Language and Intercultural Communication in the Workplace

Critical approaches to theory and practice

Hans J. Ladegaard, Christopher Jenks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138204928
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315468150
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

From language classrooms to outdoor markets, the workplace is fundamental to socialisation. It is not only a site of employment where money is made and institutional roles are enacted through various forms of discourse; it is also a location where people engage in social actions and practices. The workplace is an interesting research site because of advances in communication technology, cheaper and greater options for travel, and global migration and immigration. Work now requires people to travel over great geographical distances, communicate with cultural 'others' located in different time zones, relocate to different regions or countries, and conduct business in online settings. The workplace is thus changing and evolving, creating new and emerging communicative contexts.

This volume provides a greater understanding of workplace cultures, particularly the ways in which working in highly interconnected and multicultural societies shape language and intercultural communication. The chapters focus on critical approaches to theory and practice, in particular how practice is used to shape theory. They also question the validity and universality of existing models. Some of the predominant models in intercultural communication have been criticised for being Eurocentric or Anglocentric, and this volume proposes alternative frameworks for analysing intercultural communication in the workplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.

Reconsidering intercultural (communication) competence in the workplace: a dialectical approach

Judith N. Martin^a and Thomas K. Nakayama^b

^aSchool of Human Communication, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA; ^bDepartment of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (sociolinguistics, language education, communication, business, etc.) have investigated and promoted the notion of competence in intercultural interaction for many years. They have addressed complex issues and proposed culture general and culture specific models and applied these models in various contexts including workplace interaction. In this paper, we examine the assumptions about the cultural identities of workers in contemporary research and training in intercultural competence. These assumptions seem to reinscribe the colonialist traveler/cosmopolitan – focusing on individual characteristics, motivation, and skill sets, often through a Eurocentric lens. A dialectical perspective foregrounds individual characteristics of competence with larger societal attitudes and laws that impact the treatment of women, gays, and others. A dialectical perspective can help us better understand the opportunities and constraints facing different people in workplaces around the world. By complicating our understanding of competence and taking a dialectical perspective, we hope to advance theory and practice in this important topic area.

Chercheurs et praticiens de divers milieux disciplinaires (sociolinguistique, l’enseignement des langues, la communication, les entreprises, etc.) ont étudié et promu la notion de compétence en interaction interculturelle depuis de nombreuses années. Ils ont abordé des questions complexes et proposé des modèles de culture-générale et culture-spécifique et appliqués ces modèles dans divers contextes, y compris l’interaction dans les lieux de travail. Dans cet article, nous examinons les hypothèses sur les identités des travailleurs dans la recherche contemporaine et de la formation en compétences interculturelles. Ces hypothèses semblent réinscrire le voyageur colonialiste/cosmopolite mettant l’accent sur les caractéristiques individuelles, la motivation et les compétences, souvent par l’intermédiaire d’une lentille eurocentrique. Une perspective dialectique peut nous aider à mieux comprendre les possibilités et les contraintes auxquelles sont confrontées des personnes différentes dans des lieux de travail à travers le monde. En compliquant notre compréhension de la compétence et de prendre un point de vue dialectique, nous espérons faire avancer la théorie et la pratique dans ce sujet important.

Introduction

The concept of intercultural competence has been one of the traditional areas of intercultural scholarship. Scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including psychology (Thomas, 2003), language education (Aguilar, 2009; Byram, Gribkova, & Starkey 2002; Byram & Zarate, 1997; Byram, 2012; Dasli, 2012a; Fantini, 2012; Kramsch, 2009; Méndez García, 2012; Rathje, 2007), communication (Arasaratnam, 2007; Arasaratnam, Banerjee, & Dembek, 2010; Bennett, 2009; Chen, 2014; Chen & Starosta, 1996; Ting-Toomey, 2009; Wiseman & Koester, 1993; Yep, 2000), business (Bartel-Radic, 2009; Johnson, Lenartowicz, & Apud, 2006; Matveev, 2004; Morley & Cerdin, 2010), education (Deardorff, 2009; Holmes, 2006), have investigated and promoted the notion of competence in intercultural interaction for many years.

One of the most important contexts for intercultural interaction in the twenty-first century is the global workplace. In fact, one might argue that the workplace is the setting where individuals are most likely to encounter persons of different cultural backgrounds – as globalization, world immigration patterns, and technological advances shrink the cultural distances between some workers (Washington, Okoro, & Thomas, 2012). In fact, many business leaders identify intercultural communication competence (ICC) as a requisite skill set for workers entering the current job market (Milhauser & Rahschulte, 2010).

