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Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
Intercultural
Communication
A Critical Introduction
Ingrid Piller
Piller, Ingrid. Intercultural Communication : A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
Intercultural Communication
Piller, Ingrid.
Intercultural
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Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
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Intercultural Communication
A Critical Introduction
Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
Ingrid Piller
Edinburgh University Press
Piller, Ingrid.
Intercultural
PILLER
PRINT.indd
iii Communication : A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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© Ingrid Piller, 2011
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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www.euppublishing.com
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ISBN 978 0 7486 3283 1 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 3284 8 (paperback)
The right of Ingrid Piller
to be identified as author of this work
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Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce
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Contents
Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgements
viii
1
Overview
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Aims
1.3 Organisation
1
1
3
4
2
Approaching Intercultural Communication
2.1 Chapter objectives
2.2 Intercultural communication: what is it?
2.3 Culture
2.4 Key points
2.5 Further reading
2.6 Activities
5
5
5
9
16
16
16
3
The Genealogy of Intercultural Communication
3.1 Chapter objectives
3.2 Culture
3.3 Multiculturalism
3.4 Intercultural communication
3.5 Key points
3.6 Further reading
3.7 Activities
18
18
20
24
28
33
33
34
4
Language and Culture
4.1 Chapter objectives
4.2 Linguistic relativity
4.3 Health care in linguistically diverse societies
36
36
36
42
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vi
c onte nts
Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
4.8
Communicative relativity
A language with a name
Key points
Further reading
Activities
43
46
53
54
54
5
Nation and Culture
5.1 Chapter objectives
5.2 Stereotypes
5.3 Banal nationalism
5.4 Intercultural communication advice
5.5 Globalisation and transnationalism
5.6 Key points
5.7 Further reading
5.8 Activities
57
57
57
59
65
68
73
73
74
6
Intercultural Communication at Work
6.1 Chapter objectives
6.2 National cultural values
6.3 Multinational corporations
6.4 Doing language and culture work
6.5 Challenges and future directions
6.6 Key points
6.7 Further reading
6.8 Activities
76
76
77
84
87
91
93
94
94
7
Intercultural Communication for Sale
7.1 Chapter objectives
7.2 Selling ethno-cultural stereotypes
7.3 English for sale
7.4 A global non-language?
7.5 Key points
7.6 Further reading
7.7 Activities
96
96
97
101
104
108
109
109
8
Intercultural Romance
8.1 Chapter objectives
8.2 Love goes global
8.3 Love makes the world go round
8.4 Mail-order bride websites
8.5 Key points
111
111
111
115
120
125
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co n te n ts
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8.6
8.7
Further reading
Activities
vii
126
126
9 Intercultural Communication and Exclusion
9.1 Chapter objectives
9.2 Racism in disguise
9.3 Jobs with accents
9.4 Enhancing access
9.5 Key points
9.6 Further reading
9.7 Activities
128
128
128
132
137
141
142
142
10 Intercultural Communication in a Multilingual World
10.1 Chapter objectives
10.2 Language proficiency
10.3 On being rendered speechless
10.4 Language matters
10.5 State language regimes
10.6 Commercial language regimes
10.7 Key points
10.8 Further reading
10.9 Activities
144
144
145
147
151
158
163
168
168
168
11 The Future of Intercultural Communication
11.1 Chapter objectives
11.2 The material base of intercultural communication
11.3 Shifting terrains
11.4 Social justice
11.5 The position of the researcher
11.6 Further reading
11.7 Activities
171
171
171
174
174
176
177
177
References
Index
179
194
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Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making and it has been written
on the move. I first started thinking about writing an intercultural communication textbook when I coordinated the MA in Cross-Cultural
Communication and convened a unit with the same name in the
Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia, from 2001
to 2004. I developed the book proposal and wrote the first chapter while
I worked in the English Department of Basel University, Switzerland, in
2005 and 2006. Then I moved back to Australia and tried (not very successfully) to keep working on the manuscript while I served as the Executive
Director of the Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre (AMEP
RC) at Macquarie University. I finally resumed and completed work on
the manuscript in 2010 when I returned to Macquarie University from
a year at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE). I
think it’s fitting that a book about intercultural communication should
have been written on the move and in different places – it certainly means
that I have lots of first-hand examples of intercultural communication to
share. My students, colleagues and friends in all of these places and many
others with whom I am connected virtually or have been fortunate enough
to visit have influenced this book in various ways, and I thank you all.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to those who read drafts of this book
and discussed them with me, particularly Alexandre Duchêne and Kimie
Takahashi, and also Adam Jaworski, Alastair Pennycook, Aneta Pavlenko,
Crispin Thurlow, Dongmei Pu, Emily Farrell, Erwin Koller†, Esmat
Babaii, Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Georges Lüdi, Huamei Han, Ikuko
Nakane, Jackie Chang, Jenny Zhang Jie, Jiří Nekvapil, Loy Lising, Lynda
Yates, Monica Heller, Song Li, Sue Lubbers, and Vera Williams Tetteh.
