Connections and Inclusions

Intercultural Communication in Communication Studies Scholarship

Ahmet Atay, Alberto Gonzalez, Ahmet Atay, Alberto Gonzalez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000081978
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents different aspects of intercultural communication research as they connect to and intersect with sub-disciples such as media studies, communication education, international communication, rhetorical studies, gender and sexuality studies, popular culture, and organizational communication.

Intercultural communication (IC) scholars in the CSCA region have often been questioned, and sometimes challenged, by scholars who have claimed that the Midwest is not an ideal locale for studying communication across cultures and among people from varying cultural backgrounds. However, over the years, scholars have established that intercultural communication is an important area of scholarship in the Midwest (and beyond), and that the region offers plenty of opportunities for studying the intersections of cultural perspectives in communication, ranging from racial and ethnic discrimination to the adaptation process of international students and from immigrant experiences to issues in queer cultures.

Because IC research does not exist in isolation, and it is always connected to larger frameworks or theoretical approaches within communication studies, the contributors in this book address how IC scholarship informs other areas of research and how IC scholars use the concepts and theoretical lenses of IC research to examine issues outside of IC. Although the focus is mainly on IC scholarship within the CSCA region, the scope of the book extends beyond this regional boundary as well.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Communication Studies.

Intercultural Communication: Taking Stock of the Domain

Young Yun Kim

I began studying intercultural communication in the 1970s as a graduate student from Korea, just about the time when intercultural communication was formally instituted as a subdiscipline of communication. It was during this decade that the National Communication Association (NCA) created the Commission on International and Intercultural Communication (which subsequently became a division in the mid-1980s) and the International Communication Association (ICA) established the Division of Intercultural Communication (cf. Prosser, 2018).

In this essay I offer some observations about how intercultural communication as an academic domain has evolved over the past several decades. These observations are based on the insights I have gained as an intercultural communication researcher, theorist, and educator, and through my experiences of having served as chair of the intercultural communication divisions at the NCA and the ICA, and, more recently, as president of an interdisciplinary organization, the International Academy for Intercultural Research (IAIR). Also reflected in this essay is some of the up-to-date knowledge I have acquired recently from working as editor of the International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (Kim, 2018).

The Continuing Focus on the Micro-Level Interaction

Intercultural communication as an area of study emerged in the United States in the 1960s, riding the early wave of globalization (McLuhan, 1962) and the idealism and optimism in the post-World War II United States. This optimism was highlighted by the establishment of the Peace Corps by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as a way of challenging Americans to serve their country for the cause of international peace. In this historical context, early studies of intercultural communication (ICC) were aimed mainly at generating knowledge that could help understand the challenges of cultural differences across societies and find ways to enhance the quality and efficacy of intercultural interaction.

1. Young Yun Kim (PhD, Northwestern University) is a professor of communication at the University of Oklahoma. Her two main research interests are the role of communication in cross-cultural adaptation and the behavior-context interface in interethnic communication.

This original research focus on the micro-level interface of individuals across national cultures has continued to define the domain of ICC, keeping it close to the area of interpersonal communication within the communication discipline. At the same time, ICC has evolved largely independently from “international communication” or “global communication,” the areas that primarily address macro-level issues pertaining to mass-mediated and other technological forms of communication involving two or more nation states, such as globalization of media ownership and infrastructure, transborder flows of media programs and contents, and their impact on traditional societies, cultures, and languages (cf. McPhail, 2010; Thussu, 2006).

Over time, the ICC domain has expanded beyond the interface of individuals in international contexts to include communication activities involving individuals of differing domestic subcultural backgrounds. As such, the term “intercultural communication” has been used broadly to represent a wide range of topics and issues pertaining to the interface of individuals of differing cultural and subcultural backgrounds associated with national, ethnic, racial, and other domestic groups. This inclusive conceptions of culture and intercultural communication are captured in the concept, “stranger,” employed by Gudykunst and Kim (1984a) as a way of integrating a variety of intercultural communication contexts represented by terms, such as intergroup, interethnic, and interracial communication into a continuum of varying degrees of “interculturalness” (Ellingsworth, 1977; Sarbaugh, 1988), marked by the overall difference, unfamiliarity, and psychological distance apparent between communicators.

Intercultural Communication as Interdisciplinary Social Science

From early on when ICC became a subdiscipline of communication, ICC began to take shape and blossom as a social scientific research domain. This early grounding of ICC in the social science research tradition is reflected in a series of books published since the 1970s that were dedicated to the theoretical and methodological development of ICC, including three volumes of the Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication (Asante, Newmark, & Blake, 1979; Asante & Gudykunst, 1989; Gudykunst & Mody, 2004) and four volumes of annuals featuring notable emerging ICC theories (e.g., Gudykunst, 1983, 2005a; Gudykunst & Kim, 1984b; Kim & Gudykunst, 1988; Wiseman, 1995). Guiding the bulk of research and theorizing activities in ICC has been the neopositivist and systems methodologies emphasizing objective and quantitative data collection and analysis, along with the phenomenological-interpretive methodologies using qualitative research methods (e.g., ethnographic field studies, rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, and conversational analysis). More recently, some investigators have used an open-system methodology with “mixed-method” research designs employing both quantitative-objective and qualitative-interpretive methodologies in a single study (e.g., Kim, Lujan, & Dixon, 1998; McKay-Semmler & Kim, 2014).

