Brazil holds one of the highest mortality rates by firearms. Criminal commands operate on the outskirts of Brazilian cities, emerging as instances of sociability and parallel power, becoming a reference in values supporting community life. Violence in Brazil is a relational problem, inscribed in a conflict rooted in long-lasting inequality that opposes “crime” as a social world to socially established “citizens.” People who live in territories subjected to the logics of crime need to develop coexistence strategies that include adaptive communication practices, which thrive as they help ensure survival. The anonymous voice of crime uses “forbidden funk” (funk proibido), a subgenre of funk music in Rio de Janeiro protected as cultural heritage and pursued by the courts for an apology for crime, to communicate. Adapting funk music as an interactional device, voices situated in a precarious and vulnerable social place use the communicative power of “proibido” to reiterate strategic communication practices to coexist with crime, within it or side by side. One of these practices is “representing crime” in “proibido,” through which the anonymous voice of crime borrows the voices of the MCs to not only claim for themselves the ethical responsibility of speaking on behalf of the “world of crime” but also request a new social place, aiming to break the cycle of isolation and incommunicability of life within the criminal commands, in a lasting social conflict. The complexity of the problem requires a robust and open methodology to observe communicative practices in their production context, without enclosing them in established aprioristic theories and concepts. Here a model of proibido communicative power is depicted from an articulation between (a) an understanding of communication as a tentative and probabilistic process, (b) the idea of interactional devices and language games as heuristics, and (c) situational analysis, a variant of grounded theory for the situated analysis of communicational practices.
Article
Funk “Proibido” Music and Communication of Criminal Commands in Brazil
Luciana Fernández Moretti
Article
Game Streaming: Implications for Streamers and Game Creators
Mark Johnson
Since the 2010s, the live streaming—live online video broadcast—of digital gaming has emerged as a significant Internet phenomenon. Millions of people stream their digital gaming for leisure, profit, or some combination, in the process often accumulating large communities of fans and followers who enjoy their streamed content, or simply broadcasting to small but often very dedicated handfuls of viewers. Game live streaming is also plagued by harassment and toxicity, but nevertheless continues to have a significant influence on gaming by generating famous and noteworthy moments within wider gaming culture. Game live streaming is far from a niche practice, and rather one with interest and applicability to a range of media studies, communication studies, game studies, and Internet research agendas.
Article
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Relevance for Communication Studies
Raka Shome
Gayatri Spivak is one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Although a literary critic, her work can be seen as philosophical as it is concerned with how to develop a transnational ethical responsibility to the radical “other,” who cannot be accessed by our discursive (and thus institutionalized) regimes of knowledge. Regarded as a leading postcolonial theorist, Spivak is probably best seen as a postcolonial Marxist feminist theorist, although she herself does not feel comfortable with rigid academic labeling. Her work is significantly influenced by the deconstructionist impulses of Jacques Derrida. Additionally, the influence of Gramsci and Marx is prominent in her thinking.
Spivak’s work has consistently called attention to the logics of imperialism that inform texts in the West, including in Western feminist scholarship. Relatedly, she has also written significantly on how the nation, in attempting to represent the entirety of a population, cannot access otherness or radical alterity. This is best seen in her work on the subaltern and in her intervention into the famous Indian group of Subaltern Studies scholars. Other related foci of her work have been on comprehending translation as a transnational cultural politics, and what it means to develop a transnational ethics of literacy.
Article
Gender as a Consideration When Designing Health and Risk Messages
E. Michele Ramsey
Given the impact of gender on health, healthcare decisions, and treatments for illness, as well as the increased inequities encountered by non-white men and women, messages about health and health risks are affected by purposeful assumptions about gender identity. While the term sex denotes the biological sex of an individual, gender identity is about the psychological, cultural, and social assumptions about a person associated with that person because of his or her sex. Gender and health are intimately connected in a number of ways, and such connections can differ based on race, ethnicity, age, class, religion, region, country, and even continent. Thus, understanding the myriad ways that notions of gender affect the health of females and males is fundamental to understanding how communicating about risks and prevention may be tailored to each group.