I am particularly grateful to all the students who attended my intercultural communication classes at the University of Sydney and the University
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ack n o wl e d ge me nts
ix
Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
of Basel, the participants of the intercultural communication workshops
I convened for AMEP teachers across Australia, and the attendees of my
visiting lectures on intercultural communication at various European,
Japanese, Middle Eastern and US universities. I learned from you all and
tried to always keep you in mind as the intended audience of this book.
Maintaining professional and personal relationships on the move can
be a challenge and so a special mention of all of my friends and colleagues
at www.languageonthemove.org is in order. www.languageonthemove.org
is a sociolinguistics website and blog devoted to intercultural communication, multilingualism and language learning, and I will be looking forward
to your visits there, too.
My family has been on the move with me, and their love, support and
patience have made it all worthwhile. My daughter kept reminding me
that nothing justifies cutting back on playtime with your child, certainly
not writing “an adult book!” A special Sağ ol and Danke to Nasser and Ava!
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To my students: past, present and future
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c h apt e r 1
Overview
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1.1 in troduc t i o n
I have been teaching intercultural communication courses and workshops
for over a decade and have often been disappointed by the literature in
the field. This is because textbooks in intercultural communication are
rarely populated by anyone like myself or my students. I have lived
in a number of countries for extended periods, I speak a number of
languages, and I have close relationships with people whose national,
linguistic and cultural backgrounds are very different from mine. The
same is true of many, if not most, of the students in my classes: many
are overseas students, many come from migrant backgrounds, some
have grown up in different countries, some have attended international
schools, many are the children of intermarried couples, or they are in
such relationships themselves. My disappointment with much of the
intercultural communication literature stems from the fact that people
with diverse backgrounds leading linguistically and culturally diverse
lives and engaging in linguistically and culturally diverse relationships,
people such as myself and my students, hardly ever seem to figure in
the intercultural communication literature. Part of my motivation for
writing this book thus stems from the fact that I want it to be relevant
to and reflective of intercultural communication in real life. Intercultural
communication in real life is embedded in economic, social and cultural
globalisation, transnational migration and overseas study. The main challenges of intercultural communication are the linguistic challenges of language learning, the discursive challenges of stereotyping, and the social
challenges of inclusion and justice. Let me exemplify this with a case
study of intercultural communication in higher education. As in many
other countries, particularly in the English-speaking world, university
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2
ov erv ie w
classrooms in Australia have become sites of intense intercultural communication in recent decades (Phillimore and Koshy 2010). What does
that mean for students’ learning experiences?
Let’s meet Aya, a participant in Nakane’s (2007b) study of the linguistic and cultural challenges faced by Japanese overseas students in
Australian university classrooms. In this context, Asian students in general
and Japanese students in particular are often perceived as being shy and
silent. When the researcher interviewed Japanese overseas students in
Australia about their experiences of intercultural communication in the
classroom, many of them mentioned that they were afraid to speak up
because they lacked confidence in their English. They also said that they
did not quite understand the conventions of classroom discussions and so
found it hard to get the timing right: either they did not know when to get
their contribution in or they found that their turns were interrupted by
more vocal, often local Australian, students. As they often did not know
what the expectations of a particular format such as lecture, tutorial, small
group or open class discussion, or student presentation were, they often
thought it safer to keep silent than to speak at the wrong moment or say
the wrong thing. So, the silence of those Japanese students had very little
to do with Japanese cultural traits. It is true that some were intentionally
silent because they thought it was inappropriate for a student to challenge
their lecturer, for instance. However, most of them wished to speak more,
as Nakane (2007b) discovered by interviewing them. What kept them
from engaging was not Japanese culture but lack of confidence in their
English and limited understanding of Australian university classroom
formats. Furthermore, silence was not only something they did (‘being
silent’) but also something that happened to them (‘being silenced’) when
their peers kept interrupting, when their lecturers did not allow for time
to speak up, or when the conversation turned to local topics they knew
nothing about. In this environment, the silence and shyness of Japanese
students was a cultural stereotype and a truism that was constantly reinforced through the misinterpretation of actual classroom practices involving everyone in those classrooms, not only the relatively small number of
Japanese students.