As is the case in all areas of communication, the intellectual roots of ICC cut across the traditions of various social science disciplines. Building on the works of more established social science disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, cross-cultural and social psychology, and sociolinguistics, intercultural communication has matured into a vibrant area of study domain within the discipline of communication. In particular, ICC owes its development significantly to ethnographic field works of cultural anthropologists (e.g., Hall, 1959, 1976), theory-based empirical studies of cross-cultural psychologists (e.g., Hofstede, 1980, 2001; Triandis, 1995), and the social psychological studies of ethnic/race relations commonly referred to as intergroup psychology (e.g., Pettigrew, 1998; Tajfel & Turner, 1986).

The several decades of growth in social scientific research and theorizing in ICC have resulted in today’s broad ICC domain, which is composed of the traditional core research area and three additional subareas commonly referred to as intergroup communication, cross-cultural communication, and cultural communication.

The traditional core represents the main line of ICC research interests that have been addressed from the very beginning of ICC, that is, the issues, concepts, theories, and research activities involving direct contacts and interaction processes between individuals of dissimilar societal cultural backgrounds. Key concepts and issues addressed in this area include cultural and intercultural communication competence, cultural identity, culture shock and reentry shock, intercultural apprehension, intercultural negotiation, intercultural conflict and conflict management, intercultural sensitivity, intercultural empathy, intercultural friendship, and intercultural peacebuilding. Among the major theories developed in this core area are anxiety/uncertainty management theory (Gudykunst, 1988, 2005b), communication theory of identity (Hecht, Warren, Jung, & Krieger, 2005), face negotiation theory (Ting-Toomey, 2005), and the integrative communication theory of cross-cultural adaptation (Kim, 1988, 2001).

Intergroup communication is a label widely used to refer to the study of communication activities involving individuals of differing domestic sociological groups, such as ethnicity, race, and other commonly recognized social categories influencing communication. Closely related to the discipline of social psychology, intergroup communication scholars have used some of the key social psychological theories, such as social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), intergroup contact theory (Pettigrew, 1998) in developing their own communication-focused theories, such as communication accommodation theory (Gallois, Ogay, & Giles, 2005) and the contextual theory of interethnic communication (Kim, 2005).

Cross-Cultural Communication represents a substantial amount of research that has been conducted to compare two or more cultural groups from the “etic” (“outsider”) perspective. Numerous research findings have been made available on cross-cultural differences in communication-related variables, such as cognitive styles, communication styles, conflict management styles, conversational norms, emotions and expressions, nonverbal communication, personal space, pedagogy, shame and guilt, and virtues and vices. Research in this area uses several theories, many of which have been developed by scholars outside the discipline of communication, such as cross-cultural psychology and cultural anthropology, including Individualism and Collectivism (Triandis, 1995), High- and Low-Context Cultures (Hall, 1976), and Hofstede’s dimensions of cultural variability (Hofstede, 1980, 2001).

Studies in Cultural Communication are largely aimed at identifying unique and prevailing patterns of communication practices associated with specific cultures and domestic subcultures. Unlike cross-cultural communication studies, cultural communication studies take the perspective of cultural relativism and the emic (“insider”) perspective, emphasizing the uniqueness, completeness, and relative stability of each culture. Rooted in the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition, cultural communication studies employ descriptive-interpretive research methods, such as ethnographic field observation, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and textual-rhetorical analysis. As early as 1981 Philipsen laid the groundwork for the ethnographic study of cultural communication and subsequently developed the speech code theory (Philipsen, 1997; Philipsen, Coutu, & Covarrubias, 2005). Directly or indirectly, this theory has served as a significant intellectual foundation and framework for many original field studies, such as Fitch’s (1998) study about the interpersonal communication and relationship patterns in Colombia and Carbaugh’s (2005) study illuminating Finnish practices of silence in conversations.

The Critical Turn: From Objectivism to Activism

Along the way of the development of ICC as a social science research domain, critical intercultural communication scholarship emerged in the 1990s. Branching out from the descriptive-interpretive-rhetorical tradition, critical scholarship has become a salient and productive intellectual force in ICC. Reflecting the general ideological shift toward cultural and ethnic pluralism in the United States and beyond, critical ICC scholars (including those who are associated with cultural studies, postcolonialism, muted group and standpoint theory, and critical pragmatism, feminist studies, and the like) place issues of power and power inequality at the front and center of investigation to highlight the perspectives and experiences of ethnic or racial minorities and of members of non-Western cultures.

Of focal interest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Intercultural Studies within Central States
• 1 Intercultural Communication: Taking Stock of the Domain
• 2 Interiority as Epistemology: Situating Myself in the Central States Communication Association
• 3 Intercultural Communication Scholarship in the U.S. Heartland
• 4 A Methodological Nomad and an Accidental Scholar
• 5 Intercultural Communication and the Central States Region
• 6 Crossing Paths: Intercultural Collaborations
• 7 Rethinking “Difcult” Conversations in Communication Instruction From an Intercultural Lens: Pedagogical Strategies for “SWAP-ping” the Communication Classroom
• 8 Identifying Dominant Group Communication Strategies: A Phenomenological Study
• 9 A Feminist Postsocialist Approach to the Intercultural Communication of Rape at the ICTY
• 10 Can Detroiters Dream Again? Te Imagined Dialectics of Urban Decline in Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown—Detroit
• 11 Sensemaking in Turbulent Contexts: African Student Leadership in a Postcolonial Context
• Index