Intercultural Interaction: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Intercultural Communication

Citation

Bell, R. (2010), "Intercultural Interaction: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Intercultural Communication", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 438-442. https://doi.org/10.1108/13527601011086621

This book is part of the series “Research and Practice in Applied Linguistics” and as such does not claim a role in cross‐cultural management so much as the more specialized field of inter‐cultural communication. However, it goes well beyond the declared intention of exploring “the relationship between research and practice in applied linguistics” in the general editors' preface and is a professional reference book of great value to teachers and other professional in the field.

This is a very professional book, impeccably well‐written, exhaustively researched and referenced and is a compendium of information in the field of cross‐cultural communication. Central to the book is the idea that business and organizations operating across cultural frontiers are really concerned not just with comparing cultures but the nature of intercultural inter‐action: what happens when people deal with each other, a cross‐cultural rather than ethnographic approach. This is what practitioners and teachers need to understand and this is what the book sets out very successfully to research.

It is packed with discussion, ideas and references which are fascinating to those of us who work in this field. I cannot recall a book with so many models, frameworks and instruments to refer to a veritable cornucopia. It is also a very careful book: judgments are sensible, balanced and moderate. This is reflected in the box in the introduction on “values underpinning our work”: the authors value open‐ness and multi‐disciplinary approaches; they reject ideological dismissal and data that ignores contextual factors. This last point seems to be on a lower level than that of broad values and suggests experience of struggling with students who fail to take into account the rich mix of contributing factors involved in interpretation of situations and behaviour.

Helen Spencer‐Oatey has published extensively in the field of cross‐cultural communication with strong focus on face and rapport management, while Peter Franklin is probably best known as the driving force behind the Delta Inter‐cultural Academy and the dialogin.com culture pages, a must for anyone working in this field.

After noting the lack of terminological consensus in the field, the authors explain that the central concept, “inter‐cultural interaction”, referred to throughout the book as intercultural interaction competence (ICIC), is to be seen as embodying the dynamics of dealings between people in contrast to cultural comparison, in complex transactions involving both intentional and unintentional signals.

The book is organized into four parts: conceptualizing ICIC, promoting competence in ICIC, researching ICIC and resources, and covers 12 chapters, which with references and index, bring the book to a respectable but not too weighty total of 367 pages.

Every chapter begins with a “chapter outline” and ends with “concluding comments”; throughout the book easy to read boxes labelled “concept” draw attention to important ideas (“message communication competencies”, “conceptualizations of identity” and so on), and are illustrated throughout the book with “research reports”, “samples”, “instruments” and “experiential examples” offering practical experience in rich detail.

Content of the book

Chapter 2, the first in the part of the book dealing with conceptualizing ICIC, is a compendium of basic concepts from classic sources: Trompenaars and Hampden‐Turner, the GLOBE study, Hofstede, Schwartz, Hall and others. The chapter for me goes further than Smith and Bond's similar chapter in their 1998 book and is a must for students fresh to cross‐cultural management and communication. It also introduces the emic/etic dichotomy, a concept all students should be aware of.

Chapter 3 is a painstaking in‐depth investigation of the background literature and models and is somewhat forbidding for the student new to this area. The authors examine the inputs from multiple sources including classic work by Ting‐Toomey and Gudykunst. They examine in some depth Byram's model developing the distinction between linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse competences as well as a number of models of inter‐cultural competence in particular the Worldwork framework, developed as an analysis of business people's “international competences”. Many of these frameworks have common features emphasizing open‐ness, sensitivity and toughness in varying degrees.

Chapter 4, “Achieving understanding in ICIC”, includes some fascinating and also very practical material on message communication, embracing high and low context exchanges, non‐verbals and building shared understanding, key elements of a cross‐cultural communication course. There is excellent advice on making oneself understood (speak clearly, increase redundancy, restrict vocabulary and so on) contextualization clues and use of interpreters.

