intercultural communication cm1010 | ibcom ba year I - term IV (2019-2020) [by gycc]
INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
(summary + reading notes)
book; INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION:
A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
by Piller, I. (+ various articles & chapters)
CHAPTER ONE: Approaching Intercultural Communication (week I)
Chapter Objectives
❖ Intercultural communication and its relation to the CENTRAL QUESTION:
Who makes culture relevant to whom, in which context, for which purposes?
❖ Getting to know the terms cross-cultural communication, intercultural communication and
inter-discourse communication; identifying how these terms are used with different, similar or
overlapping meanings in different studies
❖ Analysing culture-related texts for the uses, content, scope + status of culture
Intercultural Communication: What is it?
conceptualising the meaning of intercultural communication through three different studies →
1. An investigation of the ways in which British and Italian service staff of an airline respond to
service failure such as baggage being lost;
● While both British and Italian employees behave in similar ways in response to
something going wrong, they differ in their attitudes towards customers affected by
service failure
● Researches explain that the similarities of how the workers act are a result from the
same training that all employees of airlines receive, and the differences in attitudes
resulted from British and Italian culture. They concluded that attitudes are more
influenced by culture than behaviour
2. The ways LA Korean immigrant shopkeepers interact with their African American customers;
● The researcher found that service encounters with Korean customers were very
straightforward, and the communicative activities usually consist of ‘greeting,
business transaction and closing’
● On the other hand, interactions with African American customers were more complex
because these customers initiated additional communication such as small talk, jokes
or even personal talk. The Korean storekeepers never proactively engaged in these
additional communicative activities and often ignored such attempts at making the
encounter more personal;
○ The AA customers felt ignored by the K shopkeepers and complained about
their lack of involvement, which led to them linking it as racist attitudes
○ K shop-owners considered these customers’ attempts at personalising the
encounter an imposition and a sign of bad manners, which they related to
lack of education
● Even after years, intercultural communication between shopkeepers and customers
did not improve and they failed to accommodate to each other’s ways of speaking
○ The researcher explains that this persistence of divergent communicative
styles can be referred to the wider socio-historical context as the groups
experience a long history of racial tensions
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,intercultural communication cm1010 | ibcom ba year I - term IV (2019-2020) [by gycc]
3. The ways people who live in tourist destinations are being represented in travel writing;
● Researchers found out through British newspapers that travel journalists used three
distinct strategies to represent people who live in tourist destinations:
(1) The people are described very generally - journalists will refer to them as
‘locals’, members of a national/ethnic or social group (e.g. Russians, women)
(2) To single out prototypical representatives that the journalists has observed or,
more rarely, interacted with
(3) To represent people in tourist destinations as ‘helpers’ to the tourist
(hospitable locals)
● These representational strategies are part of turning a place into a tourist destination:
a place where people are specimens of a particular culture and where it’s safe for the
tourist to go and gaze at people as a tourist attraction
➢ These three studies are concerned with intercultural communication in three kinds of context:
(1) culture as identical to nation
(2) culture as ethnicity/race
(3) culture as product of the text
➢ Their everyday character shows that intercultural communication is mundane and ubiquitous
➢ These three distinct understandings/forms of ICC (studies) can be defined as:
○ cross-cultural communication → assumption of the existence of distinct cultural
groups // these studies investigate communicative practices comparatively
[CONTRASTIVE]
○ intercultural communication → assumption of the existence of distinct cultural
groups as well, but study their communicative practices in interaction with each other
[INTERACTIVE]
○ inter-discourse communication → avoids any prior notions of cultural identity, but
instead studies (1) how culture is made relevant in a text or interaction, (2) how
cultural identity is brought into existence through text and talk
[DISCURSIVE]
Definitions of Culture
For intercultural communication studies to be meaningful in an increasingly interconnected world,
and to be socially relevant, it needs to assume that culture, and particularly cultural difference, is
something that is created and recreated through text and talk instead of considering it as something
that people have.
However, no single definition of ‘culture’ exists, and the terms means many things to many people.
Let’s consider the following examples to find out what the underlying understanding of ‘culture’ is:
1. Culture through National ‘.com’ sites, marketing tools which are typically geared towards
tourism and overseas business investors. They provide country-specific news and are part of
the branding of a country → culture is part of a country’s assets
2. Culture in business travel advisories. Besides practical advice and assistance, it also provides
some ‘cultural advice’
3. Culture through news reports about international lgbtq conference, banned in Ghana in 2006
These examples can explain the definitional issues from culture: context, content, scope and status:
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,intercultural communication cm1010 | ibcom ba year I - term IV (2019-2020) [by gycc]
➢ Context/Use; how ‘culture’ is used for specific purposes in a specific context; example I
comes from the context of country marketing, example II is from the world of international
business travel, example III is related to state control, where ‘culture’ is related to citizenship.
➢ Content;
○ e.g. I as ‘culture as a national asset’
→ Culture is characterised by its possessions; examples are high culture like the
history of that country, its’ museums, festivals or art. However, it can also be
described by its’ popular culture like cuisine, belief systems or folklore.