In addition to interviewing students and lecturers, Nakane (2007b)
also video-recorded a number of units of study in order to gain an understanding not only of what students and teachers said about intercultural
communication but also of how they actually did intercultural communication. To account for both perception (‘what people think they do’) and
performance (‘what people actually do’) in intercultural communication
is important because our perceptions are not always right. Sociolinguists
like to compare self-reports about language usage to the weather forecast:
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a ims
3
sometimes it is right and sometimes it is wrong. At the same time, perception informs performance and vice versa. Aya was an overseas student from
Japan in some of the classes recorded by the researcher. She was also different from most of the other Japanese students in the way she frequently
sought out speaking opportunities – indeed, she was the second-most
frequent contributor in her classes. With 5.8 seconds, the average length
of her turns was very similar to the class average of 6.1 seconds. However,
the above-average frequency and average length of her contributions did
not do anything to change Aya’s perception of herself as having difficulties participating. They did not do anything to change her teachers’ and
her peers’ perception of her as a ‘very quiet’ student lacking in interest
and engagement. Indeed, it is one of the tragedies of intercultural communication that language forms are taken to stand for much more than
just language proficiency. As we have seen, in this case silence – on top
of not having been accurately observed in the first place – was misjudged
not as an expression of limited English proficiency, lack of familiarity
with Australian classroom routines or lack of familiarity with local topics,
but rather was judged as a personal quality: of being an uninterested and
disengaged student.
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1.2 a ims
It is the aim of this book to offer a comprehensive, up-to-date, critical
introduction to the field of intercultural communication from a discourseanalytic and sociolinguistic perspective. Through increased migration,
tourism and global media, people with different cultural and linguistic
backgrounds are now more in contact than ever before. The ubiquity
of cultural and linguistic contact, mergers and hybrids has resulted in a
strong interest in intercultural communication, both outside and inside
academia. This book provides an understanding of intercultural communication as communication where language learning and language proficiency on the one hand and stereotyping and the discursive construction
of identity on the other intersect with social inclusion and justice.
Intercultural Communication makes two key contributions to the field.
First, with its grounding in discourse analysis and anthropological linguistics, it treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive
constructions. Second, with its grounding in sociolinguistics, particularly
bilingualism studies, it highlights the use of different languages and/or
language varieties as a central aspect of intercultural communication, and
illuminates the differential prestige of languages and language varieties,
and the varying access that speakers have to them.
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1.3 or ga n i sa t i o n
The book aims to be engaging to a wide readership regardless of whether
they have a background in linguistics or not, and therefore adopts a recurring structure whereby the book itself, as well as each chapter and subsection, is organised in three steps:
Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
• establishing common ground through a state-of-the-art review of the
field
• critiquing the common ground by posing new questions and exploring
new connections
• opening up new perspectives by sketching out research projects that
students at various levels can undertake.
Each chapter is arranged around a set of case studies that serve to exemplify
the specific issues.
The chapters are ordered as follows. Chapter 2 is the key theoretical
chapter and aims to deconstruct the notion of ‘cultural difference’.
Chapter 3 continues that theme by placing the field of intercultural communication in its historical and social context. Chapters 4 and 5 relate the
notion of culture to two other key concepts, namely language and nation.
Chapters 2 to 5 form the basis for the remainder of the volume in the
sense that the following chapters are organised around contexts, sites and
domains where ‘culture is made relevant’ by actors. The first context in
which the discursive construction of cultural difference is explored is the
world of international business in Chapter 6. Cultural difference is also
made relevant in the ethno-cultural stereotypes employed in marketing
(Chapter 7). While cultural difference is often viewed negatively, it carries
positive associations in marketing (Chapter 7) and intercultural romance.
