Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life, and Scholarship in Globalizing Universities

Adam Komisarof, Zhu Hua

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317578802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book generates a fresh, complex view of the process of globalization by examining how work, scholarship, and life inform each other among intercultural scholars as they navigate their interpersonal relationships and cross boundaries physically and metaphorically. Divided into three parts, the book examines: (1) the socio-psychological process of crossing boundaries constructed around nations and work organizations; (2) the negotiation of multiple aspects of identities; and (3) the role of language in intercultural encounters, in particular, adjustment taking place at linguistic and interactional levels. The authors reflect upon and give meaning and structure to their own intercultural experiences through theoretical frameworks and concepts—many of which they themselves have proposed and developed in their own research. They also provide invaluable advice for transnational scholars and those who aspire to work and live abroad to improve organizational participation and mutual intercultural engagement when working in a globalizing workplace. Researchers and practitioners of applied linguistics, communication studies, and higher education in many regions of the world will find this book an insightful resource.

1
Introduction

Adam Komisarof and Zhu Hua

Globalization is a compelling force in universities worldwide. With the flow of migrants continuing unabated, even intensifying across national borders, many universities are hosts to communities boasting unprecedented cultural diversity—evident in their faculties, administrations, and student bodies. These changes have brought the concomitant challenge of forging inclusive multicultural spaces in an institution—that of higher learning—which is often expected to lead the broader society in similarly humanistic endeavors. In this volume, we hope to gain a bird’s eye view as to how such efforts are progressing.

Globalization, and the flow of people across national borders which it has engendered, is viewed by many as a hallmark of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Migration and intercultural contact, however, are not new (Giddens, 2001); vestiges abound of such interaction throughout human history, whether captured in Marco Polo’s tales of his travels or embodied in the remnants of China’s Great Wall (which was constructed to keep invading forces at bay). Adventure, trade, missionary work, exploitation, and/or the promise of opportunity have motivated people for millennia to venture beyond their native borders. What differentiates the present is that such migration is occurring now on an unprecedented scale. According to Sam and Berry (2006), at the start of the twenty-first century, there were 175 million people living in countries different from their birthplace, which constituted a doubling from just 25 years earlier. More recently, International Migration Report (2013) states that the total number of migrants worldwide had ballooned to 232 million in 2013.

Simply stated, globalization refers to the increased mobility of products, services, ideas, labor, technology, and capital throughout the world (Hamada, 2008; Vogt and Achenbach, 2012). Globalization can also be conceived as a social process which involves material, political, and symbolic exchanges (Hamada, 2008) as human resources cross national borders, thus having a profound effect upon social space, which is, in the words of sociologist Jan Aart Scholte, becoming “deterritorialized” (Vogt and Achenbach, 2012).

To better understand the impact of globalization and be responsive to their own changing demographic composition, universities are re-examining their curricula, teaching methods, student recruitment, and much more. The very fabric of institutional life and experience is in the process of transformation, and university faculties are no exception. In striving to achieve the elusive ideal of a truly international university, hiring the best scholars and educators in their fields, regardless of nationality, is a central objective at most top-flight institutions. Even universities of more modest means are looking increasingly beyond their own national borders when hiring new faculty. Consequently, the world’s academics have never been more mobile. However, employing a culturally diverse staff of scholars is only the beginning; namely, these new members need to be integrated into their organizations to make them feel a sense of participation and fully leverage their professional contributions.

The purpose of this book is to generate a fresh, complex view of the process of globalization by examining how work, life, and scholarship inform each other among university faculty members, specifically as they navigate their interpersonal relationships at work and beyond. This will be accomplished by investigating the experience of transnational, intercultural scholars: transnational in the sense that they have worked and lived in countries different from those of their heritage/home cultures and crossed (in)visible national, social, cultural, professional, and/or organizational boundaries physically and metaphorically, while intercultural in the sense that these scholars, with their different research orientations and connections, all work in the field of intercultural communication, which is broadly defined as a study of interactions between people of different cultures.

In this volume our authors analyze their successes and challenges in establishing a sense of belonging in their organizations. Many reference the broader context of globalization among universities in their country of residence (and in the process highlight globalization’s localized impact), but their focus is upon the relational and interactional dynamics as they negotiate their social and professional participation within their organizational networks, i.e. with other faculty members, students, departmental/university managers, and administrators. In the process, the authors explore the reflexive relationship between work, life, and scholarship—demonstrating their professional and personal investment in faculty globalization.