Gender role expectations and assumptions have serious impacts on men’s health and life expectancy rates, including self-destructive behaviors associated with mental health and tobacco use, self-neglecting behaviors linked to the reluctance of men to seek treatment for ailments, reluctance to follow a physician’s instructions after finally seeking help, and risk-taking behaviors linked to drug and alcohol use, fast driving, guns, physical aggression, and other dangerous endeavors. Because gender role expectations tend to disfavor females, it is not surprising that gender generally has an even greater impact on women’s health than on men’s. Even though biological factors allow women, on average, to live longer than men worldwide, various gendered practices (social, legal, criminal, and unethical) have serious impacts on the lives and health of women. From sex discrimination in research and treatment regarding issues linked to reproductive health, depression, sexual abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, the sex trade, and normalized violence against women (such as rape, female genital mutilation, forced prostitution/trafficking, and domestic violence), women’s lives across the globe are severely affected by gender role expectations that privilege males over females.
While some general consistencies in the relationships between gender, women, and health are experienced worldwide, intersections of race, ethnicity, class, age, country, region, and religion can make for very different experiences of women globally, and even within the same country.
The recent years have seen an increasing call to reconsider the binary means by which we have defined sex and gender. Advances in our understandings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, and transgendered individuals have challenged traditional notions and definitions of sex and gender in important and complex ways. Such an important shift warrants a stand-alone discussion, as well as the recognition that sexual orientation should not be automatically linked to discussions of sex and gender, given that such categorization reifies the problematic sex/gender binaries that ground sexist and homophobic attitudes in the first place.
Article
Genocide and Intergroup Communication
William A. Donohue
Understanding intergroup communication in the context of genocide and mass killing begins with an exploration of how this kind of communication can devolve into such heinous human tragedies. How does communication set the stage that enables groups to pursue this path? The literature suggests that genocide is preceded by a period of intense communication that seeks to exacerbate racial divides while also providing social sanctions for killing as a solution to this intergroup strengthening activity. As individuals use language in their intergroup exchanges that seeks to build their own identity through the derogation of an outgroup, they become trapped in a conflict paradox that can then lead to violence or genocide. Strategies for detecting language associated with forming an identity trap and then dealing with it are also discussed.
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Global Health and Critical Studies
Mohan Jyoti Dutta
Amid the large scale inequalities in health outcomes witnessed globally, communication plays a key role in reifying and in offering transformative spaces for challenging these inequities. Communicative processes are integral to the globalization of capital, constituting the economic conditions globally that fundamentally threaten human health and wellbeing. The dominant approach to global health communication, situated within the global capitalist logics of privatization and profiteering, deploys a culturally targeted and culturally sensitive framework for addressing individual behavior. The privatization of health as a commodity creates new market opportunities for global capital. The extraction of raw materials, exploitation of labor, and the reproduction of commoditization emerge on the global arena as the sites for reproducing and circulating health vulnerabilities. By contrast, the culture-centered approach to global health foregrounds the co-creative work of building communicative infrastructures that emerge as sites for resisting the neoliberal transformation of health care. Through processes of grassroots democratic participation and ownership over communicative resources, culture-centered interventions create anchors for community-level interventions that seek to transform unhealthy structures. A wide array of social movements, activist interventions, and advocacy projects emerging from the global margins re-interpret the fundamental meanings of health to create alternative structures for imagining health.
Article
Globalization of Formal Debate Training, Civil Society, and Democratic Institutions
David Worth
Despite myriad sponsoring organizations and formats around the world, student debates at multiple educational levels share some fundamental characteristics. A better understanding of these characteristics can illuminate the activity and the cultural and civilizational assumptions that constitute debate, as well as debate’s relationship to democratic thinking. Debate pedagogy exists as a part of forensics, an Aristotelian term for speech and debate. While oral disputation has classical roots, contemporary debate assumed a more recognizable form with European and British practices in the modern era. Debate then grew tremendously in the United States. Argument models, competition structures, and assumed fundamentals of the activity developed in the 20th century in the United States have been extended into the global debate community. The 2020 World University Debating Championship featured in-person debates between 1,177 students from 243 universities in 50 countries. Formal debates between college students from competing schools is promoted as a tool for critical thinking instruction and empowerment. Generally, this instruction is carried out by advisers, coaches, faculty, alumni, and volunteers. In some cases, debate aids self-education: Students run their own debate teams, using the structure to supplement their normal curricular education.