Chapter 8, then, explores the global circuits of romance. Discourses about
cultural difference lend themselves to all kinds of purposes and Chapter 9
explores the more sinister ones of exclusion and exploitation. Chapter 10
changes direction slightly and moves away from the discursive construction of difference to explore the language practices and language ideologies
in which intercultural communication is embedded. Chapter 11 sketches
out future research directions.
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c h apt e r 2
Approaching Intercultural
Communication
2.1 c ha p ter o b j e ct i ves
This chapter will enable you to:
Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.
• Start thinking about intercultural communication in terms of one
central research question: who makes culture relevant to whom in
which context for which purposes?
• Familiarise yourself with the terms cross-cultural communication,
intercultural communication and inter-discourse communication, and
identify how the terms are used with different, similar or overlapping
meanings in different studies.
• Analyse culture-related texts for the uses, content, scope and status of
culture.
2.2 i n t e rc ul t ur a l co m mu ni cation: what
is it?
‘Intercultural communication’ is one of those terms that everybody uses,
and in many different and not necessarily compatible ways. Instead of
starting with a definition, I will start with a description of three studies
that come under the heading ‘intercultural communication’, and I will
ask you to work out for yourself how the researchers who conducted and
wrote these studies understand ‘intercultural communication’.
Study 1: Lorenzoni and Lewis (2004) are concerned with the ways
in which British and Italian service staff of an airline respond to service
failure. Service failure is another term for ‘when something goes wrong’
such as baggage being lost or a customer not being able to get on their
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6
approa ching i nter cul tur a l co mmunica tio n
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flight due to overbooking. With the help of two questionnaires, the
researchers interviewed thirty-seven British and thirty-nine Italian ground,
telephone and cabin staff who worked for the same airline. The questionnaires contained items such as ‘A customer reacts quite loudly and emotionally to a dissatisfying service encounter. Would you say you have to
“bite your lip”?’ The researchers found that both groups were very similar
in their ‘behavioural responses’, that is, most participants reported that
they would try to change an arrangement if doing so was within company
regulations. If a change of arrangement was not an option, they would
explain why this was so. However, there were some attitudinal differences.
Italian service staff, for instance, sometimes reported ‘compassionate cases’
but British workers did not. The researchers explain the similarities they
found in the way the workers act as resulting from the same training that
all employees of the airline receive, irrespective of where they are based;
and they explain the differences they found in the workers’ attitudes as
resulting from British and Italian culture, and state that attitudes are not
as amenable to training as behaviour.
Study 2: Bailey (2000) is concerned with the ways in which Korean
immigrant shopkeepers in Los Angeles interact with African-American
customers. The researcher observed these interactions by visiting a number
of retail shops owned by Korean immigrants. He installed a video camera
in one such shop and recorded all interactions during a four-hour period,
and he also interviewed the shopkeepers and customers. The researcher
found that service encounters with Korean customers were very straightforward, and usually contained three communicative activities – greeting,
business transaction, closing – as in this example:
Korean shopkeeper and Korean customer in interaction (Bailey 2000: 94)
Cashier:
Annyŏng haseyo.
Hello/How are you? [Customer has just entered store]
Customer: Annyŏng haseyo.
Hello/How are you?
Customer: Tambae!
Cigarettes!
Cashier:
Tambae tŭryŏyo?
You would like cigarettes? [Cashier reaches for cigarettes
under counter]
Cashier:
Yŏgi issŭmnida.
Here you are. [Cashier takes customer’s money and hands
her cigarettes; customer turns to leave]
Cashier:
Annyŏnghi kaseyo.
Good-bye.
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intercu ltu ra l co mm unica tio n: wh a t is it?
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Customer:
7
Nye.
Okay.
By contrast, interactions with African-American customers were more
complex because these customers initiated additional communicative
activities such as small talk about the weather, jokes about current affairs,
or personal talk about their families or jobs. The Korean storekeepers never
proactively introduced such additional communicative activities, they
rarely reciprocated and often they did not even respond to such attempts
at making the encounter more personal. In the interviews, it emerged that
African-American customers often felt ignored by the shopkeepers and
complained about their lack of involvement, which they attributed to
racist attitudes on the part of the Koreans. By contrast, the Korean-born
shop-owners and cashiers considered their customers’ attempts as personalising the encounter an imposition and a sign of bad manners, which they
attributed to lack of education (or ‘good breeding’ as they called it) on
the part of the African Americans. What is noteworthy is that even after
years of doing business in African-American neighbourhoods and after
years of shopping in Korean convenience stores, shopkeepers and customers do not accommodate to each other’s ways of speaking. The author
explains the persistence of diverging communicative styles with reference
to the wider socio-historical context in which they interact, turning each
interaction into a new micro-enactment of prior conflicts.
