ICC READINGS
ICC READINGS
,Holmes 2017
Communication → verbal / virtual / mediated / textual / multimodal
Geopolitical changes have increased the likelihood of intercultural contact in the workplace and
contributes to its internationalization
Contact zones: social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other (characterized by
highly asymmetrical power relations which individuals and diverse social groups must negotiate)
Hegemonic: structures by which dominant group maintains power
Researchers in cross-cultural management have adopted interpretive, critical, postmodern, and
postcolonial approaches to researching and understanding intercultural communication
Hofstede’s four dimensions of cultural difference:
1. Power distance
2. Individualism-collectivism
3. Masculinity-femininity
4. Uncertainty avoidance
Bennet → DMIS – development model of intercultural sensitivity
Hammer → IDI – international development inventory
The field of intercultural communication has been influenced by scholarship in languages and applied
linguistics
Migration of skilled and unskilled workers across the global south and developing world, and into and
within the metrocentres of the developed north – have heightened the importance of the critical turn in
intercultural communication research and training
The role of international and intercultural education in the context of student mobility, and
internationalization more generally, offers a pathway for opening up dialogue among graduates and
their teachers on inequalities and injustices which will accompany graduates into the workplace
Intercultural communication and context:
Phipps defines intercultural communication as: “dialogical and material exchanges between members of
cultural groups” and where cultural membership is “marked variously by race, ethnicity, nationality,
language, class, age, and gender”
Culture and representation:
Culture = always present + influencing communication and social interaction
Baumann: we don’t have culture, we construct culture
Essentialist: we don’t belong to / have a culture
Culture = widely understood to encapsulate a person’s nationality / ethnicity
,All cultures have one thing in common: they are members of imagined communities
Culture = what is accepted and familiar (familiar to whom and acceptable to whom?)
Holliday reminds us: culture is NOT a destiny, a pre-determined, fixed understanding of how individuals
should communicate with one another
The concept of “culture” calls into play how individuals (re)represent themselves as the express their
diverse and hybrid social experiences
Culture also unifies as individuals coalesce and cohere in social groups, due to their shared aspirations
and circumstances
Globalization:
Scholte defines globalization: transplanetary and supraterritorial connections among people
Globalization = an interconnected world
Water’s definition of globalization: a social process in which the constraints of georgraphy on economic,
political, social and cultural arrangements recede, in which people become increasingly aware that they
are receding and in which people act accordingly
Cross-cultural management: [Used in the context of management education and training]
Even if fluency in the language = gained, they still felt a level of discomfort, different cultures have
different levels of personal space – as a result, cross cultural communication = born
Analyst role = to observe, to go out into the field
After the war, people had to be trained to work with international individuals
Languages in the workplace: multilingualism, the intercultural speaker, translanguaging
Multiple languages in a workplace have typically been seen as a cost
Core concepts such as translation, context, proficiency, identity, and multilingualism are being re-
examined through other lenses, and these investigations are being linked to management concepts such
as knowledge transfer, power relations and trust.
Multilingualism
Steyaert and Janssens: monolingualism and bilingualism create communicative and economic problems
for organisations – rigid, monolithic structures and discrete systems that embody monolingualism and
bilingualism result in speakers being unable to interconnect and interact
Unifying communities and identities around a single language is an ideological stance which serves
partisan interests of purity, exclusivity and domination, and may deny the complexity of language
scenarios among language users
Intercultural speaker
The person who can mediate between two or more languages and cultures
, Need both cultural competence and linguistic competence
This is NOT the same as being an interpreter
Translanguaging
No clear-cur boundaries are seen between the languages people draw on in communication, instead
people engage in translanguaging – defined as the linguistic and communicative repertoires
interlocutors draw on in given context
Language = social practice
Speakers = social actors
Social interaction occurs in socio-political context
Languages in the workplace: the global spread of English and lingua franca English(es)
Lingua franca – the contact language
Speakers negotiate and (re)construct their identities to make them amenable to and align with their
interlocuters in the interactional context
Kramsch: suggests language use = highly subjective experience
Individuals draw on their emotions, memory, imagination, and senses to apprehend and articulate
expression when using a language
Canagarajah: meaning making among multilingual subjects resides in a multimodal, multisensory,
ecological understanding and interpretation of diverse symbol systems
Competence = an adaptive process to accommodate the apparent disorder and randomness of the
situation, rather than one linear, structured language acquisition or applying mental rules to situations
Future directions in research, theory, methodology and education
Culture = socially constructed among those engaged in the intercultural encounter, in presenting
themselves to others, individuals call and prioritize certain cultural and linguistic resources and identities
in these encounters
