & Konopaske 2014; Okpara & Kabongo 2011; Zhu & Gao 2013). Several reasons contribute to expatriates’ inability to work and interact with those who are culturally different. First, a lack of understanding of the differences in cultural orientations (see Hofstede 1980, 2001) between the expatriate (parent country nationals) and host country nationals contributes to poor intercultural communication. A study examining why Nordic (Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) expatriates perform poorly in Japan concluded that poor appreciation of cultural barriers such as collectivism, status, and power distance hindered cooperation between the Nordics and Japanese (Peltokorpi & Clausen 2011). As a result of communication challenges arising out of cultural differences, there was information filtering, in-group/out-group categorizations (“us vs. them” mentality), and incongruent expectations between the Nordics and the Japanese. The communication challenge was also compounded by the fact that there was no common working language, as the Nordic expatriates lacked motivation to learn Japanese, while operating in Japan. In some instances, expatriate managers are aware of the need for intercultural communication, but are unwilling to engage with the locals when communication barriers are high. In another a study involving Danish expatriates in China (Jonasson & Lauring 2012), the Danish and Chinese managers were reportedly not listening to each other because of differences in communication styles. Although the

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Danish expatriates knew their business well, the Chinese managers were needed to adapt their ideas to fit the local culture. However, instead of conferring with their Chinese counterparts, the Danish managers were contacting former expatriates to acquire knowledge about the local Chinese market. As a consequence, the Chinese managers complained that communication was frequently “one-way” and the Danish expatriates did not listen if the Chinese responses were different from their own views. The Danish expatriates, in turn, complained that the Chinese communicated in a high-context fashion, i.e. non-verbal communication to infer important cues (see Hall 1976), and protested that such communication style was not conducive for conducting business. Although the Danish expatriates were culturally aware (of the difference in communication styles), they demonstrate an unwillingness to decipher intercultural communication patterns, which hindered information exchange. This unwillingness to listen, in turn, contributed to a lack of trust and poor working relationships with the Chinese locals (Jonasson & Lauring 2012). Additionally, social and relational power also contributes to the “one way” intercultural communication as characterized by the Danish expatriates (Jonasson & Lauring 2012). Lauring (2011), using another sample of Danish expatriates working in Saudi Arabia, noted that ethnocentrism (a belief that one’s group is more superior than others) can lead to false assumptions about cultural differences, misjudging other people, and distorting intercultural communication in the process (Lauring 2011: 248). The ethnocentric attitude exhibited by the Danish expatriates described above may reflect a need by expatriates, in general, to dominate and demonstrate their expertise to the locals over a relatively short period of time and in a foreign environment (Lauring 2011). In this sense, the social and relational power between the expatriates and local staff also affects intercultural communication beyond cultural and linguistic differences. As demonstrated above, a lack of intercultural competence appears to be a major stumbling block behind ineffective or failed international assignments. Specifically, a lack of motivation to learn the local language, a lack of understanding of cultural differences, negative attitudes and ethnocentrism (i.e., arising out of the need to establish social power), and an unwillingness to work across linguistic differences hinder intercultural understanding and communication. In order to enhance the success of international assignments, it is important for multinationals to carefully select expatriates who have the personal disposition to work in a crosscultural environment. In this regard, both intercultural communication and intercultural sensitivity are essential for working in cross-cultural settings.

2.2 Intercultural communication and global mindsets In a survey conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (2007), overcoming cultural obstacles is the number one concern for global CEOs. Although firms are geographi-

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cally global, the mindsets of their managers and business leaders remain largely territorial (“headquarters mentality”) which limits their capacity to perform in the global marketplace. Expansion into foreign markets requires managers to have a global mindset to foster a polycentric (vis-à-vis ethnocentric) view and seize on opportunities as the global market place opens up (Bücker & Poutsma 2010; Levy et al. 2007). In this regard, managers who acquire intercultural competence are better able to contribute to a firm’s economic success through international orientation, marketing, and innovative mindsets (Knight & Kim 2009). For example, Indra Nooyi – PepsiCo’s CEO who was born in India and educated in the U.S. – has frequently been credited with turning the beverage company around through diversifying and expanding into international markets because of her intercultural competence and global mindset (Fitzsimmons, Miska & Stahl 2011; Ventakaraman 2002). Managers and employees who are interculturally competent bring cultural insights and linguistic skills and significantly enhance a firm’s marketing efforts in foreign environments (Brannen, Piekkari & Tietze 2014; Cox & Blake 1991). For example, research has shown that individuals who possess an intercultural disposition are more likely to engage in adaptive selling and alter their communication styles to suit the needs of culturally diverse consumers (Bush et al. 2001). Indeed, in a study involving “four and five diamond” hotels staff and guests, staff displaying intercultural competence were perceived to be more attentive and generated more revenues than those who had low intercultural competence (Sizoo et al. 2005). The hotel staff who were interculturally competent were able to communicate better, adapt their behaviours and upsell to foreign guests. Conversely, in an Australian study, staff lacking in cultural sensitivity and intercultural communication skills has led to customer complaints about disparate treatment and low service satisfactions (Barker & Härtel 2004). Research has also shown that individuals who are “bicultural” or multicultural – those who are immersed in two or more cultures and speak two or more languages as a result of having moved or lived in foreign countries (see Hanek, Lee & Brannen 2014 for description) – have stronger intercultural competence which presents a valuable resource for firms doing business internationally (Ng 2001; Thomas, Brannen & Garcia 2010). In addition to enhanced intercultural marketing capabilities described above, firms benefit from increased creativity and innovation when employees are bicultural or multicultural due to their cognitive flexibilities (Leung & Chiu 2008; Leung et al. 2008). Growing up and/or having experienced biculturalism and multiculturalism can promote creativity and innovation as individuals more readily embrace ideas from unfamiliar sources, subvert routinized decision-making processes, see remote associations, and actively draw from novel ideas from other cultures (Leung, Chen & Chiu 2010). Lücke, Kostova, and Roth (2013) identified a number of ways in which patterns of multiculturalism – compartmentalization, integration, inclusion, convergence, and generalization – that

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are developed through sociocultural experiences are particularly suited for accomplishing important functions in multinational firms. Furthermore, in an era of corporate social responsibility, intercultural competence is essential for understanding the sensitive nature of multicultural markets around the world (Talbert-Johnson 2009). For example, multinational firms are increasingly under the spotlight to operate in a socially responsible manner for implementing fair labour practices, respecting human rights, and the preservation of indigenous cultures and population (Levis 2006). In this regard, firms will need to consider the local needs of foreign markets, in addition to entering new markets and building market share (Demangeot et al. 2013). Intercultural competence is essential for facilitating a multinational’s embeddedness in the local culture and enhancing its legitimacy with local stakeholders (e.g., government, labour unions, and customers). When firms deploy managers who are interculturally sensitive, they are also better equipped to interact and engage with local citizens, community groups, and other stakeholders, which in turn promotes trust and goodwill with the host country (Demangeot et al. 2013; Porter & Kramer 2006). Managers who are interculturally competent are also able to interpret local customs and practices and understand that what is acceptable in the home country may not be acceptable in the host country. Research conducted across fifteen countries has demonstrated that social responsibility expectations and values vary across different cultures (Waldman et al. 2006). For example, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo was able to resolve a conflict resulting from Pepsi’s use of scarce water for unnecessary products (i.e., soft drinks) and convincing Indians the Pepsi products were safe (pesticides had seeped into groundwater used to bottle Pepsi products) (cf. Fitzsimmons, Miska & Stahl 2011). Based on the foregoing, we see that intercultural competence can foster a global mindset among managers and better position them to take advantage of opportunities in the global marketplace. For example, intercultural sensitivity and communication skills enable employees to better respond to an increasingly multicultural customer base and improve firm marketing efforts. Additionally, bicultural and multicultural employees also exhibit stronger intercultural competence and more flexible cognitive processes, which enable them to draw from unfamiliar cultures, see remote connections, and enhance their creativity and innovation. Managers who are interculturally competent can also help firms navigate and negotiate delicate stakeholder concerns, and promote goodwill with host country nationals. A global mindset, along with strong intercultural skills, can confer upon multinational firms a valuable resource that is difficult to replicate in a highly competitive global environment.

2.3 Intercultural competence and a multicultural workforce With greater talent mobility around the world, particularly among skilled workers (Al Ariss & Syed 2011), firms are also faced with managing an increasingly multicul-

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tural workforce in the domestic labour market. A culturally diverse workforce will necessarily entail communication challenges and conflicts among members in culturally diverse workgroups (Tsui, Egan & O’Reilly 1992; Williams & O’Reilly 1998). In this regard, cultural empathy and intercultural communication skills are essential managerial competencies for managing multicultural workgroups in contemporary workplaces (Caligiuri & Lundby 2015; Lloyd & Härtel 2010; Matveev & Nelson 2004). Chang and Tharenou (2004) conducted a dyadic study involving managers and subordinates in Australia, and identified six competencies – cultural awareness, cultural understanding, respecting other values, treating people as individuals, using different perspectives, and having experience in other cultures – for managing a multicultural workforce. According to Chang and Tharenou (2004), managers constantly encounter different values and ideas in multicultural environments, and it is essential for them to accommodate different behaviours and communication patterns in order to manage across cultures. Indeed, there is a growing body of literature that suggests that multicultural groups must be properly managed, in order to reap the benefits such as creativity and innovation, greater marketing success, and improved firm performance arising from a multicultural workforce (Cox & Blake 1991; Ng & Tung 1998; Richard 2000). Ng and Barker (2014) further suggested that firms and managers must be interculturally competent in both internal and external communications, as they impact recruitment efforts and retention of talents across different cultures. As the population becomes increasingly diverse, there is a greater need for interculturally competent (bilingual and multilingual) workers to better serve the needs of culturally diverse consumers and the public (Kalist 2005). Therefore, it is not surprising that the demand for bilingual and interculturally competent workers rises in response to an increasingly diverse population (Bowker 2004). In this regard, firms must step up their recruitment efforts to attract workers who reflect the cultural diversity of their customer base, especially as consumer markets become more culturally diverse as well. Marketing research suggests that bilingual advertisements can convey a more “cosmopolitan” feel, and is thus more appealing to the target group (Kojima 1992). Firm communication (e.g., job and recruitment advertisements) can signal to prospective job seekers the diversity and climate within the organization. Research has shown that job applicants are more likely to be attracted to join organizations that signal a climate of inclusion such as a commitment to diversity practices (Avery 2003; Highhouse et al. 1999; Williams & Bauer 1994). As an example, Ng and Burke (2005) manipulated job offers (i.e., those with and without messages of diversity) in a study involving job seekers, and reported that organizations with messages of diversity attracted higher quality job applicants, in addition to job seekers who are also more culturally diverse. Thus, having the right (i.e., inclusive) recruiting message can enhance not only the diversity of a firm’s workforce, but also the quality of its employees.

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Additionally, intercultural communication among managers can also signal the climate of inclusion within organizations. For example, ethnocentric references such as “your group” or “my group” can create in-group/out-group distinctions among multicultural group members, and also imply that one (cultural) group may be more superior to others (Grimes & Richard 2003). For example, in the U.S., when managers use the term “minorities” to refer to non-whites in corporate communications (e.g., “minority employees”), it may be deemed as offensive since the term “minority” denotes that they have less power than whites (Edmondson et al. 2009). The term may also be outmoded as non-whites are projected to be the majority group in many places in the U.S. (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). A climate of exclusion can also result in lower job satisfaction among minority employees, which in turn, leads to higher incidents of withdrawal behaviours such as greater absenteeism rates and turnover intentions (Avery et al. 2007; McKay et al. 2007; Triana, Garcia & Colella 2010). From the above discussion, it is clear that increasing worker mobility around the world has led to a much more multicultural workforce requiring firm and managers to be interculturally competent in their communication. First, firms must respond to increasingly diversity among the population and consumers by hiring more culturally diverse workers. When firms and employers demonstrate intercultural competence in their recruitment communication, they are better able to attract higher quality employees from across different cultures. Second, firms that successfully recruit and manage a culturally diverse workforce also stand to benefit from greater creativity and innovation (as previously discussed). A climate of inclusion (i.e., when managers and workers avoid ethnocentric languages) can promote greater satisfaction among culturally diverse workers, which in turn lower organizational withdrawal behaviours such as absenteeism and turnover. Thus, managers and employers must demonstrate intercultural competence in order to attract, retain, and effectively manage a multicultural workforce.

