Download 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:
1) Artifacts: arrowheads, hydrogen bombs,
magic charms, antibiotics, torches,
electric lights, chariots, jet planes, etc.
2) Beliefs or value systems: right or wrong,
God and man, ethics, general meaning
of life
3) 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