College debate is intrinsically international. Debaters often travel internationally to compete. The events are international in scope and the issues debated are international by nature. Debates that focus on current events or perennial philosophical questions cannot avoid international elements and implications. Economics, interconnected international politics, international media, social media, and other forces ensure that debates cross borders conceptually if not physically, and even critique of borders has been a feature of intercollegiate debate for many years.
Article
The Globalization of Superheroes: Diffusion, Genre, and Cultural Adaptations
Kyle Hammonds
Superheroes are a global phenomenon. The superhero genre has been proliferated through modern industrial societies by way of movies, television, comics, and other forms of popular media. Although virtually every nation in the world has heroic myths, the modern superhero, as marked by the inception of recent American comics heroes in 1929, is a uniquely Western invention. Superheroes are “Western” insofar as they embody and exhibit Western civic values, such as democracy, humanism, and retributive justice. These characters have been communicatively incorporated into globalization processes by means of diffusion and thereby enact aspects of cultural imperialism. Even so, superhero figures have been in high demand across many populations for their entertainment value. As superheroes have diffused in non-Western cultures, they have not only been absorbed by new cultures but also refigured and adapted. These non-Western adaptations have had a recursive influence, such as the global popularity of Japanese manga. The recursive relationship between Western superheroes and their non-Western adaptations implies superheroes are an important aspect of cultural fusion in global popular culture.
Article
Globalizing and Changing Culture
Hans J. Ladegaard
Although there is no exact definition of globalization, and relatively little empirical evidence on how it affects people’s lives, most scholars argue that it reflects an increasingly mobile and interconnected world. People travel for pleasure or work, or they migrate to other parts of the world. They also communicate with linguistic and cultural others, either face-to-face or via modern communication technologies, which requires them to use a global lingua franca (English). This leads to greater interdependence and a sense of sharedness, but also to more intergroup conflicts. Thus, the world has become more interconnected, but also more fragmented, and social and economic inequality both within and across nation-states has become more visible.
The importance of culture as an analytical concept in (intercultural) communication research is another pertinent topic in the literature. Some scholars have argued that culture has lost its potency as a meaningful analytical concept and therefore should no longer take center stage in communication research. Others claim that culture will always be salient and influence behavior. How and to what extent globalization changes culture has also been discussed extensively in recent years. Some scholars argue that globalization leads to sameness and uniformity, and ultimately to the end of the nation-state. Others disagree and posit that globalization leads to a strengthening of the nation-state and of the cultural values we associate with it.
A meaningful way to test theoretical assumptions about globalization and culture is to analyze communication and work practices in global organizations. Research from these contexts suggests that globalization has not led to cultural assimilation and uniformity. Employees in the global workplace and student sojourners use national stereotypes as a frame of reference when they communicate with cultural others, and they demonstrate high awareness of cultural differences and how they impact their communication, study, and work practices.
Recent research on cultural change and globalization has included a critical dimension that questions a world order where the increase in power and cultural and economic wealth in developed countries happens at the expense of poor people with no voice and little visibility living in developing countries. Critical (intercultural) communication research considers these imbalances and also provides a critique of Anglocentric research paradigms, which do not include the cultural and linguistic experiences of non-Western cultural others.
Article
Global Music Piracy
Neil W. Perry and Aram Sinnreich
Music has always been a public good, playing a central role in human society. Not merely a source of entertainment, it is also a medium for storytelling, news, and social bonding. Musicians began to professionalize during the Renaissance, and the rise of print publishing contributed to the formation of a nascent music industry. The book industry, which grew in economic and political strength after the widespread adoption of movable type, introduced the idea of legal monopoly—copyright—to reproduce works of authorship. In time, this was adopted by music publishers as well.
In the two centuries since music was first copyrighted, music has become increasingly commoditized, and central to the adoption and sale of new communication technologies. Major technological shifts contributed to new legal and economic paradigms, from the mechanical reproduction of scores in the 19th century to piano rolls and recorded sound at the turn of the 20th century, to radio and television broadcasts a few decades later, to digital recording and network-based peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution at the turn of the present century. Rather than supplanting one another, emerging technologies worked symbiotically with previous ones, expanding the music industry ecology. Throughout this process, copyright law has continued to evolve and expand, serving as a central mechanism for industrial organization and economic exploitation.