2.4 Intercultural competence and leadership Intercultural competence and communication are also seen as increasingly important attributes for building leadership capacity in multinational firms (Blaess, Hollywood & Grant 2012). As previously suggested, intercultural leaders are much more likely to have a global mindset, which is important for a firm’s strategic global orientation (Johnson, Lenartowicz & Apud 2006). Leaders who are interculturally sensitive can bridge across cultures, tap into multicultural perspectives more quickly (i.e., reducing decision-making time), and prevent groupthink (Fitzsimmons, Miska & Sathl 2011). Leadership effectiveness is often perceived, and is also highly dependent on the expectations of the followers, such that an effective leader in one country, can be perceived as weak in another culture (Bildstein, Gueldenberg & Tjitra 2012). For example, a highly participatory and consensus seeking

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leader may be perceived as indecisive and lacking in vision as a result of cultural expectations arising out of differences in power distance. Likewise, a leader from a low-context culture speaking to a high-context culture group must be careful to avoid being interpreted as arrogant or rude (see Tung 1993). Indeed, research suggests that followers perceive leader effectiveness based on their communication competence because highly effective leaders exhibit their charisma and individual consideration (e.g., cultural sensitivity) through their personal communication to their followers (Flauto 1999). Like managers, leaders are required to be interculturally sensitive because they serve as role models and have the capacity to influence followers. When leaders use a certain language in their communication, they reinforce related stereotypes that are potentially divisive and offensive to many. As an example, U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot used the term “your people” when addressing AfricanAmericans at a NAACP gathering in 1992 and offended many prospective supporters (cf. Tung 1993). Such language also has the unintended consequence of privileging the dominant group in culturally sensitive situations (Roy 2012). This has led Tung (1993) to call for individuals to develop communication competency from an “unconscious incompetent” stage (i.e., unknowingly insult someone from a different culture) to “unconscious competence” or “unconscious super competence.” Unconscious (super) competence occurs when intercultural sensitivity becomes second nature, and leaders do not have to constantly pause and think about what they say or how they respond (Tung 1993). Additionally, leaders are frequently called upon to negotiate with other foreign leaders in the course of doing business internationally. According to Fitzsimmons, Miska, and Stahl (2011), when both parties at a negotiation have positive experiences (i.e., feel comfortable with each other and make efforts to reciprocate) the negotiation is more likely to be conducted in an atmosphere of trust. Thus, leaders must be able to take the perspective of the foreign partner in order to produce winwin outcomes for both parties. Negotiation strategies and styles differ, particularly between the West (more individualistic) and the East (more collectivist) (Ma 2007; Ma & Jaeger 2010). Research has shown that individualistic cultures (e.g., Anglos) tend to be more competitive, while collectivist cultures (e.g., Asians, Latinos) tend to be more cooperative (Cox, Lobel & McLeod 1991). However, researchers also indicated that competitive behaviours increase with cultural difference between the two negotiation parties. In a “prisoner’s dilemma” negotiation exercise, negotiators from different cultural backgrounds became more competitive and less cooperative with each other, as the power distance with the host country nationals increases (Matsumoto & Hwang 2011). According to Ma (2007), who studies East-West negotiations, although the Chinese (who are collectivist in nature) prefer conflict avoidance and compromise, they also revel in competition during international business negotiations. One way in which leaders can strengthen their intercultural relationships, particularly when doing business with the East, is in cultivating “guanxi” relationships

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(Gao, Ballantyne & Knight 2010). Guanxi are interpersonal relationships that can be fostered between two individuals from different cultural backgrounds (cultural “outsiders” and “insiders”) and functions as a “middle-culture” to facilitate negotiations and business transactions (Gao, Knight & Ballantyne 2012). As a result, it has the ability to transcend cultural differences between two parties from different cultural backgrounds once guanxi has been established. As such, guanxi is an important intercultural competence in a leader’s toolkit especially for doing business with China. It should be noted that guanxi favours social exchange and relational contracts (relationship-based exchanges), over formal, legal contacts and agreements which are typically practiced in the West. Guanxi is also frequently applicable in other parts of the world and comparable to notions such as wasta in the Middle East, kankei in Japan and kwankye in South Korea (Hutchings & Weir 2006; Karam et al. 2013). To summarize, effective intercultural communication helps to develop important competence for leaders who are operating in an increasingly multicultural environment both at home and abroad. Leadership effectiveness is frequently assessed on the basis of their personal communication and as such, leaders must demonstrate intercultural sensitivity in their wide ranging roles from public speeches to negotiation exercises. For example, a leader must be able to recognize that although collectivist cultures avoid conflict and prefer compromise, they could also engage in competitive behaviours when the cultural difference in power distance between the two parties are large. Furthermore, when dealing with cultures that emphasize social exchanges, leaders are encouraged to develop intercultural relationships or guanxi, as it bridges cultural differences by emphasizing the interpersonal ties between two parties. Such relationships are useful for facilitating negotiations and business transactions. Taken together, intercultural communication and competence are important attributes for managing and leading in a globalized marketplace and economy.

3 Emerging issues in intercultural communication In this final section, we present three emerging issues which represent challenges and opportunities related to collaborating and expanding globally.

3.1 Intercultural communication and distributed work Rapid advancement in digital and communication technology and declining computing costs have drastically changed the way we work (Ng & Burke 2006). Advances such as mobile and smart devices (e.g., iPhones), cloud computing, and virtual collaboration applications (e.g., “Skype,” “GoToMeeting”) have opened up infinite possibilities for distributed work and global virtual collaborations (Klitmøller &

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Lauring 2013; Zakaria & Al Safi 2013). Despite the benefits of communication technology in facilitating global collaboration, these applications also bring several communication challenges, particularly in diverse, multicultural environments. They include miscommunication arising out of physical and cross-cultural distance (Aragon & Poon 2011), difficulties in establishing trust (Li et al. 2012; Pinjani & Palvia 2013), and longer time needed to establish group norms (Daim et al. 2012; Krumm, Terwiel & Hertel 2013). While it is difficult to overcome some of these challenges, improving software applications (Aragon & Poon 2011) and longer periods of time working together in multicultural teams can lessen some of the barriers in collaborating globally. Caligiuri and Lundby (2015) also proposed ways to improve global teams more effectively, which includes identifying individual characteristics (e.g., personality) that are conducive for global collaboration, providing opportunities for cross-cultural experiences, providing a climate of support and assisting individuals with the development of intercultural competence skills.

3.2 Developing intercultural competence Although intercultural competence has been identified as a critical KSA (knowledge, skill, ability) for the 21st century (Bird et al. 2010), managers and leaders continue to lack these competencies necessary for conducting business in a foreign environment and for managing a multicultural workforce. A long history of colonization by Europeans and Americans and anti-immigrant sentiments may cause managers and leaders to develop ethnocentric attitudes (including racist views) (Joppke 1996; Tung 1987; Webber 1991). Although education and organizational efforts (e.g., intercultural communication training) are intended to assist individuals in developing intercultural competence, they often receive lukewarm responses and may even be met with resistance by the participants (Hoskins & Sallah 2011). Managers also lack motivation (and open mindedness) to acquire intercultural skills, and often cite the lack of opportunities to utilize these skills (cf. Black & Mendenhall 1990; Fischer 2011; Peltokorpi & Clausen 2011). Moreover, multinational firms frequently do not plan in advance or actively prepare expatriates for international assignments. As a result, attempts at assisting expatriates develop intercultural competence tend to be knee-jerk reactions, superficial, and are often too late (cf. Collings 2014). Therefore, multinational firms have not been able to fully expand internationally due to a lack of intercultural competence among business leaders and managers (Story et al. 2014).

3.3 Cultural intelligence as an emerging aspect of cultural communication Intelligence cannot be adequately understood without considering its cultural context (Sternberg & Grigorenko 2006; Triandis 2006). For individuals to succeed in

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interacting across cultures, cultural intelligence (CQ) is a recent concept in the organizational literature based on cross-cultural communication (Triandis 2006). CQ is considered to be a vital intercultural competency, as it represents an individual’s ability to successfully adapt to unfamiliar cultural settings (Earley & Ang 2003; Ang et al. 2007). CQ is a developing concept that assists in helping workers communicate more effectively in intercultural interactions (Earley & Ang 2003), and is a related concept to other forms of intelligence such as cognitive intelligence, social intelligence and emotional intelligence (Gardner 1993). However, it is somewhat distinct from the rest, as CQ necessitates an individual’s ability to switch among cultural environment with relative ease (Brislin, Worthley & MacNab 2006; Earley & Ang 2003; Thomas 2006). CQ incorporates four different intelligences: metacognitive intelligence, cognitive intelligence, motivational intelligence, and behavioural intelligence (Early & Ang 2003). CQ requires individuals to display and synthesize a number of elements, such as suspending judgment (until more information is obtained about the cultural context) and understanding the context of the intercultural communication event before proceeding (Triandis 2006). It also requires cognitive, affective, and behavioral training (Earley & Ang 2003), which can be done through behavior modification and experiential training (Paige & Martin 1996). Organizations can also cultivate an environment that promotes increased CQamong its members (Triandis 2006).

4 Conclusion and final thoughts This chapter explores the role of intercultural communication in the world of business. Based on a review of the literature, we documented how intercultural communication as a part of intercultural competence is crucial for facilitating international trade and business in an era of globalization. Multinational firms benefit when leaders and managers demonstrate intercultural competence in international business activities such as expanding to foreign market expansion, negotiating with host country nationals, and in managing foreign subsidiaries. Intercultural competence is also essential for managing a multicultural workforce and realizing the benefits of diversity such as greater creativity and innovation. However, current research suggests that leaders and managers are still lacking in intercultural management skills (and having a global mindset) to achieve global competitiveness and fully tapping into the potential of a multicultural workforce. Although intercultural training has been prescribed for enhancing the intercultural competence of managers, the results have been mixed (e.g., Fischer 2011; Rehg, Gundlach & Grigorian 2012). A lack of motivation, self-efficacy, and ethnocentric attitudes are also contributing to poor training results (Harvey et al. 2012; Hoskins & Sallah 2011; Rehg, Gundlach & Grigorian 2012). One way to overcome these challenges is to select the right individuals who are predisposed to embrace

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cross-cultural experiences (and training) to develop intercultural competence. In this regard, personality-based selection may be helpful to identify individuals who are likely to benefit from intercultural training, and subsequently undertake international business activities. For example, individuals who are extraverted, openminded and emotionally stable are more comfortable working in multicultural environments (cf. Caligiuri & Lundby 2015). Indeed, research has shown that personality traits are predictive of expatriation success (i.e., low desire in returning home early) and in performing global leadership tasks (Caligiuri 2000, 2006; Caligiuri & Tarique 2009). Moreover, there has been little research on linking personality with CQ. This line of research is promising as it can potentially offer a solution to identifying and investing in the right individuals who would bear the most fruit for multinational firms. Alternatively, there have been suggestions that early and repeated exposures to foreign culture at an early age facilitate the development of intercultural competence (Hanek, Lee & Brannen 2014). Biculturals or multiculturals are individuals who moved to a foreign country either as international students or immigrants (self-initiated expatriates) at a relatively early age. In this regard, bicultural and multicultural individuals may be more adept and comfortable at interacting interculturally as a result of early and constant exposure to demographically dissimilar others, consistent with the social contact hypothesis. Immigration and increasing worker mobility are providing a pool of bicultural and multiculturals who are uniquely suitable to undertake international assignments (see Ng 2001). While research on biculturals and multiculturals is limited, this proposition is well worth exploring given their contribution in an increasingly multicultural world.