Chapter 5 deals with rapport in ICIC and is familiar from work developed by Helen Spencer‐Oatey in previous books and Scollon and Scollon's work outlining the mechanisms of discourse strategy. Ting‐Toomey on self‐effacement and enhancement is vital to understanding subtleties in communication and the attendant danger of perceptions of insults on both sides of cross‐cultural transactions. Multiple competences are involved and multiple variables contribute to successful encounters.

The next chapter moves on from discourse strategy to impression management, leading us into potential disadvantage and domination since inter‐cultural impression management is coloured by stereotypes. We see how this can lead to inter‐group domination as in the case of Aborigines in court bullied into agreeing with an aggressive lawyer. Stereotypes are essentialist in attribution terms and fail to take account of individuals; Smith and Bond's observation about culture‐specific “liberal distaste” in individualistic cultures is quoted, inspiring a comment on the “the culture‐centredness of much research”. At the end of the same chapter the potentially dominant function of English as a world language is raised, suggesting that this threatens minority languages, unfairly rewards competent speakers and exports the values of Anglo cultures; as the authors point out there are other views which minimize such dangers.

Chapter 7, “Adapting to unfamiliar cultures”, focuses on individual experience dealing with other cultures, re‐visiting Oberg's honeymoon model, and expands on culture shock. Competences emphasizing emotional strength and coping strategies are identified that enable people to deal with these situations more successfully. The chapter looks at Milton Bennett's oft‐maligned DMIS and mentions its failure to take account of issues beyond cultural relativism that we consider non‐negotiable such as forced ablation and human rights. The chapter considers identity and how re‐location affects this, leading to a consideration of Berry's well‐known model of cultural identity and inter‐cultural dialogue and the constraints that limit the strategies open to minority cultures. This leads to a consideration of the contact hypothesis, often taken for granted by the layman – and implicitly by Sir Trevor Phillips, controversial head of equality and Human Rights Commission.

Chapter 8, the first in Part II, “Promoting competence in ICIC, deals with assessing competence and is rich in material, models and instruments. The authors point out that the majority of instruments in this area are self‐report with the associated problems of this method of obtaining information though they are consistent with the goal of heightening self‐awareness. In most cases these instruments are to be distinguished from tests, seen as more rigorous in terms of validity and reliability, on which the chapter offers many instructive comments. Mention is made of the origins of a number of instruments in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s for selection of volunteers for diplomatic service and the Peace Corps.

There follows a review of major instruments in the field starting with value orientation survey (VOS) based on Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's value orientation model with dilemma‐style items based on Russo 2000. A series of other commercially available instruments are described such as the cross‐cultural adaptability inventory (CCAI), noting the danger of the politically correct reply as in many instruments of this type. This points up the dilemma of face validity: the instrument should be seen to do what it claims but the writers intentions should not be excessively transparent. The Worldwork instrument, the international profiler is reviewed and praised for offering a differentiated profile based on ten competences based on 22 dimensions. The Intercultural Sensitivity Inventory claims to assess values and ICIC, captured through behaviours rather than attitudes. The intercultural competence assessment (INCA) instrument is discussed and we are reminded of language development policies in Europe. The chapter closes with brief comments on university and organizational uses of assessment instruments, in the latter case drawing attention to the diversity implications raised.

In chapter 9, “Developing competence in ICIC”, the transitive and intransitive sense of that expression are contrasted in long‐term educational aims and short‐term organizational interventions. We are reminded of the three domains of ICIC: cognitive, attitudinal and behavioural, frequently presented as knowledge, skills and attitudes and the importance of balancing emphasis between these in our two major areas of application: education and professional/organizational development. The authors underline that organizational interest is in leveraging not merely noting diversity and in gap analysis contrasting resources and needs, a process familiar in language needs analysis.

