Intercultural Communication: An Overview

Intercultural Communication: An Overview

Course Outline • Course Outline • Definition of key terms: culture, communication, intercultural communication, etc. • Development of intercultural communication as a field of study • Value systems and intercultural communication • Chinese Conceptualization of Face and intercultural communication • Guanxi in Chinese culture and its implication for foreigners • collectivism VS individualism • Ascriptive and achievement-oriented cultures • Non-verbal communication • Managing intercultural conflicts effectively • Case Study

Suggested readings • 杜瑞清，田德新，李本现。Selected Readings in Intercultural Communication, Xi’an Jiaotong University Press, 2004。 • Linell Davis. Doing Culture: Cross-cultural Communication in Action. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Beijing,2001,2007. • Larry A. Samovar/Richard E. Porter. Communication between cultures. (Fourth Edition).Wadsworth Thomson Learning,2001

Teaching Methodology • Learning groups • Interviews • Discussions with Chinese students • Case studies and presentations • Assignments

Cases of Intercultural Failure • Case 1 TCL’s Failure in Europe and North America Fortune Life Aug. 2007: The Maze of International Management “TTE (TCL-Thomson Electronics) employs over 8,000 non-Chinese employees, which presents great challenges for management. The Chinese management failed because they manage the foreigners with Chinese methods. They failed to adapt themselves to the local culture, with not much knowledge of the values of the host country. They could not find a way to adapt to local culture, which has led to its failures in the course of internationalization. (Chinese culture: obedience, modest, …) • Case 2 An American company gave a multimillion-dollar proposal in a pigskin binder to a potential Saudi Arabian client. • Case 3 Greetings in China and Western countries • Chinese: Have you eaten? Where are you going? How old are you? • Westerners: weather,

Case：Way of Replying • The vice president for HR of Philips Lighting Co., an American, was having a talk with a Chinese employee whom he believed to have a great potential. He wanted to know this person’s plan of career planning over the next five years and the position he expected to reach within the organization. • The Chinese employee did not answer the question directly. Instead, he started to talk about the future development of the company, the promotional procedures of the company, and his own role in the organization. The vice president was puzzled and getting impatient because such a condition had occurred several times when he talked with Chinese employees. • He could not understand why the employee did not give him a direct answer. • After the talk, the Chinese employee complained that his boss was too aggressive and straightforward. • What do you think are the reasons for such a situation?

Lecture 1: Introduction • What is culture? • What is communication? • What is intercultural communication? • How important is intercultural communication under the context of globalization?

1. Culture 现代汉语词典的定义： • 人类在社会历史发展过程中所创造的物质和精神财富的总和，特指精神财富，如文学、艺术、教育、科学等 • 考古学用语，指同一历史时期的不依分布地点为转移的遗迹、遗物的综合体，同样的工具、用具，同样的制造技术等，是同一种文化的特征，如仰韶文化、龙山文化 • 指运用文字的能力及一般知识

1.1 Three angles of looking at culture • Anthropologist perspective: culture is creation, it helps to distinguish human beings from animals. • Social functions: culture is productive force, info and knowledge • Communicative perspective: culture can and should be transmitted

1.2 Some Definitions of Culture • Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. • Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. • Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning. • A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions. • Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action. • Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.

Culture is communication, communication is culture. • Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. • Culture is difficult to quantify, because it frequently exists at an unconscious level, or at least tends to be so pervasive that it escapes everyday thought.

1.3 Ingredients of culture Cultures may be classified by three large categories of elements: • Artifacts: arrowheads, hydrogen bombs, magic charms, antibiotics, torches, electric lights, chariots, jet planes, etc. • Beliefs or value systems: right or wrong, God and man, ethics, general meaning of life • Behaviors: actual practices of concepts or beliefs

1.4 Characteristics of Culture • Culture is not innate, it is learned. • Culture is transmissible • Culture is dynamic • Culture is selective • Facets of culture are interrelated • Culture is ethnocentric

2. Communication 2.1 Behavior vs. Messages • Behaviors • Verbal: written/spoken • Nonverbal: gestures, postures, etc. • Behaviors and messages • Be observed • Elicit a response: any behavior that elicits a response is a message • Any: both verbal and nonverbal • Behavior may be conscious or unconscious • We frequently behave unintentionally, or uncontrollably

2.2 Definition of Communication • a form of human behavior derived from a need to connect and interact with other human beings. It can be defined as that which happens whenever someone responds to the behavior or the residue of the behavior of another person. • That which happens whenever someone responds to the behavior or the residue of behavior of another person.

2.3 Features of communication • Responding to the behavior or the residue of the behavior of another person. • Behavioral residue: those things that remain as a record of our actions • When someone perceives our behavior or its residue and attributes meaning to it, communication has taken place regardless of whether our behavior was conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional. • Attribution: drawing on past experiences and giving meaning to the behavior we observe • Being necessitates behavior, and we cannot NOT communicate.

2.4 Ingredients of communication • Behavioral source • Encoding • Message • Channel • Responders • Decoding • Response • feedback

2.5 Features of communication • Dynamic • Interactive • Physical and social context

3. What is intercultural communication? • It refers to the communication between people from different cultures. • It takes place when a message is produced by a member of one culture for understanding and response by a member of another culture. • As cultural variations are many and great, the potential for misunderstanding and disagreement can likewise be serious and great. • Intercultural studies have become, therefore, imperative.

All people have the right to be equal and the equal right to be different. --Shimon Peres • Intercultural communication entails the investigation of those elements of culture that most influence interaction when members of two different cultures come together in an interpersonal setting.

Driving Forces for Intercultural Communication • Improvements in transportation technology • Developments in communication technology • Globalization of the economy • Changes in immigration patterns • Domestic changes, like racial issues, native Americans, women, homosexuals, the poor, the disabled, the homeless, and countless other groups became visible and vocal as they cried out for recognition and their rightful place in our community.

Assignment 1 • Study the definitions of culture, make sense of them, and then give a definition of culture by yourselves. • This assignment is supposed to be a group task. Each group is supposed to give its own definition, with explicit statement of the main components of culture.

Assignment 2 • Study the case of TCL, a leading consumer electronics producer in China, which started its expansion abroad with failure. Try to analyze its failure from an intercultural communication perspective. • This is supposed to be a group task, and each group will have to make a presentation to the class.

Assignment 3 • Shanghai Airline’s case • Failure to communication sufficiently and in a timely manner leads to customer dissatisfaction, and hence loss of customer loyalty. • Group discussion and presentation

Assignment 4 • Rescue work in Wenchuan after earthquake • Comparison with rescue work in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. • Try to understand the collectivist spirit of Chinese culture and the individualistic spirit of American culture. • Which one is better? • Group presentation

Assignment 5 • Nonverbal communication • Search for examples of nonverbal communication specific in Chinese culture. • Are there any geographic variations even in China? • Group presentation

Intercultural Communication: An Overview