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Robert Shuter

28 Intercultural new media studies: Still the next frontier in intercultural communication Abstract: The publication in 2012 of Intercultural new media studies: The next frontier in intercultural communication ushered in a new 21st century disciplinary focus for intercultural communication (Shuter 2012a). This landmark article – the most read in the history of the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research – established the parameters of a new sub-field of ICC, Intercultural New Media Studies (INMS), which explores the intersection of new media and intercultural communication. This essay is adapted from Shuter’s groundbreaking article and continues examining and expanding dimensions of INMS and exploring its implications for intercultural communication theory and praxis. Keywords: intercultural communication, new media, intercultural new media

1 Introduction The publication in 2012 of Intercultural New Media Studies: The Next Frontier in Intercultural Communication ushered in a new 21st century disciplinary focus for intercultural communication (ICC) (Shuter 2012a)1. This landmark article – the most read in the history of the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research – established the parameters of a new sub-field of ICC, Intercultural New Media Studies (INMS), which explores the intersection of new media and intercultural communication. Specifically, this field is composed of two research areas: 1. new media and intercultural communication theory and 2. culture and new media. In exploring new media and intercultural communication theory, five major theories of intercultural communication are closely scrutinized in light of salient new media research to determine their efficacy and relevance in a new media age. This detailed analysis concludes with an annotated summary of theoretical new media implications and research directions for each of the five major intercultural communication theories. Culture and new media, the second area of INMS, is next explored and includes close analysis of international/intercultural new media research trends in leading communication journals and concludes with suggested future research directions in this area. 1 This article is adapted from Robert Shuter (2012a), Intercultural new media studies: The next frontier in intercultural communication, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research. DOI 10.1515/9781501500060-028

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1.1 INMS: Parameters of a field New media and intercultural communication theory is the primary focus of intercultural new media studies (INMS). This area focuses on how ICT’s impact theories of communication between people who do not share the same cultural backgrounds, often defined as national culture (nation state) and co-culture (i.e. ethnicity and race) in early intercultural communication research, but expanded contemporarily to include myriad cultures, both within and across geo-political boundaries, as well as hybridized cultures that have developed transnationally due to migration, diaspora, and time and space reconfigurations in a digital age (Bazarova & Yuan 2013; Clothier 2005; Dooly 2011; McEwan & Sobre-Denton 2011; Steinkuehler & Williams 2006). The secondary area of INMS, but still considerably important, is the relationship between culture and new media; namely, how does culture impact the social uses of new media within and across societies, and in what ways do new media affect culture? There is limited research on the primary area, and significantly more data on the secondary area. New media and intercultural communication theory, the primary area of INMS, may alter our understanding of the process of intercultural communication by identifying new digital theories of intercultural contact as well as refining and expanding extant ICC theories pertaining to such areas as acculturation/adaptation, third culture development, intercultural competence, high context/low context communication, co-cultural communication, cultural identity, intercultural dialogue, culture shock/stress, stereotyping, ethnocentrism, racism, intercultural awareness, intercultural conflict, speech codes, and intercultural relationship development. Although there are limited data on the impact of new media on many of these intercultural areas, the available research suggests that new media play a major role in the ebb and flow of intercultural encounters, conceivably augmenting twentieth-century theories on communication across cultures. After an exhaustive review of international/intercultural new media research, five seminal areas of intercultural communication and their attendant theories were selected for close analysis to determine their salience and efficacy in a new media age: cultural identity, intercultural dialogue, third culture, acculturation, and intercultural competence.

2 New media and intercultural communication theory This section examines the primary area of INMS – new media and intercultural communication theory. It explores the possible effects of new media, and raises important twenty-first-century questions, about five major areas and related theo-

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ries of intercultural communication and concludes with a summary of new media implications for intercultural communication theory and research.

2.1 Cultural identity 2.1.1 Application to cultural identity Cultural identity, according to social identity theory, is derived from membership in social groups, a legacy of in-group identification that also influences communication in social groups (Tajfel & Turner 1986). It is co-created and negotiated, according to Collier (2002), impacted by internal and external factors that she calls avowal and ascription, and also affected by communication. This view of cultural identity is rooted in twentieth-century assumptions about the origins of the self in relationship to others; that is, social identity is based on group contact(s) that is fixed in space and time, producing discernable social identity(ies) that varies in salience depending on the social context(s). However, in a new media era of perpetual contact (Katz & Aakhus 2002), where individuals live in virtual spaces with myriad others, is this perspective relevant and sufficient for explaining the development and maintenance of cultural identity in the twenty-first century? Singh (2010) argues that with the advent of the internet individuals are inducted into “virtual cultures” – technological, homogenized entities not grounded in time or space. Beniger (1987) refers to these virtual cultures as pseudo-communities as opposed to traditional organic communities, which are bound by physical space and rely on face-to-face communication. These virtual cultures can alter pre-existing cultural identities, according to Singh, threatening traditional indigenous identifications that are co-created, negotiated, and developed in concert with social identity theory. Chen and Dai (2012) maintain that virtual communities challenge pre-existing cultural identities because of asymmetrical power relationships that are inherent in these communities. They argue that since Western culture has an implicit power advantage even in cyberspace, virtual communities are not culture neutral and, hence, may shape the development of new cultural identities, which may not turn out to be hybrid constructs. A hybridized cultural identity, according to Clothier (2005), can emerge from being inducted into a virtual community composed of diverse people and cultural influences that border and overlap each other, which Clothier calls a hybrid virtual culture. Theoretically, hybrid virtual cultures and their attendant hybrid identities are antagonistic to authority and cultural hegemony, according to Clothier. However, because the West dominates cyberspace in so many significant ways (Chen & Dai 2012) – linguistically through the English language, symbolically via the West’s pervasive icons, and materially in Western created hardware and software – it is unclear whether hybrid cultural identities are, indeed, possible and whether identi-

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ty co-creation and negotiation can truly occur in virtual communities consisting of disparate, unrelated individuals. It does appear, however, that when virtual communities are composed of culturally homogenous members – in-group members that may or may not know one another – these communities can support and reinforce pre-existing cultural identities (Bouvier 2012). Hopkins (2008) found that young Australian Muslim Turks, who felt marginalized by Australian anti-Islamic feeling, successfully utilized new media to connect with Muslims worldwide, reinforcing their identities and faith. Croucher and Cronn-Mills (2011) discovered that French-Muslims used social networking sites to maintain their Muslim identities, sometimes at the expense of their French identities. Oh (2012) reports that second-generation Korean American adolescents use transnational Korean media to enhance intra-ethnic bonds and support their Korean identities. In fact, organic communities in diaspora appear to successfully utilize social media and other new media to retain and reinforce their cultural identities (Croucher 2011; Johnson & Callahan 2013). There is also evidence that ethnic and racial groups in the United States utilize social media to present their cultural identities in highly elaborate ways. Grasmuck, Martin, and Shanyang (2009) found that African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Vietnamese construct Facebook profiles and narratives that proudly and explicitly proclaim their cultural roots. Their self presentations not only reinforce cultural identities but appear to be tacit opposition, according to the authors, to social dynamics in the larger society that promote a color blind ideology. Hence, unlike early internet research suggesting that cyberspace is culturally and racially neutral (Turkle 1995) – a virtual utopia where cultural identity and status differences are minimized – this study and others suggest that ethno-racial identity presentations in anonymous SNSs empower minority and marginalized users (Hu & Leung 2003; Mehra, Merkel & Bishop 2004; Brock 2012).

2.1.2 Theoretical implications of INMS Based on this review of available literature on new media and cultural identity, three theoretical new media implications are offered regarding twenty-first century salience of past cultural identity theory and research conducted in organic, faceto-face communities. 1. It is not clear how cultural identities are constructed in virtual communities. Cultural identities may not necessarily be co-created or negotiated in virtual communities according to the literature reviewed here. Negotiation and cocreation require some degree of parity between parties, which may not be possible in virtual communities since information technology – hardware, software, web design, and new/social media – appear to privilege the West. Moreover, since virtual communities are often pseudo-communities – sometimes

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anonymous and generally disconnected from physical space and time – intimacy and engagement can be quite limited, which are requisites for co-creation and negotiation. How hybrid cultural identities are created in virtual and organic communities are uncertain. While the literature suggests that hybrid cultural identities can emerge in either organic or virtual communities, it is unclear how this process unfolds. If co-created and negotiated, how is hybridity created in virtual and organic communities when traditions, symbols, and icons are co-opted by dominant and powerful cultural forces? Similarly, how is hybridity realized in cyberspace when race, ethnicity and culture are so pervasive? The dynamics of maintaining cultural identity may be different in virtual communities than organic ones. The literature suggests that co-cultures and marginalized individuals may find more and different opportunities for presenting and reinforcing their cultural identities in virtual communities than organic ones. Cyberspace can empower disenfranchised groups in unique and powerful ways that are differentiated from the dynamics of face-to-face interaction. What are the dynamics of identity preservation in virtual communities and how do they differ from organic communities?

These three theoretical implications suggest that considerable more research needs to be conducted on construction and maintenance of cultural identity in a new media era. Refinement and expansion of current cultural identity theories coupled with development of new identity theories are strongly suggested by available intercultural new media research.

2.2 Intercultural dialogue and third culture 2.2.1 Application to intercultural dialogue Intercultural dialogue is an important goal of intercultural contact and, as such, has been widely examined. It is generally considered an ideal type of contact, requiring openness and empathy, and resulting in a deep understanding of other (Ganesh & Holmes 2011). Unlike casual contact, intercultural dialogue, according to the literature, requires communicators to be aware of, even challenge, their personal values and predispositions – albeit, any aspect of their background – that may prevent a deep understanding of others. Similarly, to achieve intercultural dialogue, communicators must be open to accepting differences – a deeply rooted principle of dialogue founded on the work of Buber (1965), Gadamer (1989), and Habermas (1987), twentieth-century theorists who wrote about dialogue in organic

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communities. In fact, since theories, models and strategies for achieving intercultural dialogue emerge from a twentieth-century face-to-face paradigm, it is unclear whether, and the extent to which, dialogue literature – or dialogue itself – are applicable to the virtual world. Literature on virtual intercultural dialogue is limited, but the evidence suggests that it is challenged by many of the same factors that affect dialogue in organic communities. Cho and Lee (2008) examined computer-mediated groups composed of students from the United States and Singapore and discovered that virtual intercultural collaboration was constrained by preexisting social networks and intergroup boundaries formed in their respective countries and cultures. They found that the students’ willingness to collaborate and share information with others were affected by whether their virtual partners were member of their in-groups and shared their cultural values. Similarly, Pfeil, Zaphiris, and Ang (2006) hypothesized correctly that cultural values influence collaboration, discovering that collaborative authoring patterns of Wikipedia reflected predominant cultural values of French, German, Japanese, and Dutch authors. Utilizing Hofstede’s values scheme, this study identified unique cultural styles of collaboration that correlated with individualism and collectivism, power distance, and femininity and masculinity. The researchers concluded that cultural differences found in the physical world are also in play in virtual communities. Research on the use of computer based technologies in the classroom to enhance intercultural instruction suggests that they assist in creating collaboration between students from different countries. Wach (2013) found that when Polish teenage students learning English participated in on-line cross-national encounters with native English speakers their interest in different cultures increased significantly. This led the author to conclude that computer-mediated communication (CMC) was not only an effective tool for learning English but had unique potential for broadening the intercultural perspectives of the students. Although virtual collaboration may lead to intercultural dialogue, and perhaps is a precursor to dialogue, collaboration is frequently missing requisite dialogic elements like empathy and deep understanding. Hence, the question remains: Is intercultural dialogue possible in the virtual world? Studies of third culture in cyberspace offer some additional insight into this question.

2.2.2 Application to third culture The concept of third culture was originally developed by Casmir (1978, 1997; Camir & Asuncion-Lande 1989) who posited that individuals from different cultures can optimize their relationship in a third culture which he described as the “… conjoining of their separate cultures” into a more inclusive culture “… that is not merely the result of a fusion of two or more separate entities, but also the product of the

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harmonization of composite parts into a coherent whole” (1989: 294). Dialogue is necessary to develop a third culture, according to Casmir, which he argues cannot be achieved without empathy and deep understanding of others. Starosta and Olorunnisola (1998) add that individuals must be consciously aware of their differences and capable of suspending judgment to build a third culture, a product of convergence, integration, and mutual assimilation. Once achieved, third culture provides an ideal climate to interact because it is mutually accepting, supportive, and cooperative. Although third cultures are difficult to create in the physical world, some research suggests that they may be more achievable in virtual communities. McEwan and Sobre-Denton (2011) argue that the ease of technological access to cultural others combined with reduced social and economic costs significantly increase the probability of developing third cultures in the virtual world. Virtual communities, unlike organic ones, do not require leaving ones domicile to be an active member nor are they plagued by face threats due to social errors, according to the authors. In fact, new media provides users with technological tools to manage social distance, which McEwan and Sobre-Denton suggest increase cultural risk taking and experimentation, leading more readily to virtual third cultures. Research on language learning and CMC suggest that on-line interactions across cultures can assist in the formation of third cultures. For example, PrietoArranz, Juan-Garau, and Jacob (2013) found that Polish and Spanish students who engaged in on-line encounters with one another to enhance their English language skills also tended to develop virtual “third spaces” which increased bonding, collaboration, and appreciation of one another’s cultures. There is also evidence, however, that third cultures are difficult to construct in the virtual world. Nelson and Temples (2011) examined graduate students’ attempts to negotiate memberships in multiple on-line communities during an international exchange program. The students experienced numerous cultural issues in constructing on-line relationships in international virtual communities, leading the authors to conclude that the process of what they called “reconciliation,” which is comparable to third culture building, is complex and sometimes impossible in cyberspace. Interestingly, Steinkuehler and Williams (2006) discovered that while on-line games provide what they refer to as a “third space” for participants – a virtual dimension where people can socialize informally – these spaces are generally useful for bridging social capital and do not usually provide deep emotional support. While data are inconclusive on whether intercultural dialogue or third culture can actually occur in virtual communities, the research does suggest that the use of multiple new media technologies in a virtual community may increase the emotional attachment of participants and, hence, the prospect for dialogue. Wang (2012) found that Facebook is a viable platform for building cross-cultural friendships among Taiwanese and American university students; however, to retain

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these friendships after the completion of a project, other Web 2.0 applications are necessary. Dooly (2011) also discovered that the effectiveness and depth of on-line cross-cultural relationships between two groups of student teachers in Spain and the United States were affected by the number and nature of communication platforms utilized, including Skype, Moodle, Voicethread and Second Life. Finally, Develotte and Leeds-Hurwitz (2015) successfully facilitated intercultural dialogue between French and U.S. students utilizing desktop video conferencing, including both video and chat. They have also used MSN Messenger, Skype, and Adobe Connect to achieve similar results.