Study 3: Galasiński and Jaworski (2003) are concerned with the ways
in which people who live in tourist destinations are being represented
in travel writing. The researchers collected travel narratives published in
the travel section of the British broadsheet newspaper the Guardian in
1997. They found that travel journalists used three distinct strategies to
describe people who live in tourist destinations, or ‘hosts’ as the authors
call them: to begin with, those people are referred to in very general terms,
either as ‘locals’, as members of a national or ethnic group (e.g. ‘Russians’,
‘Dominicans’), or as members of a broad social group (e.g. ‘women’, ‘children’). These groups are then described as homogeneous and with clearly
identifiable attributes; for example, ‘Madeirans being a modest, undemonstrative, devoutly Catholic people.’ A second strategy of representing
people in tourist destinations was to single out one or more prototypical
representatives that the journalist has observed or, more rarely, interacted
with. In a story about a trip to China, for instance, a beggar was singled
out for such an individual description: ‘A beggar in cotton shoes, black felt
hat and padded coat, approaches me. Suddenly, he pulls back his coat to
reveal a right arm that is no more than a fingered flipper attached to the
shoulder.’ A third strategy was to represent people in tourist destinations
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8
approa ching i nter cul tur a l co mmunica tio n
as ‘helpers’ to the tourist, most typically as ‘hospitable locals’. An example
comes from a story about a trip to Italy: ‘I travelled alone and met nothing
but courtesy and warmth.’ The authors conclude that these representational strategies are part of turning a place into a tourist destination: not
a place where real people, part of a complex society, lead their lives, but
rather a place where people are specimens of a particular culture and where
it is safe for the tourist to go and gaze at people as a tourist attraction.
These three studies are concerned with intercultural communication in
three mundane contexts: service work, convenience shopping and reading
the newspaper. Their everyday character brings the ubiquity of intercultural communication home to us. Yes, intercultural communication is
mundane and ubiquitous but WHAT is it? Clearly, the three studies are
concerned with quite different objects of enquiry and are based on different understandings of intercultural communication. Study 1 compares
the attitudes and communicative behaviours of service workers from different ‘cultural’ backgrounds, where ‘culture’ is understood as identical to
nation (‘British’ and ‘Italian’). Study 2 studies shopkeepers and customers
from different cultural backgrounds in interaction, and ‘culture’ is seen
as similar to ethnicity and/or race (‘Korean immigrants’ and ‘African
Americans’). Study 3 investigates how other people are talked about and
cultural belonging is discursively constructed. Here culture is seen as a
product of the text instead of a social variable.
Scollon and Scollon (2000, 2001) refer to these three distinct understandings of intercultural communication as ‘cross-cultural communication’, ‘intercultural communication’ and ‘inter-discourse communication’,
respectively. Studies in ‘cross-cultural communication’ start from an
assumption of distinct cultural groups and investigate aspects of their
communicative practices comparatively. Studies in ‘intercultural communication’ mostly also start from an assumption of cultural differences
between distinct cultural groups but study their communicative practices
in interaction with each other. Finally, the ‘inter-discourse approach’
set[s] aside any a priori notions of group membership and identity
and [. . .] ask[s] instead how and under what circumstances
concepts such as culture are produced by participants as relevant
categories for interpersonal ideological negotiation. (Scollon and
Scollon 2001: 544)
When you start reading in the field of intercultural communication it is
useful to clarify for yourself whether a given piece of research is contrastive, interactive or discursive but you are likely to find that the terms
‘cross-cultural communication’, ‘intercultural communication’ and ‘inter-
Piller, Ingrid.
Intercultural
PILLER
PRINT.indd
8 Communication : A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sheffield/detail.action?docID=714142.
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24/03/2011 08:11
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discourse communication’ are not always neatly applied by writers. In this
book, when I report on the work of other researchers I will use their own
terms