○ e.g. II ‘culture as challenge’
→ often seen in business advise, mostly about interpersonal relationships.
This perspective of culture is concerned with how people communicate with each
other verbally (e.g. engaging in or avoiding small talk) and non-verbally (e.g.
removing outside shoes when entering a home)
○ e.g. III ‘culture as citizenship’
→ culture consisting of practices that are seen as signifying a particular identity.
These practices are widely linked to the particular ‘culture’ Examples would be dress
codes or ways of speaking (think about the debates of immigrant not learning their
‘own’ language)
○ These various contents of ‘culture’ include and exclude some people. For instance,
it’s obvious that lgtbtq people are being excluded from the ‘Ghanaian culture’
➢ Scope; the exclusionary character of ‘content’ leads to scope, because the exclusion and
inclusion of ‘cultural identity’ become apparent then. The scope is the underlying
understanding of ‘culture’. All three examples take the nation as the basic unit of culture.
Thus, the scope of each culture, the cultural unit, is a nation in the examples.
➢ Status; how is culture understood? the status of ‘culture’ in all these examples is that of an
entity and the existence of that entity is presupposed and remains constant even under
negotiation. Phrases such as ‘Ecuadorian culture’ or ‘Russian mentality’ won’t be questioned
as they trigger a presupposition of existence. However, if we treat culture as something
people do, then its status changes from an entity to a process.
○ The entity view of culture (traditional approach) is characterised by essentialist: it
will treat culture as something people have or to which they belong
○ The process view of culture (constructionist approach) is characterised by
constructionist: it treats culture as something people do, perform and crucially,
compete over - constructed through communication, socially conveyance.
Thus, culture has many different meanings and is used in many different ways, which differ along the
dimensions of use/context, content, scope and status!
CHAPTER TWO: The Genealogy of Intercultural Communication (week I)
Chapter Objectives
❖ Gaining an overview of the historical and socio-economic contexts in which the
contemporary concern with cultural difference, multiculturalism and intercultural
communication is embedded
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❖ Critically engaging with the ideologies and material interests informing specific
understandings of culture, multiculturalism and intercultural communication
‘Culture’
Caesar described a tribe, in contemporary terms, an ethnic group as consisting of lingua, institutis,
legibus (language, customs, laws). This historical example resulted in two observations:
1. What Caesar regarded as of prime importance in describing an ethnic group, namely
institutions and laws, is no longer the most remarkable
2. The term Culture, which is so ubiquitous nowadays, was not even part of Caesar’s vocabulary
Thus, if ‘culture’ does not self-evidently exist as claimed in chapter I, in which contexts were
culture and cultural differences then talked into existence? How then did this way of talking about
other ethnic groups in terms of culture arise? Piller argues, in the case of English, the discourse of
cultures, cultural differences and intercultural communication arose in the historical context of the
19th and 20th centuries as part of the colonial and imperial era of both the UK and the USA.
However, the salience of intercultural communication in the present period, is both an aspect
of globalisation, but also a response to globalisation. Furthermore, the cultural differences are an
essential part of global inequality and they often serve to obscure power relationships and material
differences.
Let’s trace the history of the English word ‘Culture’ with some more examples:
➢ The term was first adopted into English from French and Latin in the agricultural meaning
→ ‘cultivation, husbandry and the tending of natural growth’ (15th century)
➢ However, the meaning most important for our purposes developed in the 19th century through
influences from German → the meaning of ‘historical self-development of humanity’
➢ As a countermovement, the Romantic movement of the 19th century began to emphasis folk
cultures or popular cultures
Inspired by this European Romanticism, a new meaning of ‘culture’ emerged in English and it
became the central category in the new discipline of anthropology. It was a key assumption of early
anthropology that each culture was located somewhere on a specific point on a general scale of human
development from savagery to civilisation. Edward Tylor, the first professor of anthropology, argued
that ‘cultures’ could be scientifically measured by comparing them. His idea was to set ‘the educated
world of Europe and America’ as standard on the top end of a scale and the ‘savage tribes’ on the
bottom end and then arrange the world’s national and ethnic groups in between on this gradient.
Tylor’s idea of scientific measurement needs to be read in the context of a period where increased
travel led to an increased awareness of different people and where the oppression and exploitation of
those people was morally justified for colonialism in the 19th century. This form of exerting
dominance over others and new view of culture has famously been termed as Orientalism →
different peoples having different cultures and these cultures were historically ordered, with
European culture as the most superior.
These examples are over a century old, but they should still not be dismissed as irrelevant. Traces of
the orientalist view over other cultures can still be found in contemporary discourses. Moreover,
images of the cultural others as a stereotypical spectacle continues increasing rapidly. For instance,
texts such as the ‘Foreign children’ poem continue to circulate and new texts presenting people as
stereotypical representatives of a country still appear all the time. Those who are guilty of using this
perspective argue that the purpose is to educate others about the world and different cultures.
However, Piller shows that this was not an ‘education’ based on facts, knowledge or understanding
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