However, it must be noted that the majority of ICC models have been based on Eurocentric, ethnocentric, and egocentric perspectives (Bruneau, 2002; Yep, 2000), and therefore may be limited in their applicability to multiple cross-cultural encounters or contexts (Greenholtz, 2005; Martin, 1993; Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009): ‘Generalizations and assumptions derived from models with such a skewed perspective have a tendency to be unfairly normative, ineffective, and inconsiderate’ (Kupka, Everett, & Wildermuth, 2007, p. 21). Specifically, these individual-centered models tend to focus on national culture, conceptualize culture as bounded and static, and ignore issues of power and the larger structures that constrain and impact individual attitudes and actions. However, more recent scholarship has challenged these notions, emphasizing the dynamic, fluid nature of culture, cultural identity and intercultural encounters (Feng, 2009; Holliday, 2009, 2010a; Jack, 2009; Jenks, Bhatia, & Lou, 2013; Verschueren, 2008; Young & Sercombe, 2010), recognizing the important role of political and other macrostructures in investigations of intercultural competence (Block, 2013; Hoskins & Sallah, 2011; Phipps, 2014). In this paper, we propose a dialectical approach to ICC scholarship, in an attempt to contribute to this more complex and nuanced understanding of competence and advance theory and practice in this important topic area.

We first describe the characteristics and challenges of the twenty-first century global workplace and then outline and critique traditional approaches to ICC. Specifically we note how the positivistic individual-centered approaches that call for ‘mutual accommodation’ and ‘shared meaning’ may not adequately reflect the realities of dynamic, structural (societal and organizational) hierarchies of the global workplace. Finally we present a critical dialectical perspective that offers a dynamic, relational approach to competence and foregrounds individual characteristics of competence with larger societal attitudes and laws that impact an individual’s competence skills (Martin & Nakayama, 2010).

The twenty-first century global workplace

Business experts and scholars agree that the twenty-first century workplace, regardless of location, is somewhat different from the work contexts of even 25 years ago as a result of (1) economic globalization (Akram, Fahim, Bin Dost, & Abdullah, 2011), (2) shifting demographic patterns (Karoly & Panis, 2004), and (3) the rapid pace of technological change. Economic globalization affects industries worldwide and segments of the workforce insulated from trade-related competition in the past. The shift in workplace demographics arise from local and global migration patterns. People have always encountered cultural others, migrating because of war, famine, or search for a better life and work, and current migration is no exception. The post WWII labor migration from Turkey, Spain, and Italy to Germany, for instance, brought huge complexity to a fragile peace and a country rebuilding from the ground up. Rural Pakistani and Bangladeshi moving to communities in northwest mill towns in England in the early 1900s, or the great migration of African-Americans from southern to northern USA in the same era also saw increasing intercultural contact, not without conflict. Current statistics reveal women migrating and entering the workforce in greater numbers than ever before; people in many countries are working later in life – leading to a shift in workplace demographics and a more balanced distribution by age, sex, and race/ethnicity and greater participation in the workforce by those with low labor force experience (Karoly & Panis, 2004; World Migration in Figures, 2013).

A final factor that impacts the current global workplace is technological change, especially communication technologies (Karoly & Panis, 2004, p. xiv), resulting in the increase in virtual work and global virtual teamwork of often culturally diverse team members (Lloyd & Härtel, 2010; Phadnis & Caplice, 2013), raising the question of how online encounters impact intercultural competences (Maroccia, 2012). Technological advances have also led to the proliferation of job outsourcing to emerging economy locales. All these factors are ‘catapulting people, practices, and beliefs from different cultures into shared and contested physical and virtual spaces in workplaces … in unprecedented ways’ (Sorrells, 2012, p. 372), leading to complex and challenging power and relational dynamics (Holliday, 2012; Kramsch & Uryu, 2012; Sorrells, 2013).

Power issues and hierarchies have always been a taken-for-granted element of the workplace (Coleman, Kugler, Mitchinson, & Foster, 2013) and cultural variation in the expectations and practices regarding these hierarchies (e.g. Hofstede’s [2001] power distance variable) have been well documented (Bochner & Hesketh, 1994; Matusitz & Musambira, 2013; Varela, Salgado, & Lasio, 2010). However, a more challenging (and also endemic) hierarchy is the structural inequality among various identity groups (nationality, language, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) that come together in the contemporary workplace (Gates & Mitchell, 2013; Warren, 2012).