ICC READINGS
,Holmes 2017
Communication → verbal / virtual / mediated / textual / multimodal
Geopolitical changes have increased the likelihood of intercultural contact in the workplace and
contributes to its internationalization
Contact zones: social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other (characterized by
highly asymmetrical power relations which individuals and diverse social groups must negotiate)
Hegemonic: structures by which dominant group maintains power
Researchers in cross-cultural management have adopted interpretive, critical, postmodern, and
postcolonial approaches to researching and understanding intercultural communication
Hofstede’s four dimensions of cultural difference:
1. Power distance
2. Individualism-collectivism
3. Masculinity-femininity
4. Uncertainty avoidance
Bennet → DMIS – development model of intercultural sensitivity
Hammer → IDI – international development inventory
The field of intercultural communication has been influenced by scholarship in languages and applied
linguistics
Migration of skilled and unskilled workers across the global south and developing world, and into and
within the metrocentres of the developed north – have heightened the importance of the critical turn in
intercultural communication research and training
The role of international and intercultural education in the context of student mobility, and
internationalization more generally, offers a pathway for opening up dialogue among graduates and
their teachers on inequalities and injustices which will accompany graduates into the workplace
Intercultural communication and context:
Phipps defines intercultural communication as: “dialogical and material exchanges between members of
cultural groups” and where cultural membership is “marked variously by race, ethnicity, nationality,
language, class, age, and gender”
Culture and representation:
Culture = always present + influencing communication and social interaction
Baumann: we don’t have culture, we construct culture
Essentialist: we don’t belong to / have a culture
Culture = widely understood to encapsulate a person’s nationality / ethnicity
,All cultures have one thing in common: they are members of imagined communities
Culture = what is accepted and familiar (familiar to whom and acceptable to whom?)
Holliday reminds us: culture is NOT a destiny, a pre-determined, fixed understanding of how individuals
should communicate with one another
The concept of “culture” calls into play how individuals (re)represent themselves as the express their
diverse and hybrid social experiences
Culture also unifies as individuals coalesce and cohere in social groups, due to their shared aspirations
and circumstances
Globalization:
Scholte defines globalization: transplanetary and supraterritorial connections among people
Globalization = an interconnected world
Water’s definition of globalization: a social process in which the constraints of georgraphy on economic,
political, social and cultural arrangements recede, in which people become increasingly aware that they
are receding and in which people act accordingly
Cross-cultural management: [Used in the context of management education and training]
Even if fluency in the language = gained, they still felt a level of discomfort, different cultures have
different levels of personal space – as a result, cross cultural communication = born
Analyst role = to observe, to go out into the field
After the war, people had to be trained to work with international individuals
Languages in the workplace: multilingualism, the intercultural speaker, translanguaging
Multiple languages in a workplace have typically been seen as a cost
Core concepts such as translation, context, proficiency, identity, and multilingualism are being re-
examined through other lenses, and these investigations are being linked to management concepts such
as knowledge transfer, power relations and trust.
Multilingualism
Steyaert and Janssens: monolingualism and bilingualism create communicative and economic problems
for organisations – rigid, monolithic structures and discrete systems that embody monolingualism and
bilingualism result in speakers being unable to interconnect and interact
Unifying communities and identities around a single language is an ideological stance which serves
partisan interests of purity, exclusivity and domination, and may deny the complexity of language
scenarios among language users
Intercultural speaker
The person who can mediate between two or more languages and cultures
, Need both cultural competence and linguistic competence
This is NOT the same as being an interpreter
Translanguaging
No clear-cur boundaries are seen between the languages people draw on in communication, instead
people engage in translanguaging – defined as the linguistic and communicative repertoires
interlocutors draw on in given context
Language = social practice
Speakers = social actors
Social interaction occurs in socio-political context
Languages in the workplace: the global spread of English and lingua franca English(es)
Lingua franca – the contact language
Speakers negotiate and (re)construct their identities to make them amenable to and align with their
interlocuters in the interactional context
Kramsch: suggests language use = highly subjective experience
Individuals draw on their emotions, memory, imagination, and senses to apprehend and articulate
expression when using a language
Canagarajah: meaning making among multilingual subjects resides in a multimodal, multisensory,
ecological understanding and interpretation of diverse symbol systems
Competence = an adaptive process to accommodate the apparent disorder and randomness of the
situation, rather than one linear, structured language acquisition or applying mental rules to situations
Future directions in research, theory, methodology and education
Culture = socially constructed among those engaged in the intercultural encounter, in presenting
themselves to others, individuals call and prioritize certain cultural and linguistic resources and identities
in these encounters