2.2.3 Theoretical implications of INMS In light of this literature review on new media and intercultural dialogue/third culture, four theoretical new media implications are now presented about twentyfirst century relevance of past intercultural dialogue/third culture theory and research grounded in organic, face-to-face communities. 1. Intercultural dialogue and third culture building, as defined in face-to-face literature, may be difficult to achieve in virtual communities. The on-line literature examined in this section suggests that empathy and deep understanding – prerequisites for dialogue and third culture building – may not be readily achievable in the virtual world. 2. Intercultural dialogue and third culture building may be governed by different processes in virtual communities than organic ones. The reviewed research suggests that factors like anonymity and controlling social distance, which are inimical to face-to-face dialogue and third culture building, may help produce both outcomes in the virtual world. 3. It may be necessary to utilize multiple new media platforms to achieve intercultural dialogue and third culture in a virtual world. Research suggests that a mix of new media platforms, including on-line and video chat/conferencing, may increase the chances for achieving intercultural dialogue and third culture in virtual communities. 4. External factors from the physical world that affect intercultural dialogue and third culture building may also impinge on both outcomes in the virtual world. Social factors from the physical world, including stereotyping, predispositions, and different cultural values, may affect the development of intercultural dialogue and third culture in the virtual world. These four theoretical implications suggest that since intercultural dialogue and third culture may be regulated by different processes in the physical and virtual worlds, scholars need to conduct research on the ways these processes differ. This type of research should yield important insights on how new media affects intercultural dialogue/third culture and whether either one is achievable in virtual spaces.

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2.3 Acculturation and intercultural competence 2.3.1 Application to acculturation Communication research abounds on how people adapt to new cultures, and much of the data examine the impact of interpersonal interaction and mass media on acculturation. Young Yun Kim (1988, 2001), the leading communication scholar on acculturation, provides an integrative model to explain how sojourners’ background and personality–as well as the quality and quantity of their interpersonal encounters–influence cultural adaptation. Kim found that positive social communication in the host culture, combined with reasonable and successful ethnic support, provide cultural knowledge and skills and emotional stability to acculturate successfully. She also integrates mass media into her model, arguing that acculturation is influenced by the nature, type, and frequency of media consumption patterns. Additional researchers have also found that host culture social communication and mass media play a significant role in acculturation as do ethnic social support and media from a sojourner's culture of origin (Durham 2004; Khan 1992; Raman & Harwood 2008). Although there is a good deal of research on the effects of social communication and mass media on acculturation, there is limited data on new media and acculturation. Available new media studies suggest that the internet and selected on-line communities facilitate the process of acculturation. For example, Ye (2005) found that Chinese international students living in the US who utilize on-line ethnic support groups composed of other Chinese students experience significantly less acculturative stress and more emotional support. Ye’s finding confirms Ying and Liese’s (1991) early investigation that while on-line ethnic support groups provide important emotional support, they do not help significantly with learning skills necessary to be successful in a new culture. Ye (2006) examined traditional and on-line support networks among Chinese international students and discovered that students who received support from both on-line ethnic groups and interpersonal networks in the host culture (USA) tended to experience fewer social difficulties in acculturation. Further, Chinese international students who sustained their on-line interpersonal networks in their home country had fewer mood disturbances during the adaptation process. According to Ye (2006), Chinese who newly arrived to a culture tended to report higher support levels from on-line ethnic groups than those who had been living in the culture for a longer time period. Confirming and extending Ye’s (2006) findings, Chen (2010) found that the longer immigrants lived in a host culture, the less likely they surfed home country websites and the more apt they were to communicate on-line with residents of the host culture, which facilitated their acculturation. There is growing data on the influence of social networking sites on acculturation. Croucher and Cronn-Mills (2011) found that the use of social networking sites

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among French Muslims reinforced their Islamic identities rather than their French identities, which complicated the adaptation process. In a conceptual essay, Croucher (2011) hypothesized that increased use of social networking sites composed of people from the same culture may serve as an obstacle to acculturation. Utilizing cultivation and ethnic group vitality theories, Croucher argued that increased exposure to homogenous social networking sites tend to increase in-group identification and negatively affect cultural adaptation. Croucher’s research on social networking sites contrasts with studies reviewed here on the positive effects of on-line ethnic support networks on acculturation. Perhaps, social networking sites provide a unique portal for ethnic networking that distinguish them from other types of on-line ethnic encounters. Contrary to Croucher’s research, Lee, Kim, Lee and Kim (2012) found that SNS, specifically Facebook, helped exchange students cope with stress, maintain their cultural identities, and connect with socially supportive peer networks, which may increase adjustment and acculturation. Sandal (2014) discovered that exchange students who use a combination of social media and on-line communication to communicate with family members and friends tend to have less acculturative stress and adjust more successfully.

2.3.2 Application to intercultural competence Not only is acculturation affected by face-to-face and on-line support networks, but it is also influenced by the individual's level of intercultural competence, often measured by awareness of and openness to cultural differences as well as the abilities and skills necessary to successfully navigate a new culture (Wiseman & Koester 1993). While Kim (2001) and others have found that individuals learn about new cultures incrementally, largely through pre-departure preparation, social communication in the host culture, and mass media, there is also evidence that on-line encounters can increase intercultural competence and enhance acculturation. Studies on internet-mediated second language learning suggest that on-line international exchanges accelerate language acquisition and intercultural competence. Chun (2011) found that on-line contact between Germans and American university students learning one another’s languages significantly increased their cultural awareness and intercultural communication skills. Belz (2005) reported that internet-mediated language learning between Germans and Americans dramatically improved the participants’ ability to use questions to ascertain cultural information, which they argue is an essential component of intercultural competence. While investigating the effect of blogs on second language learning for Spanish and American students, Elola and Oskoz (2008) discovered that blogging in newly acquired languages improved both groups’ intercultural competence. Despite the popularity of virtual gaming worlds like Second Life, World of War Craft, EverQuest, Final Fantasy, and Xbox Live, there are very limited data on

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whether virtual worlds affect intercultural competence and, hence, acculturation potential. In an important study, Diehl and Prins (2008) explored the cross-cultural exchanges of Second Life (SL) participants, evaluating both their real- and virtualworld interactions. They found that SL enhanced the participants’ “intercultural literacy” by promoting intercultural friendships, second language acquisition, and openness to diverse cultures, practices, and attitudes. In a related study, Ward (2010) found that the acculturation strategies utilized in the physical world are also employed when participants’ culturally adapt to virtual gaming worlds, which suggest that this type of cyber-experience may enhance skills that increase acculturation potential.

2.3.3 Theoretical implications of INMS The studies reviewed here on new media and acculturation raise six provocative theoretical implications about the role of new media in acculturation and intercultural competence. 1. CMC appears to play a positive role in acculturation and intercultural competence. Available data suggest that on-line exchanges between members of ethnic groups provide important emotional support and generally play a positive role in acculturation. In contrast, on-line cross-cultural exchanges during training sessions for second language acquisition can increase intercultural competence, which can increase acculturation potential. 2. Virtual gaming worlds may play a useful role in improving acculturation potential and increasing intercultural competence. Limited data suggest that participating in Second Life may improve intercultural skills that are essential for intercultural competence and successful cultural adaptation. Data also suggest that participants of virtual gaming worlds may utilize many of the same acculturation strategies that are used in the physical world. 3. Social media seems to affect acculturation and intercultural competence, but the data are too limited to speculate on the types of effects. Social media (SNS) – including Facebook, Twitter, and My Space as well as culturally indigenous brands like QQ (China), Orkut (India) and Weibo (China) – have been virtually unexamined in terms of their effects on acculturation and intercultural competence. Limited data suggest that ethnic social media may negatively affect acculturation, but it is unclear how cross-cultural uses of SNSs affect acculturation and intercultural competence. Do social networking sites increase intercultural contact and, hence, improve acculturation potential or do they merely enable users to communicate with in-groups who share their cultural backgrounds and limit acculturation (Shuter 2011)?

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4. The interplay between new media, mass media, and acculturation is unexplored and requires careful analysis. Given the interactive and personal nature of new media, could they have more impact on acculturation and intercultural competence than traditional mass media? Does frequency of new media use impact the potential effects of mass media on acculturation and intercultural competence? 5. The effects of mobile devices on acculturation and intercultural competence have not been explored, and given their omnipresence in the twenty-first century, this new media platform warrants examination. Mobile phones, smart phones, and tablets are ubiquitous and powerful. Cell phones are more plentiful worldwide than are internet connections, and more people text message and mobile call than engage in computer-mediated communication (Shuter 2012a; Shuter & Chattopadhayay 2010, 2014). Yet, there is no published research on text messaging (SMS), mobile calling – albeit, any application of a mobile device – and acculturation and intercultural competence. 6. Since new media are not included in acculturation theories developed in the twentieth century, these theories may not adequately explain how people acculturate in the twenty-first century. It is important to revisit and reconfigure major theories of acculturation to ensure that they sufficiently include new media. Moreover, how individuals acculturate in on-line communities and virtual worlds may provide new insights into the process of acculturation in the physical world. These six theoretical implications suggest that although new media may play a significant role in acculturation and intercultural competence, new media platforms may have differential effects on each of them. As a result, future research on new media and acculturation/intercultural competence can be guided by these six theoretical implications, exploring how each new media platform, including social media, CMC, and mobile devices, affect acculturation and intercultural competence.

2.4 Further exploration of theories In concluding this section of the article on the possible effects of new media on five major areas of intercultural communication, it should be noted that there are additional important areas of intercultural communication and their attendant twentieth-century theories that may need to be refined or revised in light of available intercultural new media research. For example, scattered new media studies on stereotyping (Chia-I 2008; Guéguen 2008; Nakamura 2009), high context/low context communication (Pflug 2011; Richardson & Smith 2007; Würtz 2005), culture shock/stress (Karlsson 2006; Martinez 2010), intercultural relationship develop-

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ment (Tokunaga 2009; Yum & Hara 2005), and intercultural conflict (Mollov & Schwartz 2010; St. Amant 2002) are too limited to draw any theoretical conclusions except that there is much research needed to determine whether twentieth century ICC theories adequately explain intercultural transactions in a digital age. The 13 theoretical new media implications presented in this section of the article serve as a starting point for conducting future research on new media and intercultural communication theory, the primary area of intercultural new media studies. The article turns now to the impact of culture on the social uses of new media, the secondary research area of INMS.

3 Culture and new media: Secondary area of intercultural new media studies 3.1 Early research Culture and new media are conjoined. Not only does culture affect the social uses of new media, but new media appears to change culture. Both areas are important dimensions of INMS and, unlike the previous section on new media and intercultural communication theory, there has been more research conducted here. In addition, there has been growing research interest on the effects of new media on cultural traditions and communication patterns in societies across the globe. Early research on culture and new media focused on CMC and explored such topics as intercultural communication and CMC (Ma 1996), country differences in CMC (Yoon 1996), CMC and the rise of electronic global culture (Ess 2001; Jones 2001), and the utilization of CMC in student exchange programs and multicultural classrooms (Colomb & Simutis 1996; Meagher & Castanos 1996). More recently, scholars have examined the impact of culture on the social uses of additional new media platforms including mobile phones (Baron & Segerstad 2010; Campbell 2007; Schroeder 2010), text messaging (Ling 2008; Shuter & Chattapadhyay 2010; Spurgeon and Goggin 2007), social media (Barker & Ota 2011; Chu & Choi 2011; Lin et al. 2012), blogs (Elola & Oskoz 2008; Karlsson 2006), virtual worlds (Diehl & Prins 2008; Green & Singleton 2007; Wang, Walther & Hancock 2009), and multiplayer on line games (Chia-I 2008; Nakamura 2009; Steinkuehler & Williams 2006; Ward 2010).