A SIETAR‐based study showed that most consultancy work uses Hofstede and Trompenaars data and thus is essentially culture comparative rather than interactional. The authors make a plea for evidence‐based data with emic content to make such work more useful for professionals seeking to solve real communication problems in their organizational life; they also complain of culture‐centredness, ethnocentric reference points behind many comments on cultures. It is the process of communication not the study of cultures which should be the central focus of consultancy work: this means that skills must take priority over knowing about cultures.

After describing Gudykunst and Hammer's classic quadrant of training techniques mapping didactic/experiential against culture general/specific and outlining a number of others, the authors discuss the concept of critical incidents, in particular as used in culture assimilators, and the contrast‐culture method used in the 1960s by playing out a cross‐cultural incident. There follows a lengthy section on developing ICIC in school education with a focus on language teaching since this is the nearest most institutions get to awareness of the need for ICIC: low interest in values and beliefs is reported.

Part 3 deals with research in ICIC and again the breadth and depth of the author's knowledge of the field and the sheer hard work in assembling information on numerous instruments is apparent. They lead us through research instruments and studies on ICIC and communication styles, mostly using Likert scales and intended to produce quantitative results, then go on to the research instruments available in the areas covered by the book (such as disadvantage and domination or adaptation to unfamiliar cultures) with impressive thoroughness. The concern in this section is that these should be the subject of serious investigation aimed at adding “credibility to the intercultural profession in the eyes of the practitioner”.

Chapter 11 deals with cultural features of ICIC research and reminds that in culture‐interactional approaches participants “co‐construct their interaction”. A second issue raised is the tendency to identify participants by national dimension rankings as proxy rather than seeking to assess their values as individuals. The third point mentioned is the danger of cultural bias on the part of the researcher, a danger referred to as “de‐centring” and extending to the relevance of the choice of items and dimensions, the familiar problem of imposed etics, mainly associated with John Berry.

The second part of the chapter dealing with “culture and data collection” is of a more technical nature and considers self‐report issues, question design, translation, language equivalence and interview technique all associated with the difficulties of achieving equivalence and fair representation of findings from data. The final section of this chapter considers instruments for attempting to measure ICIC. It is noted that instruments such as Ward and Kennedy's socio‐cultural adaptation scale rate difficulty in social events rather than success factors, and in the case of the intercultural development inventory (IDI), derived from Bennett and Hammer's work, the dangers associated with social desirability in responses as well as cross‐cultural equivalence are raised.

What the authors describe as semi‐experimental data from discourse completion, simulated negotiations and role play is seen as useful both in terms of culture comparative and interactional research. All research in the social sciences involves possible interference from perceptions and relationships built up between researcher and researched and in cultural research this is even more the case. Finally in a note on quantitative research, Likert scale incomparability due to response bias is noted as well, once again, as the danger of assuming the individuals involved possess the values attributed to the culture as a whole, the dreaded ecological fallacy. The credence that can be given to cultural data is also subject to possible bias on the part of the researcher: to achieve a balanced and sensible view both insider as well as outsider input are needed providing emic as well as etic data, whether in the form of a mixed research team – who may themselves have epistemological or ontological differences – or seeking input from the respondents themselves. A warning in this chapter sums up the central idea in the book:

[…] culture comparative studies can provide useful baseline data about the norms and conventions in the countries concerned; such baseline data cannot (or should not!) be used to predict how an intercultural interaction will necessarily take place (p. 289).

Finally, a note on ethics in research reminds researchers to be respectful, as unobtrusive as possible, not taking advantage even unintentionally of power relationships and to work in the interests of the groups being studied.

Part 4 is an excellent compendium of resources covering books, journals, assessment instruments, games simulations, videos and DVDs, and web sites all organized by focus and content and including many that have stood the test of time over the years. Like the rest of the book this is painstakingly complete and helpful for the reader.

All in all this is a serious reference book which I would recommend to any professional working in cross‐cultural management and communication: it is a rich source of materials, references and knowledge of the field.