In the 1980s, new technologies, practices, and laws created the conditions for radical changes to the music industry. Digitization made music into a highly portable, easily distributable commodity, free from the sonic degradation inherent to copying analog media. Nondestructive editing, high-quality data compression, stable storage, relatively inexpensive production tools, and internet adoption helped to speed the creation and redistribution of digital music. Digital audio strained on the enforcement power of copyright owners; virtually overnight, a medium shaped by highly controlled distribution was recast as one in which control was practically impossible. In short order, the barriers to entry that had fortified the industry titans from competitors and freeloaders were disassembled and the lucrative economic model that had reigned for a century was disrupted. At the same time, new laws and treaties “harmonized” international copyright laws and enforcement—a development that exacerbated the tensions created by new digital communications platforms within media economies.
Central to these disruptions were the commercial and noncommercial “piracy” that challenged copyright authority. Digital audio accelerated a new mode of composition—sampling—which grew rapidly in popularity and seemed tailored to problematize rights holders’ monopolies over recombinant uses of their work. Additionally, internet distribution gave recordings life outside the traditional industry structures. Finally, P2P file sharing enabled redistribution of music with virtually no technological barriers. This transformation coincided with a nosedive in music industry revenue. Despite numerous contributory factors, the industry placed responsibility squarely at the feet of music “piracy,” and spent the next two decades facilitating this narrative through draconian copyright enforcement, mass lawsuits against customers, and lobbying for stronger copyright.
Article
Gloria Anzaldúa: From Borderlands to Nepantla
Diana Isabel Bowen
Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana feminist, queer, cultural critic, author, and artist who is well-known for her concept of the borderlands, physically referring to the U.S.–Mexico border, but also incorporating psychological aspects to describe the spiritual, sexual, or other boundaries that, although arbitrary and painful, guide one’s identity. Using her experiences as a means to create art and social thought, Anzaldúa calls the process of using struggles resulting from sexism, racism, and homophobia a starting point; she explained how theories of the flesh were born out of this necessity. Often, this process involves creating art or writing poetry, fiction, and theoretical essays that require adopting or crafting new terms and categories to more fully explain the lived experiences of people of color. In her writing, she used autohistorias—a term that describes using biographical stories interspersed across genres of writing—and often switched between English, Spanish, and Náhuatl languages. Noticing that scholars tended to use her theory of the borderlands almost exclusively to discuss the geographic tensions between the United States and Mexico, for example, she adopted the Náhuatl term nepantla to more succinctly describe the spiritual dimensions of experience.
Scholars interested in Anzaldúa’s work have observed the importance of acknowledging intersectionality and standpoint theories as central to exploring Chicana feminist thought. While her work connects her to the Chicana/o movement and to the women’s movement, Anzaldúa also discusses how the Chicana/o movement excluded women and the women’s movement excluded voices of women of color. Centering experiences of women of color and bringing marginalized voices to the center highlights Anzaldúa’s strategy for gaining awareness of one’s marginal status, reclaiming one’s identity through this knowledge, making use of everyday and structural acts of resistance, and creating theories of social change. These spaces of in-between are uncomfortable but also provide opportunities for social transformation.
Article
Half Sibling Relationships and Family Communication
Bailey M. Oliver-Blackburn
Half siblings are brothers and sisters who share only one biological parent and are thus, half biologically related. Although half siblings may be the result of extramarital/partnership affairs or post-bereavement, most are the result of a divorce and remarriage. Half sibling research is rare, and existing research and even national and international statistical reporting agencies often incorrectly conflate half siblings with stepsiblings. Research that can be found on half siblings often illustrates a “deficit-comparison” approach where half and stepsiblings are compared to full biological siblings and studied for how they fall short of biological sibling outcomes. Early research speculates that children who reside with half siblings experience poorer educational outcomes, report significantly more depressive symptoms, exhibit poorer coping skills, are more likely to engage in risky behavior such as early sexual activity and drug and alcohol use, and have more strained sibling and parental relationships compared to those with no half siblings or those with only full biological siblings. The challenges that exist for half sibling relationships are often hypothesized as associated with either family structure (half siblings located within a complex stepfamily) or explained through evolutionary perspectives of Darwinian fitness. However, research on half siblings overall is mixed, with studies also positing these outcomes are not due to the presence of half siblings and that there are instead positive implications from having a half sibling on individual outcomes, sibling relationship quality, and overall family functioning. Overall, half siblings can form quality relationships and half brothers and sisters who share a residence, are closer in age, of the same gender, spend more quality time with one another, have parents who prosaically intervene on their behalf, and who emphasize their positive relationship and connection through addressing terms and sharing backstories of their family’s origins are more likely to report a positive relationship.