3.2 Publications in two major journals between 2005 and 2011 As new media studies have grown exponentially in the twenty-first century so, too, has research increased on country variations in the social uses of new media, the focal point of most cross-cultural new media investigations. In fact, after an ex-

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haustive analysis of all published studies from 2005 to 2011 in New Media and Society (NMS) and the Journal of Computer. Mediated Communication (JCMC) – arguably, the two major communication journals on new media – it was found that both journals together published 293 international new media studies – those conducted outside the US, and just 41 of these included more than one country in the investigation. Since 86 % (252) are single-country studies, they are overwhelming intracultural not intercultural examinations of the social uses of new media. While there are myriad journals that publish new media research, JCMC and NMS are excellent indicators of communication research trends on culture and new media. A close analysis of 293 international new media articles in these two journals reveal the following trends for the frequency of research on major platforms as well as percentage of studies aimed at theory validation, either mass media or new media theories. 1. Most of the international articles (195: 66 %) are single culture investigations of computer-mediated communication (i.e. on-line exchanges, websites, internet, instant messaging). 2. Mobile phone research (calling and text messaging) conducted about usage across nations is the next most frequent researched platform (43: 15 %), followed by social networking sites (17: 6 %), multiplayer on-line games (15: 5 %), blogging (13: 4 %), and, finally, a few scattered studies on email and You Tube, with zero international articles on virtual worlds. 3. The overwhelming majority of international new media investigations (240: 82 %) and theory validation studies that primarily attempt to refine new media or mass media theories, with limited analysis of socio-cultural implications of new media. Interestingly, platform research trends identified in JCMC and NMS are supported by nation-based studies on text messaging (Shuter 2012b; Shuter & Chattopadhyay 2010) and mobile phones (Shuter & Chattopadhyay 2012, 2014). Communication scholars have also confirmed research trend three – the limited availability of socio-cultural critiques of new media, society, and intercultural communication (Cheong, Martin & MacFadyen 2012).

3.3 Future directions of INMS Given these three research trends on culture and new media, there are many avenues for future investigations to optimize its’ inclusion in intercultural new media studies. Conceptually, there needs to be significantly more emphasis on intercultural new media research that takes a socio-cultural perspective. This translates into new media studies that explore topics such as indigenous (i.e. country, co-culture, hybridity) cultural patterns of new media use, critical analyses of new media and society, and the impact of culture on the social uses of new media. A socio-cultural

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perspective should also produce studies that develop, refine or extend cultural theories of new media communication including, but not limited to, cultural values and the social uses of new media, co-cultural theory and new media behavior, and socio-cultural factors and cultural preferences of new media platforms. Based on the preceding three research trends in JCMC and NMS, it’s also important to conduct significantly more intercultural new media investigations that include two or more cultures interacting (at individual or collective level) and examine a broader range of new media platforms. While single country investigations are important because they reveal intracultural patterns of new media use, multiple culture investigations are also essential for generating comparative cultural data on the social uses of new media. In addition to continuing intercultural research on computer-mediated communication, it is important to examine, with much greater frequency, the social uses of additional new media platforms across cultures, particularly mobile phones, text messaging, social networking sites, multiplayer on-line games, and virtual worlds. With an abundance of intercultural data on these and other platforms, researchers will have a clearer understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics that drive the social uses of new media. Lastly, future studies on culture and new media should focus more on generating intercultural theories on the social uses of new media. The current trend of conducting mass media or new media theory validation studies is no substitute for formulating and refining culture-based new media theories that detail and explain socio-cultural influences on the social uses of new media. There are a few culturebased new media theories, including Cheong, Martin, and MacFadyen’s (2012) critical new media theory, and Shuter and Chattopadhyay (2012, 2014) and Shuter, Cheong, and Chen’s (2015, 2016) cultural values theory of mobile phone activity. Both theories address the inextricable relationship between socio-cultural forces and new media, with Cheong et al. focusing on power and new media, and Shuter et al. exploring cultural values and mobile phone activity.

4 Conclusion This essay conceptualizes the parameters of a new field of inquiry called INMS which consists of two areas: 1. new media and intercultural communication theory and 2. culture and new media. Exploring the intersection of new media and intercultural communication theory has the potential to refine and expand twentiethcentury theories of intercultural communication grounded in a face-to-face paradigm. In light of current intercultural new media investigations, five major ICC theories critiqued in this article need to be reexamined and, potentially, reconfigured, possibly resulting in new or modified ICC theories more applicable to a digital era. Thirteen theoretical implications are offered in this article to guide future research on new media and intercultural communication theory.

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Culture and new media, the secondary area of INMS, focuses on the interdependent relationship between culture and new media, a fertile topic of inquiry delineating the influence of socio-cultural forces on the social uses of new media within and across cultures. Three major research trends on culture and new media are also provided in the article, along with suggested future research directions to develop this area of INMS. Intercultural new media studies promises to expand our understanding of intercultural communication in a new media age and is still the next frontier in intercultural communication.

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Biographical notes [In alphabetic order of last name]

Susan C. Baker is a senior research fellow with The University of Queensland. She is a social-developmental psychologist focusing on language and intergroup communication. Her publications are in the area of acculturation, second language learning, communication accommodation, intercultural relations, and doctorpatient communication. John Baldwin received his doctorate from Arizona State University in 1994 and has been at Illinois State University since that time. He is a professor of culture and communication, teaching also in areas such as communication theory and qualitative research methods. He has co-edited book on new definitions of culture (2006) and co-authored Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life. His areas of interest including all aspects of intercultural and intergroup communication, including adjustment, competence, and verbal and nonverbal communication differences, as well as identity, prejudice, and tolerance. His dissertation was on perceptions of racism, and he has chaired a number of theses – qualitative, quantitative, and rhetorical – on a variety of aspects of identity and prejudice. His newer area of research is on the social construction of identities in Brazilian rock music of the dictatorship era. He is conversational in Spanish and Portuguese, but also has interest in other languages and cultures. George A. Barnett (B.A. and M.A., Sociology from the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign; PhD, Communication from Michigan State University). Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of Communication at the University of California, Davis. He has served as Chair of the Communication and Technology Division of the International Communication Association and President of the International Network for Social Network Analysis. Also, he served on several editorial boards and as editor of Organization-Communication: Emerging Perspectives, Progress in Communication Science and the Encyclopedia of Social Networks. Professor Barnett’s research focuses on social and communication networks, and in particular, on international telecommunication (telephone and Internet) networks and their role in social and economic development and the process of globalization. Mary Bresnahan is an internationally acknowledged scholar in the study of intercultural communication and cultural sources of miscommunication in intercultural interaction. Dr. Bresnahan has studied cultural differences in speech acts such as requesting and apology. Dr. Bresnahan has expanded her cultural interests to include attitudes toward organ donation in Asia and East Asia, smoking prevention and cessation interventions in China, and intergenerational communication about health. A second major area of interest is stigma enactment and resistance particularly with reference to obesity stigma. Dr. Bresnahan received her doctoral degree

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from the University of Michigan and is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. With over 90 publications, Professor Bresnahan has led research teams which studied smoking prevention and cessation, lung cancer, the bystander syndrome and cyberbullying. Deborah A. Cai (PhD, Communication, Michigan State University) is Senior Associate Dean in the School of Media and Communication and professor in the Department of Strategic Communication at Temple University, where she also serves on the faculty of the Media and Communication doctoral program. She is a Fellow in the International Academy of Intercultural Research and president-elect of the International Association for Conflict Management. Her scholarly expertise is in intercultural communication, negotiation and conflict management, persuasion, and decision making. She has conducted research in China, Japan, and the United States, and she has trained professionals and government leaders from countries and organizations including the U.S., China, Afghanistan, Italy, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). She is the editor of a four-volume collection of research, Intercultural Communication (Sage, Benchmark in Communication). Her research is published in journals such as Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, Journal of Applied Communication, and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Guo-Ming Chen is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Rhode Island. He was the recipient of the 1987 outstanding dissertation award, the founding president of the Association for Chinese Communication Studies, and the Executive Director of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies (IAICS). He served as Chair of the ECA Intercultural Communication Division and the co-editor of Intercultural Communication Studies and International and Intercultural Communication Annual. Presently Chen is the President of IAICS and the co-editor of China Media Research. His primary research interests are in intercultural/organizational/global communication with the focus on intercultural communication competence and Chinese communication behaviors. Chen has published numerous papers, books, book chapters, and essays. Ling Chen (PhD, Ohio State Univ.) is a Professor in the School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University. An interest in the role of culture in communication in different social contexts at various levels of interaction and in intercultural encounters has been a center of her research and scholarship. She has published 3 books and over 70 articles in books and journals such as Communication Research, Human Communication Research, and Communication Monographs. She has been and is on the editorial board of a number of international journals, in communication and related disciplines, e.g., Chinese Journal of Communication, Discourse and Communication, Human Communication Research, Howard Journal of Communications, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Communication, and

Biographical notes

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Journal of International and Intercultural Communication Research, and is past Editor of Management Communication Quarterly. Tenzin Dorjee (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is an Associate Professor of Human Communication Studies at California State University, Fullerton, USA. His primary teaching and research expertise are in intergroup and intercultural communication, identity issues, peace building, and conflict resolution. He has authored and co-authored peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and chapters on Tibetan culture, identity, and communication, nonviolence and middle way approaches to Sino-Tibetan conflict, and language and culture. He is also a published translator of six books and many articles on the philosophy and science of the mind from Tibetan Buddhism into English. He had also the distinctive honor to translate for His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India and USA. He has received various CSUF’s Faculty Teacher-Scholar Awards in recognition for his active research publications and mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students. Mohan J. Dutta is Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Adjunct Professor at the Interactive Digital Media Institute (IDMI) at NUS, and Courtesy Professor of Communication at Purdue University. At NUS, he is the Founding Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), directing research on culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change. He teaches and conducts research in international health communication, critical cultural theory, poverty in healthcare, health activism in globalization politics, indigenous cosmologies of health, subaltern studies and dialogue, and public policy and participatory social change. Uttaran Dutta is assistant professor of intercultural communication in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, USA. His research focuses on sustainable development and social change in marginalized communities, analyzing the importance of culture, communication, design and innovation in transforming the lives of people who are socially, politically and economically underserved. He has published journal articles and book chapters in communication and other disciplinary outlets, and presented papers at communication conferences. Michael G. Elasmar, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations and a Senior Research Fellow at the Communication Research Center at Boston University (BU). Dr. Elasmar served as Director of the Communication Research Center at BU from 1994 until 2015. He is a past Chair (1998–1999) of the International Communication Division (ICD) of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He was the Found-

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ing Editor of the American Journal of Media Psychology and currently serves as an Editor of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research (IJPOR), the official journal of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR). For the past 26 years his research has been focused on conceptualizing, measuring and visualizing the knowledge structures involved in the reception and processing of international communication messages. His books include “The Impact of International Television” published by Erlbaum in 2003 and “Through Their Eyes: Factors Affecting Muslim Support for the U.S.-Led War on Terror” published by Marquette Books in 2008. Edward L. Fink grew up in the Bronx and attended Columbia University (A.B.) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.S., PhD). He majored in Sociology at both institutions. Professor Fink’s research is quantitative and typically experimental. He studies attitude and belief change, social influence, research methods and statistics, intercultural communication, and social networks. His publications include articles in Human Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, Communication Research, Communication Yearbook, as well as articles in psychology, sociology, criminology, and information science. He co-authored (with J. Woelfel) The Measurement of Communication Processes: Galileo Theory and Method (1980), and he has been editor of Human Communication Research, chair of the University of Maryland’s Department of Communication, and associate dean of Maryland’s Graduate School. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and recipient of ICA’s B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award. He became a professor at Temple University on July 1, 2015. Cindy Gallois is a professor of psychology and communication at The University of Queensland and a fellow of International Communication Association and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her research centers on intergroup communication in health, organizational, and intercultural contexts, particularly communication accommodation by health professionals. Elisabeth Gareis is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College/CUNY where she teaches courses in intercultural and related communication. Her research focus is on intercultural friendship and its role in prejudice reduction and the success of international sojourns. Her findings on friendship formation between international and domestic students have been widely covered in the media (e.g., The Chronicle of Higher Education, InsideHigherEdUSA Today, and Voice of America). In applying theory to practice, Prof. Gareis is co-founder of a student-coordinated Conversation Partners Program, which matches native and nonnative speakers for informal conversations and serves to promote friendship formation. Related research focuses on the communication of love, with cross-cultural differences and changes in love expression over time functioning as access points for examining larger cultural phenomena.

