Short summary: intercultural communication in the business world
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Course
Intercultural communication in the business world
Institution
Universiteit Antwerpen (UA)
This is a short summary of the lectures 'intercultural communication in the business world' by Dieter Vermandere. Go through the powerpoints of the professor. After that, this short summary will be sufficient to study this course. Tip: go through the book to read some cases, as he will ask 1 on the...
o Why intercultural communication? à it’s different compared to communicating with mom
o Needs that trigger IC: globalization, internationalization, advances in transportation and
communication technologies, changing demographics à also rise in populism, nationalism, and
xenophobia…
§ IC considered the solution and as a bonus: personal growth and responsibility
o What is it exactly? à intercultural interaction (II, preferred term because it’s broader and less assuming
meaning than communication à more situations can be studied)
o (1) Skills: most important: be able to speak TO people, not about à communicative skills
o (2) Attitudes: crucial is tolerance of ambiguity
o (3) Knowledge: about world, people, languages, customs, and habits à never sufficient!
o Intercultural awareness: being sensitive to intercultural aspects that arise during II
o Cultural awareness: being able to avoid negative loop of only seeing differences
o People are remarkebly similar in core values (e.g., love towards family)
o Differences: Etic perspective (external, cross-cultural comparison) <-> emic perspective (internal, seeing
differences = awareness)
o Social identity theory (Tajfel): In-group favouritism <-> out-group homogeneity
o Awareness 1: being aware of positive and negative stereotyping done in in- vs out-group
o Awareness 2: being aware of differences and acting on those à risk: lumping & binarism
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, Chapter 2: What is culture?
o Surface behavior (observable acts) <-> Intended behavior (often wrongly interpreted)
o à self-reference criterion (SRC) = evaluation metric based on self
§ Risk for attribution errors: attributing intentions to someone who doesn’t have them à
people have different reference frameworks!
o Intra- vs intercultural à depends on how you look at it à mother and daughter could have different
cultures if you interpret values as cultures… does it really matter?
o A continuum (Zegarac): any situation can become intercultural when intercultural is defined as
the moment “the cultural distance between participants is significant enough to have an adverse
effect on communicative success, unless it is appropriately accommodated by the participants
o Intercultural situation (Spencer-Oatey): same as Zegarac but when distance is noticeable to at
least one of the parties. Situation = something that can arise abruptly
o Interpersonal communication = interaction between people (with a specific human being)
o Cross-cultural communication: to compare different cultures without having contact with them
o Intercultural communication: contact between different cultures (technically between persons)
o Seems like cultural difference is key (knowledge) à how can you ever know the background of someone
I interact with considering globalization etc.? And does it matter?
o Modification Spencer Oatey: at least 1 of the parties notices a cognitive distance that needs to
be addressed/accommodated for, to avoid a negative effect on the interaction.
§ Example of football game: requires awareness, knowledge and skills (fairness/equity ≠
equality of treatment)
o Culture (broader set of human-like behavior = learned) <-> Cultures (concrete manifestations)
o Language (capacity of learning language) <-> languages (concrete manifestations)
o Etymology (low culture, functional stuff) <-> anthropology (high culture, fine arts)
o Open, dynamic (= process, something what people do) <-> static, closed (= product, what people
have) à it’s heterogeneous, specific, layered, meaningful and changing
o Various models: “Iceberg”, “onion”, “glasses” and “fish tank”
o Socialization: culture is a learned behavior (it never stops) à culture provides us with information and
allows us to process information. What we learn: beliefs, values, worldview, traditions, and cultural
norms
o Cultural schemata: e.g., greeting rituals, funerals
o Cultural scripts: norms/rules of interaction
o Culture is
o Shared: information and perspectives on information
o Relative: relational/interactional
o Dynamic and mediated
o Individual, fragmentary and imaginary: intersectionality à we all have characteristiscs that
belong to different levels that apply to usà imagined communities
o Contested: inequality of power is not abnormal and struggles are part of life
o Is communication: culture is communication and communication is culture
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