Article
Health Care Teams as Agents for Change in Health and Risk Messaging
Kevin Real and Andy Pilny
Effective communication in health care teams is central to the delivery of high-quality, safe, dependable, and efficient patient care. Understanding how health care team communication operates within healthcare systems is important. Viewing health care teams in hospital settings as creators and channels for diffusions of health and risk messages is an important contribution to health communication scholarship. Health care teams are essential elements of healthcare systems. In many instances, they are components of multiteam systems embedded within larger network ecosystems. These teams are not identical, thus, considering how team type (e.g., unidisciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary) shapes distinct communication processes offers a better understanding of how these teams facilitate health and risk message diffusion. TeamSTEPPS is an important framework for essential teamwork behaviors that facilitate team processes in healthcare systems. Significantly, we develop specific communication competencies drawn from observation work that facilitate health care team effectiveness. Ideas developed by Kurt Lewin are utilized to consider how different types of multiteam systems can be effective as channels and facilitators of health and risk messages. We end the chapter with examples from field research. A set of hospital nursing unidisciplinary teams comprise a network of teams that form a heterarchical structure with important messages flowing between teams. An innovative form of hospital interdisciplinary rounds relies on specific communication practices to create and exchange health and risk messages to patients, families, health care team members, and other healthcare stakeholders.
Article
Health Literacy and Health/Risk Communication
Michael Mackert, Sara Champlin, and Jisoo Ahn
Health literacy—defined as the ability of an individual to obtain, process, understand, and communicate about health information—contributes significantly to health outcomes and costs to the U.S. health-care system. Approximately one-quarter to one-half of U.S. adults struggle with health information, which includes understanding patient education materials, reading medication labels, and communicating with health-care providers. Low health literacy is more common among the elderly, those who speak English as a second language, and those of lower socioeconomic status. In addition to conceptualizing health literacy as an individual-level skill, it can also be considered an organizational or community-level ability.
Increased attention to the field of health literacy has resulted in debates about the definition and the best ways to assess health literacy; there is also a strong and growing movement within the field of health literacy research and practice to frame health literacy less as a deficit to overcome and more as an approach to empowering patients and improving outcomes. As health-care providers have recognized the importance of health literacy, workshops, and training programs have been developed and evaluated to improve the care of low-health-literate patients. Similarly, health promotion professionals have developed best practices for reaching low-health-literate audiences with traditional and new digital media, which can also increase access for patients with hearing or visual impairments. Additionally, recent policy changes in the United States, including those related to the Affordable Care Act, contribute to a greater focus and regulation of factors that impact health literacy. Researchers and practitioners together are advancing understanding of health literacy, its relationship to health outcomes and health-care costs, and improved strategies for improving the health of lower health literate patients. Development and review of health literacy pieces can aid in shared decision making and provide insights for patients on various health-care services.
Article
Health Promotion and Risk Reduction in Congregations
Dennis Myers, Terry A. Wolfer, and Maria L. Hogan
A complex web of attitudinal, cultural, economic, and structural variables condition the decision to respond to communications promoting healthy behavior and participation in risk reduction initiatives. A wide array of governmental, corporate, and voluntary sector health-related organizations focus on effective messaging and health care options, increasing the likelihood of choices that generate and sustain wellness. Researchers also recognize the significant and multifaceted ways that religious congregations contribute to awareness and adoption of health-promoting behaviors. These religiously based organizations are credible disseminators of health education information and accessible providers of venues that facilitate wellness among congregants and community members. The religious beliefs, spirituality, and faith practices at the core of congregational cultural life explain the trustworthiness of their messaging, the health of their adherents, and the intention of their care provision.