These complex structural inequalities often stem from historical social power relations and some economists suggest that these inequities may be heightened as a result of globalization, due to increased power of global capital over labor (Śliwa, 2007; Walby, 2003). For just one example, there are a number of recent studies highlighting the effect of globalization on gender inequities in the Chinese workplace. Several studies explore the far-reaching effect of China’s economic restructuring and globalization, identifying factors (age, less education) that contribute to women’s increasing disadvantageous position in the work unit and their increased vulnerability in the changing labor market. That is, women are more likely to be offered lower wages and less likely to work in high paying foreign firms – globalization changes the nature of job queues and men and women are matched into jobs accordingly (Liu, 2007; Sheldon, Kim, Li, & Warner, 2011; Shu, Zhu, & Zhang, 2007).

There are other examples of women and children being transported across borders (both legally and illegally) to serve as servants and concubines; sweatshops in cities around the world employ undocumented immigrants with few legal rights. For example, Ladegaard (2013) documents, through narratives of foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong, the exploitation and abuse often suffered by these women and he calls for more attention by language/communication scholars to the larger sociocultural contexts and discursive ideologies that allow for and even promote negative stereotyping and prejudice, and discrimination. There are additional studies, reviewed later in the paper, that explore workplace inequities of other identity groups. The question here is how to understand/investigate ICC in these workplace encounters?

The implications for twenty-first century global worker competences in this current environment with complex structural/historical inequities are enormous and a review of literature on ICC in this context of increasing diversity (and concomitant power relations) reveals two views: (1) increased diversity/inequities require enhanced training in how to manage the increased cultural diversity in national and international contexts (Arakelian, 2009; Dooley, 2003; Guilherme, Glaser, & Méndez García, 2009; Johnson et al., 2006; Mughan, 2009; Tomalin, 2009) with special attention to legal requirements (Collins, 2012); and an opposing view is (2) that traditional diversity training may be intensely inadequate, as diversity management is impacted by both macro (societal) and micro (individual) issues (Keating, Guilherme, & Hoppe, 2010; Syed & Pio, 2010; Warren, 2012) and that a simple ahistorical ‘diversity’ framework approach to competence, without attention to macro issues, may actually reinforce Eurocentric and often colonial power relations (Sorrells, 2012). Jack (2009) notes that in his management and marketing courses, he asks students to critically ‘confront and consider social, political and ethical issues associated with a broader conception of the intercultural. … a more politicized understanding of intercultural competence’ (p. 96). We tend to agree with Jack (2009) and favor this second, more challenging view.

Current research in intercultural (communication) competence

While there has been active investigation of the concepts of communication competence, intercultural competence, and ICC for the past 50 years in a variety of disciplines, there remain many conceptual and practical challenges. The first challenge is the plethora of terms used across disciplines by authors who seldom cite each other’s work. In an attempt to remedy this, let us clarify. The term used in our discipline (communication) is intercultural communication competence. The related terms, intercultural communicative competence, or more recently, the intercultural speaker, are often used by language education scholars – in the tradition of the Council of Europe Common European Framework led by Michael Byram et al. (2002; Byram & Zarate, 1997; MacDonald & O’Regan, 2012, etc.). Generally speaking these two terms/approaches have much in common; a difference seems to be the latter’s privileging of language and language-centered scholarship,¹ although some acknowledge that intercultural competences are not always calibrated with language skills (Dervin, 2010; Zarate, 2003).

A second challenge is to reconcile the interplay between individual competence and societal forces. As described in an earlier paper (Nakayama & Martin, 2014), the majority of competence scholarship in the communication discipline has been conducted from a postpostive variable-analytic approach and attempts to identify and model the various dimensions of ICC on the individual level (Chen, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1995, 2014; Chen & Starosta, 1996; Hammer, 1989; Martin, 1989; 1993; Wiseman, 2002; Wiseman & Koester, 1993). Intercultural communicative competence scholarship seems to have followed the same trajectory (MacDonald & O’Regan, 2012). The recent theoretical integration, resulting in useful conceptual frameworks, reveals that m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Language and intercultural communication in the workplace: critical approaches to theory and practice
• 1 Reconsidering intercultural (communication) competence in the workplace: a dialectical approach
• 2 Issues of language and competence in intercultural business contexts
• 3 Examining linguistic proficiency in the multilingual glocal workplace: a Malaysian case study
• 4 The importance of interfaith dialog in the workplace for achieving organizational goals: a Kenyan case study
• 5 Preparing students for the global workplace: the impact of a semester abroad
• 6 The impact of international students on the university work environment: a comparative study of a Canadian and a Danish university
• 7 ‘The cultural stuff around how to talk to people’: immigrants’ intercultural communication during a pre-employment work-placement
• 8 Virtual team management: what is causing communication breakdown?
• 9 Identities at odds: embedded and implicit language policing in the internationalized workplace
• 10 International city branding as intercultural discourse: workplace, development, and globalization
• Index