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641

Howie Giles (PhD, D.Sc., University of Bristol, 1971, 1996) was Chair of Social Psychology − and then Head of Psychology − at the University of Bristol, and has been Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, since 1989 and since 2015 has been appointed Honorary Professor in the School of Psychology, at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include: intergenerational and aging cross-culturally; law enforcement-community relations across cultures; ethnic language attitudes; intergroup communication, tourism, health issues, etc. He has been the recipient of many Awards including the International Communication Association’s Inaugural Career Productivity Award in 2000, is Past President of the International Communication Association, past Editor of Human Communication Research, and Founding Editor of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology (1981–) as well as the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication (1990–). Brad Hall is the Department Head of Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies at Utah State University. He teaches primarily in the areas of intercultural communication, communication theory, and the link between our talk, thoughts and actions. In his own words, his teaching style is best described as “intensely laid-back,” “confusingly clear” and “routinely varied.” He believes that learning is best accomplished through consistent effort and the serendipity of unexpected insights. His research deals with issues of culture, identity, membership, conflict and everyday conversation. His work has been published in journals such as Communication Monographs, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Communication Theory, Human Relations, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, and Human Communication Research. Hyisung C. Hwang is an adjunct faculty at San Francisco State University. Her research interests are in emotion, nonverbal behaviors, and culture. She has also coauthored numerous scientific articles and book chapters on nonverbal behavior, facial expressions, and culture. Ke Jiang ( 江珂 ) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at University of California, Davis. She received her M.A. from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2010. She was a news anchor in China at the Economic Radio Station of Anhui Province. Her research focuses on news framing in the era of globalization, communication network analysis, semantic network analysis, network dynamics, network co-evolution, network visualization, intercultural communication, and cultural convergence. She also examines Guanxi networks a special form of social networks in China manifesting itself as a mixture of sentimental, instrumental and obligational ties. Jennifer Kienzle (M.A., San Francisco State University) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a visiting instructor in the Department of Communication Studies at University of

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Biographical notes

San Francisco. Her research focuses on how emerging relational media impacts identity and language utilizing interpersonal and intergroup perspectives. Jennifer currently serves as the chair of the Graduate Student Caucus of the Central States Communication Association, USA. Young Yun Kim is a professor of Communication at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, she received her M.A. degree in Speech Communication at the University of Hawaii under the sponsorship of the East-West Center and her PhD degree in Communication from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Kim teaches undergraduate and graduate courses and direct masters and doctoral theses mainly in the area of intercultural and interethnic communication area. She has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters, as well as 11 books including Becoming Intercultural, Interethnic Communication, Theories in Intercultural Communication, and Communicating with Strangers (with W. Gudykunst). She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and a Founding Fellow and Past-President (2013–15) of the International Academy for Intercultural Research. Currently, she is working as General Editor of the International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, an official publication of the International Communication Association. Waheeda Lillevik is an Associate Professor of Management in the School of Business at The College of New Jersey. She received her PhD from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada and her M.B.A. from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. She conducts research in human resources management, particularly diversity management, cross-cultural management, international human resource management, and global ethics and corporate governance. Her research appears in the Journal of Business Ethics, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, International Journal of Business and Management Studies, and Business and Society Review, in addition to numerous edited publications. Tae-Seop Lim (PhD, Michigan State University, 1988) is a professor at the department of communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His major research interests are in cross-cultural pragmatics, intercultural communication, and facework. Shuang Liu (PhD 1999, Hong Kong Baptist University) is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Queensland. She is internationally recognized for her expertise in the field of acculturation, identity negotiation, and intercultural relations. Shuang has published extensively on migrants' search for a sense of place in a bicultural or multicultural society. Her recent book Identity, Hybridity and Cultural Home explores the multifaceted concept of cultural identity to uncover the meaning of cultural home for Chinese immigrants in multicultural societies. It questions the conventional notion of a stable and secure cultural identity and challenges the common conception of biculturalism. Shuang’s book, Introducing Intercultural

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643

Communication: Global Cultures and Contexts (1st and 2nd editions; Sage Publications), co-authored with Volčič and Gallois, has been adopted by over 40 institutions across 10 countries. Valerie Manusov is Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. She is the editor of The Sourcebook of Nonverbal Measures: Going beyond Words and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Nonverbal Communication. Her work focuses primarily on the meanings people give to nonverbal cues in contexts such as romantic relationships, intercultural interactions, end-of-life conversations, and the media. Her work has been published in journals including Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, and Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. She has chapters in many volumes, including the APA Handbook of Nonverbal Communication and The Sage Handbook of Interpersonal Communication. She teaches courses in nonverbal communication, interpersonal communication, intercultural communication, and methods of inquiry at the graduate and undergraduate level. Dr. Manusov has also been the local host for the Western States Communication Association conference and the International Network on Personal Relationships, for which she also served as Executive Secretary. Judith N. Martin is professor of intercultural communication in the School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, USA. Her principle research interests focus on the role of culture in communication competence and online communication; interethnic and interracial communication, as well as sojourner adaptation and reentry. She has published research articles in communication journals as well as other disciplinary journals. She is co-author of Intercultural Communication in Contexts, Experiencing Intercultural Communication, Human Communication in Society and Communication in Society and co-editor of Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity. David Matsumoto is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory at San Francisco State University. He has studied culture, emotion, social interaction and communication for over 30 years. His books include Culture and Psychology, the Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology (ed.), and Cross-Cultural Research Methods in Psychology (ed.). Robert M. (Bob) McCann (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is a member of the UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Management & Organization’s faculty. At UCLA Anderson, Bob creates, directs, and teaches management communication and leadership classes across virtually all of Anderson's MBA degree programs. Dr. McCann is also Chair of the UCLA Thailand Executive Committee, and serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee of UCLA's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Bob was formerly the Associate Dean for Global Initiatives at UCLA Anderson, and was the Principal Investigator on UCLA's multi-year CIBER grant. Dr. McCann’s primary areas of research include workplace ageism, intergroup commu-

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nication, and intercultural communication. In these domains, he has published in several major refereed communication journals and has won numerous research awards. Bob also serves on the executive editorial board of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. His latest book is entitled Ageism at Work: The Role of Communication in a Changing Workplace. The book is available in three languages (Spanish, Catalan, and English). Yoshitaka Miike (PhD, University of New Mexico, USA) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo and Fellow at the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies. He is best known for his metatheory of Asiacentricity as an alternative paradigm for the study of Asian cultures and communication. He co-edited The Global Intercultural Communication Reader (2 nd Edition, Routledge, 2014) and guest-edited four journal special issues/ section on Asian communication theory. He is currently Review Editor of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses and serves on the editorial boards of the Asian Journal of Communication, China Media Research, Intercultural Communication Studies, International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Content, Community, and Communication, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. He is Past Chair (2013–2014) of the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association. His research interests include the history of the field of Asian communication theory, non-Western traditions of communication ethics, and aspects of Japanese culture and communication. James W. Neuliep is professor of communication and media studies at St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin. He is the author of Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach (SAGE Publications) and Communication Theory: Applications and Case Studies (Allyn & Bacon), among others. Neuliep’s original research has appeared in Communication Education, Communication Quarterly, Communication Reports, Communication Research Reports, Communication Studies, Human Communication Research, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, and Language & Communication among others. Neuliep is past editor of the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research. Neuliep is the recipient of the Leonard Ledvina Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Donald King Award for Outstanding Scholarship, and Faculty Advisor Excellence Award. Eddy Ng is a Professor of Organizational Behaviour and the F. C. Manning Chair in Economics and Business at the Rowe School of Business, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. His research focuses on managing diversity for organizational competitiveness, the changing nature of work and organizations, and managing the millennial workforce. He has served as Chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Theme Committee of the Academy of Management. He coedited the Research Handbook of International and Comparative Perspectives on Diversity Management (2016),

Biographical notes

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International Handbook on Diversity Management at Work: Country Perspectives on Diversity and Equal Treatment (2014) and Managing the New Workforce: International Perspectives on the Millennial Generation (2012). Hiroshi Ota (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001) is a professor of communication and currently the chair of Graduate School of Global Culture and Communication at Aichi Shukutoku University, Japan. His research interests revolve around the intergroup processes in human communication, particularly communication between age groups across cultures, tourism and intergroup communication, and communication styles in different cultures. He has widely published in many journals such as Human Communication Research, Communication Studies, Communication Research, and Journal of Intercultural Communication, among others. Panagiotis Sakellariou holds a PhD in translation theory from the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. He is currently conducting postdoctoral research on the postwar development of linguistics and communication theory. His research interests include translation theory, hermeneutics, social and political philosophy, communication theory, semiotics, and the history of ideas. Robert Shuter (PhD Northwestern University) is director and founder of the Center for Intercultural New Media Research (www.interculturalnewmedia.com). A thought leader in intercultural communication studies, Dr. Shuter is Research Professor at Arizona State University, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication and Professor Emeritus at Marquette University, Diederich School of Communication. He has served as Professor and Visiting & Fulbright Scholar at universities across the globe including University of Southern California (USA), New York University (USA), Hong Kong Baptist University (Hong Kong) and Uppsala University (Sweden). He is past Chair of the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association. Recognized as one of the leading researchers on communication across cultures, he has published more than 80 articles and books in major scholarly journals including Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, Management Communication Quarterly as well as popular press outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Huffington Post. In 2011 he created intercultural new media studies, which explores the intersection of new media, culture, and intercultural communication. Anne-Marie Søderberg is Professor of Cross-Cultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. With a research focus on cultures, identity constructions, communication and learning processes, she has created a bridge between her educational background in language, literature and educational studies and her present position as an international business scholar. She is currently principal investigator of longitudinal ethnographic studies of global soft-

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ware development teams in an inter-disciplinary and inter-organisational research project (www.nexgsd.org). She was director of the research programme ‘Cultural Intelligence as a Strategic Resource’ (2008–2011) based on which she co-authored the book Global Collaboration: Intercultural Experiences and Learning (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). She has (co-)authored books, book chapters and journal articles (e.g. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of International Management, Management International Review) on cross-cultural communication and management issues. Jordan Soliz (PhD, University of Kansas) is associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he also serves as Director of Graduate Studies. His research focuses on communication, identity, and intergroup processes primarily in personal and family relationships. Dr. Soliz is the editor of the Journal of Family Communication and currently serves as the vice-chair for the Intergroup Communication Interest Group of the International Communication Association. Stella Ting-Toomey is a Professor of Human Communication Studies at California State University, Fullerton, USA. Her teaching passion includes intercultural communication (ICC) theory and training. Her research interests have focused on testing the face-negotiation theory and the identity negotiation theory. She is the author and editor of 17 books and 4 instructional manuals. She has also published more than 120 articles and chapters in journals and handbooks such as the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Human Communication Research, and Communication Monographs, among others. Dr. Ting-Toomey has delivered major keynote speeches on mindful ICC in South Africa, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, and different regions of the U.S. She has also conducted a variety of intercultural competence workshops for corporations and non-profit institutes. She is the 2008 recipient of the 23-campus wide CSU Wang Family Excellence Award, and the 2007–08 recipient of the CSU-Fullerton Outstanding Professor Award in recognition for superlative teaching, research, and service. Jiang Wang is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. His major publications include Shaping China’s global imagination: Branding nations at the world Expo, Soft power in China: Public diplomacy through communication (editor), and Foreign advertising in China: Becoming global, becoming local. Bernadette Watson (PhD Univ. of Queensland) is an associate professor in psychology at The University of Queensland. She is a health psychologist who studies communication. Her research focuses on effective communication between health professionals and patients. She researches on the influence of identity and intergroup processes both on patient-health professional communication and on com-

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munication in multi-disciplinary health teams. She is the current President of the International Association of Language and Social Psychology and is an active member of the International Communication Association. Yunying Zhang (PhD Washington State Univ.) is an Associate Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication and Theatre at Austin Peay State University. Her research interest includes social cognition, media effects, and political and intercultural communication. Yi Zhu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado extension program in Beijing. His research to this point has focused on the experience of Chinese international students in American universities and the cultural adjustments and difficulties that they face. He is working to develop the construct of collective face as a central element of this experience. His goal is to develop and validate a measure of collective face which provides an alternative explanation to other less culturally salient explanations for apparent reticence of Chinese international students in the U.S. classroom such as willingness to communicate or introversion in personality. Yi is working on his dissertation and hopes to complete his degree in 2017.