Considerable inquiry into the impact of religion and spirituality on health reveals substantive correlations with positive psychological factors known to sustain physical and psychological health—optimism, meaning and purpose, hope, well-being, self-esteem, gratefulness, social support, and marital stability. However, the beliefs and practices that create receptivity to health-related communications, care practices, and service provision can also be a deterrent to message impact and participation in healthy behaviors. When a productive relationship between spirituality and health exists, congregational membership offers rituals (e.g., worship, education, mission) and relationships that promote spiritual well-being. Research demonstrates increased life satisfaction and meaning in life, with health risk reduction associated with a sense of belonging, enriched social interactions, and shared experiences.
Congregations communicate their commitment to wellness of congregants and community members alike through offering a variety of congregationally based and collaborative wellness and risk reduction programs. These expressions of investment in individual and community health range across all age, gender, and ethnic demographics and address most of the prominent diagnostic categories. These programs are ordered along three dimensions: primary prevention (health care messaging and education), secondary prevention (risk education), and tertiary prevention (treatment). Applying the dimensions of sponsorship, goal/mission, focus, services, staffing, and intended outcome highlights the similarities and differences among them. Several unique facets of congregational life energize the effectiveness of these programs. Inherent trust and credibility empower adherence, and participation decisions and financial investment provide service availability. These assets serve as attractive contributions in collaborations among congregations and between private and public health care providers.
Current research has not yet documented the best practices associated with program viability. However, practice wisdom in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of congregationally based and collaborative health-related programs suggests guidelines for future investigation. Congregational leaders and health care professionals emphasize well-designed needs assessment. Effective congregational health promotion and risk reduction may be linked to the availability and expertise of professionals and volunteers enacting the roles of planner/program developer, facilitator, convener/mediator, care manager/advocate, health educator, and direct health care service provider.
Article
The Impact of Televangelism on Christian Beliefs and Cultural Values in Tanzania
Kaanaeli Kaale and Joyce Bazira
Religion is a collection of beliefs and rituals derived from societal and cultural norms and practices to create a bond with God. Africans practiced traditional religions before the 19th century, adopting modern Christian beliefs that spread via radio and newspapers. The development of information and communications technology enabled Christians in Africa, especially in Tanzania, to use the media to increase religious freedom and start modern African Traditional Religion (ATR) churches. the past two decades, African scholars have observed the proliferation of the media landscape from a more holistic perspective to understand both the positive and negative relationships between religions and the media, generally used to promote ATR.
ATR combines beliefs from different African cultures, such as worshipping spirits, the sun, trees, stones, and other things based on their location. Televangelists, which mainly include prophets and apostles, have used the media extensively to persuade people to become more religious in traditional ways. Televangelism’s contribution to promoting ART beliefs among Christians has given rise to cyber churches, which have contributed to changes in church shape, structure, textual content, and social behavior.
Scholars use culture and critical theories to understand the unique ways in which televangelists use the media to develop neo-Pentecostal groups that depart from the Protestant and Catholic Churches. Three critical concepts relate to a better understanding of televangelists’ media use: (a) televangelism’s promotion of African Indigenous religion among Christians, (b) televangelism’s influence on modernist changes in churches, and (c) Christians’ perception of the consequences of televangelism among Christians. In general, discussing the media’s impact brings ethnically diverse groups together to solve social–economic issues and advance ATR in Jesus Christ’s name.
Article
Indigenous Resistance in South Asia
Mohan Jyoti Dutta, Pankaj Baskey, Rabin Mandi, and Indranil Mandal
This article examines the wide range of practices of Indigenous resistance across South Asia. It conceptualizes the interplays of power and control that shape the expressions of Indigenous agency in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts, depicting the multiple layers of erasure that shape the historic and ongoing displacement of Indigenous communities from land, cultural resources, knowledge, and ways of livelihood. By looking at the communicative practices of resistance in historic and contemporary contexts, it theorizes the openings for transforming the forces of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism. The article concludes by drawing on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to map the role of voice infrastructures in Indigenous struggles across South Asia, drawing out the centrality of voice in transforming the communicative inequalities that shape the production of colonial-imperial-capitalist knowledge.