As expressed in the title, the notion of crossing boundaries is central to this endeavor. Boundaries can imply both visible and fixed national borders and those invisible, perceptual, and shifting ones, e.g. psychological barriers, cultural/linguistic differences, and disciplinary orientations. The weaving in the title also reflects an important theme. We are interested in how scholars working in the field of intercultural communication (and therefore, veterans and insiders in the discipline) manage intercultural transitions, participation, and inclusion, and how their interest and expertise in the field inform their choices in everyday workplace practice, and vice versa.

The centrality of inclusion and belonging

One inherent assumption in this volume is that inclusion and belonging are key themes in globalization. Importing diversity is not enough to make a university faculty truly global. It is also essential to socially and professionally integrate diverse members into the group—in the sense that newcomers can develop relational and communication dynamics with their coworkers, which empower them to advance and actualize their skills as scholars, administrators, and educators (the, so-called, three pillars of academic work). Only once this occurs can universities fully leverage the benefits of such diversity.

When such benchmarks are not reached, the consequences can be dire. According to social psychologists, the experience of exclusion results in negative outcomes, both affective (i.e. feelings of misery, frustration, and/or anger) and performance related (i.e. perceived inability in one’s capacity to act and achieve) (Abrams, Hogg, and Marques, 2005). Those excluded can experience the erosion of valued social and psychological resources, including prestige, esteem, respect, independence, and self-determination.

Likewise, research strongly indicates that connectedness and belonging are necessary to function optimally in terms of health, adjustment, and well-being (Pickett and Brewer, 2005). For migrants, such acceptance usually comes with sustained host culture involvement, which has been shown to reduce sojourner stress and promote positive affect towards host culture members (Berry, Kim, Minde, and Mok, 1987; Inoue and Ito, 1993; Komisarof, 2004a; Sanchez and Fernandez, 1993; Ward, 1996). University faculty members are no different in this regard. Therefore, one of the aims of this book is to discover how to promote socio-professional acceptance more effectively so that faculties can be more inclusive of international cultural diversity and globalize beyond the merely cosmetic act of importing foreign nationals.

Acculturation

Another shared theme in the experiences of faculty crossing national and organizational boundaries is that they frequently undergo acculturation, which Berry, Kim, Power, Young, and Bujaki (1989) define as the process which “occurs when two independent cultural groups come into continuous first-hand contact over an extended period of time, resulting in changes in either or both cultural groups” (p. 186). For groups, acculturation usually refers to changes in social structure, economic base, and/or political organization (Berry, Kim, and Boski, 1988; Castro, 2003), while individual acculturation is a process that, as Chirkov (2009) writes, “emerges within the context of interactions, both physical and symbolic,” (p. 178) between someone who has entered a cultural community different from where s/he was initially socialized and members of that community. It involves psychological acculturation, which brings with it changes in attitudes, values, identity, and behaviors (Castro, 2003; Sam, 2006).

During the process of acculturation, individuals also make adjustments in the ways they use language(s), but to be able to speak the language(s) of the host society is itself not enough. Many studies (for a summary, see Zhu, 2014) have identified areas that may cause problems in interacting with others from a different linguistic and cultural background, for example, inappropriately transferring social-pragmatic rules of their first language(s) into the new language, clashes of different styles of communication, mismatches in cultural schemas, or a lack of understanding of professional and institutional discourses.

Acculturation is complex—shaped by social, political, economic, cultural and linguistic factors in the societies of origin and settlement as well as individuals’ stress levels; skill deficits; affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses; and demographic factors such as age, socioeconomic class, and gender (van Selm, Sam, and van Oudenhoven, 1997; Ward, 1996). Individual characteristics (e.g. personality, language fluency, training and experience, and acculturation attitudes), as well as situational ones (e.g. length and amount of cultural contact, cultural distance, degree of social support, and extent of life changes), influence the process (Castro, 2003). In the forthcoming chapters, we will see numerous concrete examples demonstrating both the richness and profundity of acculturation as it changes people’s lives forever.

A shared understanding of culture?!

As this book examines acculturation and the process of crossing cultural boundaries, a shared understanding of culture, i.e. the entity whose boundaries are being crossed, is desirable. Establishing a working definition of culture, however, is easier said than done, as this is a highly contentious issue among both academics and practitioners in fields concerned with culture and cultural change (Waldram, 2009).