Index academic-community 309, 324 acceptance of violence 271 acculturation 11, 27, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56, 113, 158, 278, 287, 288, 437, 438, 443, 448– 450, 482, 618, 625–628 acculturation, new media 618, 625, 627, 628 activism 54, 58, 309, 325, 565 address terms and pronoun uses 182 Afrocentrism 19, 36 age (group) stereotypes 290, 291, 293 Arabic 88, 119, 123, 191, 227, 244 Asiacentric perspective 36 Asian Indian 119, 126, 146, 163 assimilation 113, 395, 443, 444, 571, 623 basic emotions 154, 222, 223, 225–227, 234, 248 bicultural 11, 159, 160, 164–166, 168, 422, 432, 443–450, 452, 602, 603, 610 biculturalism 11, 358, 433, 439, 445–449, 602 Blackfeet 119, 127 boundary spanner 415 brand nationality 13, 581, 582, 585–587, 589, 590 chronemics 246, 250 civil rights movement 87, 264, 267, 371 CMC and interpersonal communication 210 coach/mentor 11, 415, 425, 428, 431, 432 code-choice 179, 182, 192 Cold War 261, 263, 267, 284, 320 Colombian 119, 126, 127, 129 color-blindness 34, 550 common ingroup identity model 377, 378 communication v, vi, 3, 4, 19, 20, 22–24, 28– 33, 35–37, 45, 46, 50, 51, 55–59, 68–69, 89–90, 101, 102, 109–112, 119, 120, 135, 141, 147, 149, 153, 166–169, 179–183, 189–191, 199–201, 204, 219, 222, 239, 245, 247, 249, 252, 253, 261, 262, 264, 265, 268–274, 280, 281, 283, 284, 289– 291, 293–302, 309–319, 321–325, 331, 334, 338, 342, 350, 352–354, 356–360, 362, 369–374, 378–382, 390–393, 398, 399, 402–406, 415–417, 422, 423, 431, 437, 449, 451, 452, 457, 463, 470–472, 481, 482, 484, 488–491, 493–495, 503, 505–507, 512, 515–519, 523, 524, 529–532,

538, 544, 550, 563, 566, 567, 569–573, 575, 576, 583, 586, 597–599, 601, 604– 609, 617–619, 622, 624–626, 628, 631 – accommodation 12, 51, 167, 244, 289, 296, 303, 369, 370, 372, 378, 383, 395, 396, 471, 481, 482, 484, 488, 491–493 – at work 300 – axiological perspectives of 83–89 – dark side of 204, 208 – epistemological perspectives of 78–83 – ontological perspectives of 71–77 – predicament model (CPA) of aging 291, 301, 302, 373 – process 4, 71, 79, 81, 109, 110, 113, 145, 211, 371, 529, 531, 532, 566 – style (defined) 141, 142, 148, 153, 441 communication (defined) 5, 12, 99, 120, 350, 457, 575, 598 communication accommodation theory 12, 51, 167, 244, 296, 369, 370, 372, 378, 383, 395, 396, 471, 481, 482, 484, 488, 492 communicative – approach 34, 296, 342, 439, 440 – competence 461, 463, 492 community 8, 10, 30, 50, 52, 53, 58, 59, 77, 79, 83, 84, 88–90, 108, 119–135, 147, 168, 180–182, 191, 192, 204, 241, 244, 249, 267, 271, 273, 302, 309–325, 334, 343, 344, 362, 363, 398–402, 405–407, 437, 444, 451, 464, 467, 473, 505, 506, 517, 518, 539, 569, 570, 573, 577, 586, 591, 603, 619–625, 628 competence, intercultural communication see intercultural communication conflict – management in couples 51, 208, 209, 211 – resolution 52, 87, 89, 264–267, 269, 270, 281, 283 – styles 51, 108, 141, 142, 148, 160–164, 168, 169, 209, 471 consciousness-only 78, 80, 81 consumer – animosity 583, 590 – antipathy 589, 590 – ethnocentrism 581, 583, 589, 590, 592 – nationalism 581, 583, 588–591, 593

650

Index

contact – cultures 22, 253 – space 369, 381, 382 contact hypothesis 276, 277, 375, 376, 378– 380, 400, 459, 548, 549, 610 content analysis 21, 46, 48, 49, 103, 112 Contextual Theory of Interethnic Communication 389, 391, 392, 395, 403 country image 13, 581, 583, 588–590, 592 country-of-origin, brand 581–583, 587–590 critical – approaches 19, 35, 55 – theory 19, 32 Critical Race Theory 19, 33, 34, 53 cross-border messages 12, 503–506, 509–511, 513, 516, 518–521, 523, 524 cross-cultural – adaption 438 – communication 3, 4, 7, 99, 101, 141–144, 148, 150, 151, 153, 158, 164, 166, 169, 170, 199, 201, 245, 290, 351, 457, 598, 609 – communication (definition) 12, 99, 457, 503, 598 – management 418–420, 422, 426, 428, 597, 599 cultural – communication 3, 4, 6–14, 19–33, 35–38, 45–48, 50–60, 68, 71, 73, 77, 88–90, 99– 113, 119–122, 124–135, 141, 142, 145, 148, 150, 151, 158, 165, 166, 169, 170, 182, 194, 199, 201, 203–205, 209, 210, 212, 245, 254, 290, 331, 332, 342–344, 349–357, 360–363, 369, 383, 390, 392, 398, 399, 416, 419, 422, 427, 428, 431, 437, 441, 452, 457, 463, 481–483, 487, 489–491, 494, 495, 530, 531, 563–565, 569, 571, 573, 575, 577, 578, 597–601, 604, 605, 607–609, 617–619, 626, 628–632 – convergence 111, 112, 571 – difference 6, 21, 23, 26, 28, 76, 129, 151, 154, 158, 165, 179, 180, 184, 193, 199, 205, 211, 228–232, 241–243, 251, 252, 267, 278, 293, 298, 352, 353, 358, 360, 419, 421, 427, 442, 444, 450, 457, 458, 461, 462, 469, 472, 485, 486, 563, 566, 570–572, 575–577, 599–601, 606, 607, 622, 626 – ecology 88 – general approach 354

– identity 8, 10, 11, 26, 28, 112, 141, 159, 168, 250, 355, 358, 363, 437, 439, 441–449, 452, 469, 618–621 – identity, virtual space 619–621 – imperialism 503, 515, 516, 520 – intelligence / cross-cultural competence 51, 56, 349, 416, 417, 419, 420, 426, 430, 598, 608, 609 – sensitivity 312, 349, 354, 357, 358, 425, 486, 598, 599, 601–603, 606, 607 – specific approach 119, 332, 354, 362 cultural trigger 415, 418, 431 – events 418, 431 culture 3–7, 19–24, 26–37, 45–50, 52, 54–58, 67, 68, 70–73, 75, 76, 79, 83, 87, 89, 90, 99–103, 106, 108–113, 119–121, 123, 128, 131, 135, 141, 143–155, 161–167, 169, 179– 185, 187–194, 199–207, 219, 226–234, 239–255, 261, 265, 272–274, 278–279, 281–283, 289–291, 293, 294, 296, 297, 300, 302, 310, 312–314, 316, 317, 320, 324, 331–339, 342–344, 352, 354–356, 358–361, 369, 373, 378, 380, 383, 399, 400, 402, 407, 416, 418–427, 432, 437– 439, 441–452, 457, 458, 460–469, 472, 482–484, 486, 487, 490, 492, 493, 536, 543, 545, 563–577, 592, 597–599, 601– 607, 610, 617–619, 621, 625-631 – -centered approach 4, 57, 309, 315, 317, 318, 325 – definitions of 23, 30, 120, 227, 457 – human phenomenon 5, 6 – social process 5, 6 Danish 119, 123, 124, 423, 428, 432, 600, 601 dark side of communication 204, 208 dependent co-arising 71, 74, 75 destination marketing 583, 589, 591, 592 developmental interpersonal processes 200, 203, 357 dichotomized classification 354 display rules 154, 155, 219, 228–230, 248, 252 doctor-patient relationship 485–490, 494 Dogon theory of knowledge 78 double-swing model 77 dysfunctional communicative behavior 200, 208, 274 East Asian 100, 104, 105, 109, 110, 149, 150, 152, 156, 158, 169, 292–294, 297, 380, 459, 461, 462, 467, 468

Index

emic/etic perspectives 4, 8, 24, 50, 56, 59, 69, 90, 101, 109, 119–122, 128, 135, 153, 240, 243, 246, 247, 250, 251, 253, 262, 264, 265, 270, 281, 289, 309, 316, 318, 319, 323–325, 332, 333, 343, 354, 390, 400, 401, 405, 406, 424, 426, 447, 460, 466, 467, 469, 493, 503, 543, 563, 578 emotional expressions – nonverbal 141, 153–155, 166, 224, 234, 239, 240, 247, 252, 462 emotional expressions 9, 153–155, 166, 191, 219–234, 239, 240, 244, 247, 248, 251, 252, 394, 493 emotions 9, 86, 123, 124, 132, 133, 143, 153– 155, 159, 161, 162, 168, 191, 201, 219–234, 239, 240, 247, 248, 252, 254, 351, 354, 417–419, 421, 424, 427, 429, 431, 463, 493, 543, 586 enryo-sasshi theory 78, 82, 83 environmental stress 11, 389, 391, 400, 402, 403 epistemology 27, 29, 45, 67, 68, 78, 80, 81 equivalence 232, 563, 565–568, 570, 571, 574, 575 ethnic – distance 398 – identity 11, 58, 107, 113, 144, 159, 161, 169, 380, 389, 392, 396, 402, 439 – proximity 11, 389, 391, 398, 403, 404 ethnicity 241, 369, 373, 374, 389, 390, 392, 393, 398, 406, 407, 416, 439, 457, 461, 482, 485, 542, 543, 548, 618, 621 ethnocentrism 10, 21, 22, 52, 88, 194, 261, 266, 268, 270, 275–277, 283, 284, 331– 344, 390, 429, 467, 468, 486, 581, 583, 589, 590, 592, 601, 618 ethnography 8, 19, 28, 30, 31, 37, 59, 241, 244, 355 – of communication 8, 19, 30, 31, 241, 244 eurocentric domination 354 euro-centricism 110 evolutionary theory 9, 219, 221 experiential learning 344, 415, 417, 418, 420, 427, 431 expressiveness 121, 166, 179, 191, 244, 252, 462, 463 face 4, 9, 10, 45, 46, 48, 50–52, 108, 151, 160–163, 168, 199, 202–204, 206, 219, 222–224, 226, 234, 248, 274, 360, 362, 421, 442

651

– and facework 200, 202, 203 – to face 4, 10, 31, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53, 153, 206, 243, 289, 380–383, 415, 421, 432, 470, 482, 538, 539, 548, 598, 619, 621, 622, 624, 626, 631 facework 54, 141, 142, 148, 152, 155, 160–164, 167–170, 200, 202, 203, 361, 442 facial expressions 9, 153–155, 221–229, 231, 240, 245, 395 – of emotions 153–155, 166, 222–229, 231, 234, 240, 251 feminist studies 33 filial piety 289–291, 293–296, 302 Finnish 119, 133, 208, 245, 567 Foreign Service Institute 19, 20, 22–24, 109 frames (situational and relational) 142, 147 French 67, 119, 131, 149, 182, 188, 417, 465, 504, 511, 514, 620, 622, 624, 626 friendship patterns 167, 457, 464, 466 functional value 273, 274 gender differences 33, 207, 462 general systems theory 262, 271 global communication competence 360, 361 globalization 11, 35, 47, 53, 55, 56, 58, 88, 99, 101, 102, 108, 111, 114, 302, 309, 349, 350, 354, 359, 360, 362, 389, 397, 415, 416, 421, 423, 457, 581, 582, 585, 586, 592, 597, 609 glocalization 57 group salience 369, 375–378, 380 health implications of aging and communication 9, 289–291, 301 high and low context 22, 26, 192, 251–253, 599 high-context communication 141, 148–150, 170, 180, 192 history 5–7, 10, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 45, 57, 69, 79, 88–90, 127, 134, 189, 220, 234, 268, 280, 331, 332, 361, 374, 390, 395, 406, 440, 465, 482, 483, 491, 503, 507, 516, 529, 531, 565, 585, 587, 592, 600, 608, 617 Hofstede’s dimensions 26, 143, 180, 274, 599 host culture context 11, 437, 443 host receptivity 467, 468 I-Ching 71–73 identity 5, 26, 31, 32, 34, 36–38, 53, 54, 77, 89, 106–107, 112, 113, 122, 125, 126, 128–