Article
Intercultural Competence
Lily A. Arasaratnam
The phrase “intercultural competence” typically describes one’s effective and appropriate engagement with cultural differences. Intercultural competence has been studied as residing within a person (i.e., encompassing cognitive, affective, and behavioral capabilities of a person) and as a product of a context (i.e., co-created by the people and contextual factors involved in a particular situation). Definitions of intercultural competence are as varied. There is, however, sufficient consensus amongst these variations to conclude that there is at least some collective understanding of what intercultural competence is. In “Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence,” Spitzberg and Chagnon define intercultural competence as, “the appropriate and effective management of interaction between people who, to some degree or another, represent different or divergent affective, cognitive, and behavioral orientations to the world” (p. 7). In the discipline of communication, intercultural communication competence (ICC) has been a subject of study for more than five decades. Over this time, many have identified a number of variables that contribute to ICC, theoretical models of ICC, and quantitative instruments to measure ICC. While research in the discipline of communication has made a significant contribution to our understanding of ICC, a well-rounded discussion of intercultural competence cannot ignore the contribution of other disciplines to this subject. Our present understanding of intercultural competence comes from a number of disciplines, such as communication, cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and education, to name a few.
Article
Intercultural Conflict
Min-Sun Kim
Conflict, as part of interpersonal interactions, occurs in specific cultural settings. Viewing conflict as cultural behavior helps explain why disputes over seemingly similar issues can be handled so dissimilarly in different cultures. There have been numerous cross-cultural comparison studies of different conflict management strategies, most of them utilizing a “national culture” approach. The findings reported in the cross-cultural conflict literature point to a picture that collectivists value harmonious interpersonal relationships with others, preferring indirect or avoiding styles of dealing with conflict and showing concern for face-saving. Understanding the range of behavior choices and strategies available to manage conflict as well as differences in preferred styles adds considerably to people’s skills as effective communicators.
Article
Intercultural Friendships
Elisabeth Gareis
Following the devastation of World War II, policymakers and scholars worked to advance international partnerships and mutual understanding. In the 1940s and 1950s, international student exchange programs were launched to foster international good will; training programs for diplomats were created that focused on intercultural communication competence; and researchers turned their attention on how to optimize intergroup relations. Most prominently, Gordon Allport outlined principles of effective intergroup contact in the contact hypothesis. Scholarship based on the contact hypothesis later determined that the potential for friendship is not only a facilitating but also an essential factor for prejudice reduction and optimal intergroup contact. Focusing largely on the friendship experiences of international students studying abroad, research also identified numerous other benefits of intercultural-friendship formation, including stronger language skills, greater life satisfaction, lower levels of stress, and enhanced perceptions of the host country. Despite these benefits, the lack of friendship between sojourners and host nationals is a common finding in intercultural-friendship research and a concern for the many educational institutions worldwide that are attempting to internationalize, in part by attracting international students. Current research, therefore, often focuses on factors that influence intercultural-friendship formation and, increasingly, on measures for promoting intercultural friendship.
First among the factors affecting the development of intercultural friendships is cultural difference. Cultural similarity provides attributional confidence and reduces uncertainty; that is, interactants can more easily predict and explain behaviors in people who are similar to them. Highly dissimilar cultures often exhibit differences in communication patterns, value dimensions, and friendship styles that can impede relationship development, especially in the orientation and exploratory stages of social penetration, during which cultural complexities are most critical. Another prominent factor is the interactants’ motivation to form relationships across cultural lines. In one of the prime arenas for intercultural contact, international student exchange, for example, sojourners seeking cultural knowledge and personal growth generally have more interest in interaction and friendships with host nationals than students who are task oriented and focus on education for better career prospects after returning home. Similarly, host environment factors, such as host receptivity (ranging from welcoming attitudes to discrimination) influence the likelihood with which intercultural friendships are formed. Other factors affecting intercultural-friendship formation include communicative competence, intercultural sensitivity, and aspects of identity and personality (e.g., cultural versus personal identification, empathy, and open-mindedness). Among measures for promoting intercultural-friendship formation are infrastructures that facilitate proximity and frequency of contact, provide foreign language training, support experience abroad, and offer intercultural education and training to further intercultural competence and the appreciation of difference.