We can, however, summarize some of the major issues of contention and attempt to resolve them sufficiently to move forward with our analysis. Zhu Hua (2014) identifies four schools of thought regarding the conceptualization and application of culture in intercultural communication studies. The first, the compositional approach, presents culture as abstract, yet relatively boundaried in terms of time, space, and its effects on individual psychology and behavior, as Triandis (1996) describes: “Culture consists of shared elements that provide the standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, communicating, and acting among those who share a language, a historic period, and a geographic location.” (p. 408)

Similarly, Hofstede (2001) famously coined culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another” (pp. 9–10). His cultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism, power distance, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, and long/short-term orientation, along with Hall’s (1976) theories of high/low context, polychronic/monochronic time, and proxemics (how personal space differs between cultures), are widely seen as outgrowths of the compositional approach to intercultural communication research and application. Specifically, they stress the centrality of values and verbal and nonverbal communication styles in defining relatively independent, coherent, and stable cultural groups, which are usually conceived and operationalized as national cultures.

This view of culture has been criticized by scholars from other schools of thought (e.g. Hermans and Kempen, 1998; Ikeda, 2008; Rudmin, 2004; Waldram, 2009). Longstanding controversies include the debate over whether nations have distinct, identifiable cultures, and whether cultural regularity or patterns even exist. As Weinreich (2009) asserts, “Culture is not static; it is not a given entity, but is maintained ... and reformulated in part as a set of complex socio-psychological processes in which people are to varying extents active agents.” (p. 126) Another dispute has raged over whether grouping people into cultural groups unjustly promotes stereotypes, exclusion of cultural “outsiders,” and exclusiveness among “insiders”—as Komisarof (2014) argues specifically about Nihonjinron (i.e. an ideology which endows Japanese culture and identity with a set of qualities that separate Japanese people from other national and ethnic groups)—or whether culture can actually be a useful tool for understanding one’s social environment when employed carefully in light of nuanced research findings (as contended in Komisarof, 2004b). Criticisms of the compositional approach likewise extend to scholarship of identity. Weinreich (1999) stresses that the assumptions of unambiguous, boundaried ingroup and outgroup identification “do not take account of the social realities of varying degrees of cross-ethnic identification, the situated contexts of modulations in these identifications, [and] the differences in cultural orientation within an ethnicity” (p. 147).

Other schools of thought about culture

The compositional approach to culture is the oldest and has probably spawned the most debate regarding its perceived foibles, which other schools of thought have attempted to redress. For example, Geertz (1973) objects to reducing culture to specific, quantifiable, and classifiable traits; relatively sparse, thin descriptions that double as cultural analysis; and experimental approaches in search of universal principles, coherence, or unified patterns of a culture. His semiotic, or interpretiveapproach, emphasizes thick description of “webs” of meaning which are revealed when behaviors are detailed in context.

Geertz’s work helped spawn two other schools of thought (Zhu, 2014). The action approach embraces culture not as an entity, but as a process. For example, Adrian Holliday’s (2011) notion of small culture “emphasizes the dynamic and changing nature of culture, recognizes the role of people in culture-making and acknowledges commonalities that can be identified among people of the same age, occupation, ability, common experience, other than nationalities and ethnicities” (pp. 193–4). Similarly, Moore (2005) argues that culture is

a common repertoire of ideas which is reworked in ways which are systematic, but not predictable. Culture is seen, not as a bounded, unified entity, containing distinct national and organizational forms, but as subject to continuous negotiation as different groups overlap, come together, and move apart. (p. 5)

For Street (1993), the action approach carries the implicit view that culture is “an active process of meaning-making” which “accentuates differences and boundaries between different groups.” (p. 25) Rudmin (2006) explains the implications of this approach for how we conceive acculturation:

Cultural groups select features by which to differentiate themselves and semiotically mark their inter-cultural boundaries. Thus, acculturation is not about cultural values, practices, and traits per se, but about encountering and reacting to social constructs created and maintained as perceptual boundaries between cultures. Similar cultures, such as Japan and Korea, or Canada and the USA, will still be bounded and semiotically marked by their respective communities, even though they have large cultural intersections and little cultural distance. (p. 27)

By extension, group identity is ascribed by symbolically, simultaneously constructing difference between groups, and similarity within them—whether or not such similarity actually exists (Barth, 1969; Jenkins, 1996).

What motivates such constructions of group identity and boundaries? Self-inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Acculturation dynamics
• PART II Negotiating identities
• PART III Language and interaction
• Index