652

Index

130, 132, 135, 141–143, 146, 153, 159, 164, 168, 181–184, 191, 192, 200–202, 205, 207, 210, 239, 245–247, 250, 296, 321, 323, 334, 355, 358–360, 363, 369–372, 374, 377–381, 389, 391–393, 396, 397, 399, 401, 402, 406, 421, 422, 437–451, 461, 466, 469, 471, 482, 487, 490, 536, 537, 542, 545, 548, 581–588, 590–592, 618–621, 626 – negotiation 11, 54, 141, 145, 159, 165, 167, 168, 201, 437, 439–443, 449, 452, 471 immigration 55, 60, 165, 382, 390, 437, 443, 444, 450, 473, 597, 610 indirectness 187, 188, 208 ingroup 11, 143, 146, 147, 151, 154, 155, 159, 160, 167, 168, 170, 201, 202, 210, 219, 229, 231–234, 275, 276, 296, 297, 331, 333–335, 340, 341, 344, 370, 371, 376– 381, 389–391, 393, 394, 396, 397, 400– 403, 406, 424, 460, 487, 488, 490, 549 – advantage 219, 231, 233 inhibition hypothesis 222 institutional equity 11, 389, 391, 400, 401, 403 integration 8, 11, 47, 77, 88, 358, 360, 389, 391, 398–400, 403–405, 422, 438, 443– 452, 457, 546, 581, 593, 599, 602, 623 intercultural – competence 13, 27, 50, 51, 350, 361, 418, 420, 427, 428, 431, 446, 457, 469, 470, 597, 598, 600–603, 605, 607–610, 618, 625–628 – competence (virtual world) 427, 626–628 – couples 9, 199, 200, 207–209, 211 – friendship 12, 156, 205, 377, 457–461, 463, 467–473, 627 – health communication 12, 481, 482, 490, 494 – histories 19–38 – interaction 3, 48, 51, 67, 73, 76, 88–90, 119, 131, 166, 199, 203, 242, 245, 343, 344, 353, 356, 357, 359–362, 372, 373, 378, 419, 420, 429, 431, 442, 485, 566, 577, 609 – new media research 37, 617, 618, 628, 630 – new media studies 13, 48, 59, 617, 618, 629–632 – romantic relationship 167, 208 – understanding 563, 573, 601 intercultural communication – and new media 617, 618, 624, 629, 630, 631

– competence (ICC) 10, 11, 22, 27, 35, 349– 363, 419, 481–484, 490, 492–494, 617, 618, 629, 631 – competence training 22, 350, 357, 359, 481– 484, 490, 492–494 – definition 22, 99–102, 350, 563, 598, 599, 624 – skills 483, 490, 604, 626 interethnic communication 11, 27, 113, 389– 406 intergenerational communication 9, 289–294, 296–301, 451, 598 intergroup – anxiety 157, 266, 343, 371, 378, 380, 381, 398, 403, 460 – communication 11, 24, 27, 52, 86, 141, 145, 146, 148, 159, 166, 167, 170, 290, 369– 372, 383, 393, 481–484, 493, 494, 598 – contact 11, 276, 277, 369, 370, 374–382, 400, 442, 457, 460, 473, 549 international – business 13, 358, 416, 418, 419, 422, 428, 429, 431, 432, 597, 598, 606, 609, 610 – communication (definition) 99–101 – conflict 262–264, 270, 277 – flows 503, 507, 508, 514 – student flows 112 – students 49, 109, 111, 112, 156, 158, 203, 205, 207, 358, 400, 438, 446, 457–460, 463, 464, 466–470, 472, 473, 610, 625 interpersonal communication and culture 9, 20, 28, 33, 51, 199–212, 483 interpretive assumptions 46 interpretive frameworks 46, 119, 128, 399 interprofessional communication 481, 488– 490, 492 intra and intergenerational communication perceptions 9, 289, 290, 296 Israeli 49, 119, 125, 453 Japanese 49, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 100, 107–111, 119, 132, 149, 150, 154, 156, 161, 183, 184, 186–193, 202, 203, 205, 224, 229, 231, 232, 240, 243–246, 248, 250, 255, 291, 292, 296–298, 300, 302, 462, 532, 567, 588, 600, 622 language 31–33, 49–51, 54–59, 69, 70, 76, 83–86, 88, 106–107, 111, 113, 123, 142, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 167, 180–184, 187, 188, 190–194, 208, 239, 244, 246, 284, 296, 297, 301, 312, 341, 353, 354, 359,

Index

371–374, 392, 416, 418, 419, 422, 424, 441, 446, 450, 452, 458, 460, 463, 469, 470, 482–494, 509, 515, 536, 563, 565– 571, 573, 605, 606, 619, 623, 626 linguistic code 180, 181, 353 low/high context communication 22, 26, 141, 148–150, 166, 170, 180–182, 192, 193, 209, 249, 251–253, 462, 599, 601, 606, 618, 628 maat 57, 83–85 Mahatma Gandhi 57, 76, 83, 87 meaning 4, 26, 56, 80, 84, 103, 119–122, 125, 128–131, 134, 142, 147, 148, 153, 159, 160, 163, 182, 188, 190, 191, 199, 209, 220, 227, 239–242, 245–247, 250, 252, 275, 295, 315, 317, 322, 350, 351, 361, 362, 416, 422, 445, 467, 519, 531, 542, 565– 569, 572, 577, 584, 585, 592 measures for promoting contact 471 media influence 380, 503, 512, 520, 540, 541 mediation 3, 4, 10–14, 563, 565, 568, 570, 572–575, 578 – three degrees of 4 medical ethnocentrism 486 medu nefer 84, 85 metacognition 419, 420, 429, 430 Mexican 119 migration 11, 35, 55, 60, 165, 294, 382, 390, 421, 422, 432, 437, 443, 444, 450, 473, 597, 599, 610, 618 miscommunication 82, 165, 211, 398, 473, 482–485, 487, 489, 493, 571, 608 motivation 11, 12, 50, 70, 81, 141, 146, 152, 163, 165, 191, 201, 334, 342, 349, 351, 353, 354, 358–360, 370–374, 390, 396, 398, 415, 417–419, 426, 430, 431, 442, 457, 467, 481, 483, 491, 494, 495, 536, 543, 545, 600, 601, 608, 609 multiculturalism 52, 360, 406, 422, 433, 452, 550, 597, 602 narrative/story 33, 35, 54, 56, 79, 90, 158, 160, 205, 206, 208, 316, 317, 321, 323, 405, 428–430 national identity 13, 246, 369, 581–586, 590, 592 neoliberalism 309, 311, 314, 325 new media 13, 14, 37, 46, 48, 53, 59, 349, 363, 617–621, 623–625, 627–632

653

nonverbal communication 9, 21–23, 55, 72, 141, 142, 148, 153, 154, 166, 191, 239, 251, 296, 303, 489 norms of peace 271 online self-disclosure 167, 206, 207 outgroup 151, 160, 168, 170, 201, 229, 233, 275, 276, 331–335, 338–341, 343, 371, 374–382, 390, 394, 396, 401, 402, 439, 460, 471, 489, 549 – homogeneity effect 371 partnerships 147, 206, 309, 316, 319, 322–325 patient’s relationship with the doctor see doctor-patient relationship personal identity 141, 147, 168, 359, 370, 379, 421, 487, 536 personal network 11, 389, 391, 398–400, 403, 404, 625 phenomenology 26, 29, 31, 37, 52 place branding 592 political consumerism 582, 584, 585 politically engaged translation 563, 572 postcolonialism 19, 32–35, 37, 47 power 5, 6, 14, 26, 29, 33–36, 47, 54–56, 73– 75, 85, 99–101, 112, 113, 124, 132, 155, 166, 168, 170, 180, 182, 183, 185, 193, 200, 244–246, 250, 273, 277, 279, 280, 292, 312, 314–316, 319, 321–323, 325, 344, 361, 370, 389, 397, 401, 403, 428, 431, 483, 484, 487, 488, 506, 508, 512, 515, 524, 538, 540, 546, 563, 565, 568, 570, 572, 575, 576, 585, 586, 591, 600, 601, 605–607, 619, 631 – distance 26, 143–145, 162–164, 166, 600, 606, 607, 622 prejudice 5, 9, 10, 21, 27, 32, 53, 87, 142, 209, 277, 331–336, 369, 371, 374, 378, 390, 394, 400, 406, 427, 457, 459, 460, 473, 530–532, 536, 539, 545, 548 privacy management 167, 204 Privacy Manipulation Theory 206 process model 12, 357, 374, 529, 531, 532 propaganda 88, 503–505, 509–510 propaganda, theories 88, 511 proxemics 59, 153, 240, 243, 424 queer theory 32, 33 reflexivity 150, 165, 322, 323, 418, 427 relational – management strategies 204, 492

654

Index

– media 379, 380 – mobility 212 – rewards 209 – turbulence 208 relative ingroup strength 389, 391, 401–403 reputation, corporate 13, 591 resistance 32, 35, 53, 70, 263, 309, 316, 322, 471, 565, 571, 608 respect 3, 4, 59, 113, 130, 132, 133, 152, 154, 158, 160, 163, 169, 183, 188, 191, 289, 291, 292, 294–296, 298, 299, 301, 302, 318, 337, 352, 353, 360, 395, 401, 403, 430, 461, 470, 486, 520, 543, 568, 569, 571, 577, 587 retrospective analysis 211 right speech 85 role of resistance 316 roles 9, 12, 51, 53, 123, 148, 154, 166, 181, 183, 188, 261, 266, 276–279, 283, 289, 302, 378, 399, 401, 440, 460, 487, 489, 533, 541, 543, 578, 598, 607 sadharanikaran 83, 86 self-construal 27, 141, 146, 147, 150–153, 161, 162, 165, 200, 210 self-disclosure 9, 51, 121, 141, 142, 155–159, 164, 167, 169, 199, 200, 204–207, 211, 356, 378, 461–463 semantic networks 103, 104, 109 semiotics 31, 32, 645 silence 24, 71, 75, 76, 82, 84, 87, 129, 131, 146, 149, 189–191, 208, 240, 244, 245, 253, 254, 309, 510 social change 4, 9, 10, 14, 27, 54, 58, 83, 87, 125, 279, 301, 302, 309–325, 572 – communication 310–312, 314–316, 319, 321– 325 social identity 11, 126, 141, 145, 201, 210, 250, 296, 331, 334, 369–372, 374, 379, 380, 383, 393, 396, 401, 439, 440, 487, 536, 584, 619 – model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) 379, 380 Social Identity Theory 296, 331, 334, 369–372, 383, 396, 401, 439, 440, 487, 536, 619 sociocultural identity 141, 168 speech act 54, 179, 184, 185, 187, 190, 192, 210

stereotype change 529, 530, 544–551 stereotype control 12, 529, 544, 545, 550 stereotypes 9, 12, 194, 261, 269, 270, 275– 277, 280, 284, 289–293, 296, 299–302, 333, 336, 369, 373, 374, 376, 390, 416, 425, 442, 452, 468, 483, 529–551, 606 stereotyping 5, 12, 51, 290, 292, 294, 336, 371, 390, 394, 396, 427, 529–542, 544, 545, 548, 550, 551, 618, 624, 628 strategies 9, 11, 45, 50–54, 70, 87, 151, 159– 163, 185, 187, 188, 199, 202–204, 208, 209, 296, 303, 312, 313, 319, 322, 342, 373, 374, 395, 398, 420, 437, 442, 443, 449, 471, 484, 489–493, 545, 547, 572, 606, 622, 627 Structural Theory of Imperialism 100 subaltern voices 309, 319, 320, 323, 324 susceptibility to imported media (SIM) 503, 520, 521 tabligh 88 theoretical new media implications, intercultural 617, 619, 621, 624, 627–629, 631 third culture 168, 445, 618, 621 third culture, virtual world 622–624 three-stage development process 550 U. S. American 31, 49, 68, 82, 119, 131, 146, 150, 151, 156, 158, 161, 162, 167, 205, 230, 243, 245, 248, 250, 252, 284, 462, 464 use of space 21, 239, 240, 243, 252 verbal communication 8, 9, 21–23, 55, 72, 85, 141, 142, 148, 152–154, 166, 179, 180, 189, 191–193, 239, 251, 296, 303, 471, 489, 566, 601 virtual intercultural dialogue 432, 622–624 Voice 29–31, 54, 57–59, 99, 101, 113, 121, 149, 162, 192, 233, 316, 319–324, 395, 510, 518, 588 Western Apache 119, 133, 134, 190, 465 western bias in intercultural research 26, 200, 290 Whiteness 19, 33, 34, 37 workplace age stereotypes 292 World Systems Theory 100