COM 254 - Intercultural Communication

This book posits that culture is not static, context is the driving force for change, and individuals can develop a multicultural mind. It is also the first IC textbook in the field that incorporates insight from evolutionary biology and the newly emerging discipline of culturalneurosciences. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides readers with new angles, encourages critical thinking, and sometimes challenges conventional knowledge in the field.

The book employs narrative inquiry to explore language, intercultural communication, collaboration, learning, and expatriate adjustment in the MNC. This approach offers new insights into intercultural experiences, communication, and cultural challenges faced by an under-researched group of professionals exposed to intensive collaborations with the local managers and employees. The findings also illustrate how the expatriates learned to better navigate the multicultural and multilingual business context and what factors facilitated and inhibited their learning and adjustment. Encouraging the qualitative, context-sensitive examination of expatriate-local personnel interactions, the book will be an invaluable source for scholars and practitioners interested in, among others, novel approaches to investigating language and intercultural communication in international business, cross-cultural management, qualitative cross-cultural research, as well as for lecturers and students interested in Central Europe and China.

This book presents a structured yet flexible methodology for developing intercultural competence in a variety of contexts, both formal and informal. Piloted around the world by UNESCO, this methodology has proven to be effective in a range of different contexts and focused on a variety of different issues. It, therefore can be considered an important resource for anyone concerned with effectively managing the growing cultural diversity within our societies to ensure inclusive and sustainable development. Intercultural competence refers to the skills, attitudes, and behaviours needed to improve interactions across difference, whether within a society (differences due to age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, political affiliation, ethnicity, and so on) or across borders.