Intercultural Adaptation Theory

A simplified model of Intercultural Adaptation, which shows
inverse parabolic arc (i.e., the "U-shaped" curve) that
we often go through when adjusting to new cultures.
Cai & Rodriguez (1996) give an overview of the communication
role in this process across nine propositions.

As we've now been leben in Deutschland fur (several?) Wochen, we should start thinking reflectively as to how we are adapting to our new surroundings. No doubt each of us is experiencing some different level of German culture as we continue to try new foods, speak new languages, and adapt to new customs. Perhaps the easiest part of international travel is recognizing that you are quickly in a culture not your own - it's usually a pretty exciting experience in the beginning (the "Honeymoon Stage") until the glitz and glamour wear off and you find yourself outside the comfort zone - for me, it was (of all things) drinking seltzer water (wasser mit gas) when I was expecting table water (still-wasser). This is an incredibly small thing to "shock" over, but even these small events have you questioning future interactions - trepidation over a drink order leads to scrutiny of a foreign food menus and drives many tourists to the local McDonald's over their local Gasthaus, as they experience a "Culture Shock" and look to regain control of their environment.

Two new ways that we might take a communication science (communiciology?) approach to this would be a focus on "intercultural adaptation" and "intercultural competence." The former focuses on Let's break them down seperately, and then I'll ask you guys to put them together in your weekly post.

Intercultural Adaptation

The following blog offers recommendations on how to
overcome these awkward new moments; I would not
recommend any of their suggestions.

When thinking of intercultural adaptation, Cai & Rodriguez (1996) talk about how communication patterns might aid or hinder persons understanding their "new" cultural environment. Defined as "as the process through which persons in cross-cultural interactions change their communicative behavior to facilitate understanding" (pp. 34, which seems to have a lot of elements in common with Communication Accomodation Theory, yes?).

IA looks at how we might try to continually alter our communication patterns to reduce misunderstandings - a common example of this is using exaggerated hand gestures when trying to convey meaning to someone who speaks a different language. Why would this play into culture? The notion here is that cross-cultural encounters are the result of individuals from different backgrounds relying on their social norms in an encounter. Example: In the US it is acceptable to hug an old friend whereas in many parts of Europe you may see friends kissing each on both cheeks. In the US, a kiss might be construed as having much more intimacy or meaning, which can lead to a rather awkward pause and silence.

Of course, with experience we hope to get better at avoiding these misunderstandings - the same "American" from above might travel abroad in the future armed with this slight cultural knowledge and be better-prepared when old friends kiss him or her on the cheek. because their past experiences were rather positive (a kiss on the cheek represents a friendship, and this is a good thing). At the same time, not all experiences are positive and we can reinforce negative as well as positive interactions. Indeed, a common stereotype among US travelers can be how poorly they are treated when visiting France - often a result of miscommunication from a lack of language skills and Francophile culture. Said negative interactions with one cultural group can drive individuals away from future intercultural interactions or at least, cause them to be more guarded when meeting "foreigners" in the future.

What does this mean for intercultural communication? It suggests that many cultural interactions can be understood in terms of how we communicate ourselves. Moreover, it suggests that much of our communicative behaviors are best understood as a function of the culture from which we stem - understanding communication is understanding culture, and vice versa.

Intercultural Competence

Another way of thinking about how we are "working" interculturally is to focus on our competence, defined by Fantini (2005) as "the complex of abilities needed to perform effectively and appropriately
when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself." An interesting distinction here is found between "effective" (how well we think we are doing) compared to "appropriate" (how well our hosts think we are doing). It is likely no secret that these perceptions can differ widely from each other, yet the better we are at detecting how our hosts are responding to our communication is the better we are at adapting ourselves to our new culture. Example: You might speak slowly and wave your arms while yelling at a barista to prepare you a michekaffe (which you're probably still calling a coffee with milk, if you're taking this approach) and you'll likely get your coffee (effective communication) - yet this behavior is hardly going to endear you to your hosts (inappropriate communication). Thus, to truly be interculturally competent we much struggle to balance out effectiveness with appropriateness, which is not so easy of a task.

Your assignment? For this week, I'd like you to make an honest reflection as to where you feel that you're fitting on both of these dimensions. Have you started to adapt to your surroundings? In the figure posted here, which "number" do you think you'd be? How would you honestly assess your own intercultural competence? Give me 300 to 400 words on this, and use the theory language. This post will serve as the basis for the end-portion of your final project, go give it a good effort!

Read more:

• Cai, D. A., & Rodriguez, J. I. (1996). Adjusting to Cultural Differences: The Intercultural Adaptation Model. Intercultural Communication Studies, 1(2).
• Fantini, A. E. (2005). About Intercultural Communicative Competence:  A Construct. Brattleboro, VT: School for International Training.

Cultural Convergence Theory

Comparing the salad bowl to the melting pot metaphor of US 

culture, one distinguishes the uniqueness of each culture

more evidently in the left image than the right. 

The term convergence is defined by Kincaid (2009) as "movement toward one point, toward another communicator, toward a common interest, and toward greater uniformity, never quite reaching that point." This last point - never quite reaching that point - is what distinguishes convergence from a singularity. As a popular corollary to US culture, you might consider convergence to be more like the salad bowl metaphor (separate parts, all in an US culture) as compared to the melting pot metaphor (separate peoples all blended together as one US culture).

Why converge at all? Converging to one point helps us create mutual understanding of who were are as a nation and a people - making sense of our borders as less geo-political and more socio-emotional. Kincaid's convergence model was initially meant to address shortcomings of transmission-based models of communication, but we can expand it to look at cultural convergence (a topic address thoroughly by MIT scientist Henry Jenkins, specifically in reference to new media). From the reading, we see two tenants of CCT at the aggregate (re: cultural) level:

Theorem 1: In a relatively closed social system in which communication among members isunrestricted, the system as a whole will tend to converge over time toward a state of greater cultural uniformity.

Theorem 2: In a relatively closed social system in which communication among members is restricted, the system as a whole will tend to diverge over time toward a state of greater cultural diversity.

So, when you think about communication so far - in particular, your interactions in Erfurt compared to Amsterdam? How might you define the cultural diversity of each location? Can you look at the cultural 'openness' and 'closedness' of each system and explain your thoughts about the diversity in each system (or lack thereof)? I'll look forward to your thoughts on this one. 

Kincaid, D. L. (2009). Convergence Theory. Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. (pp. 189-192). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Face Negotiation Theory

Whenever one encounters a new culture, one of the things that they will notice rather quickly is the emergence of conflict. Commonly when traveling for example, foreigners will unknowingly violate social norms of behavior that might lead to embarrassing situations (such as using one's right hand to eat and greet in Islamic cultures, as the left hand is considered "unclean) while their hosts are left in a quandary - upholding their own cultural norms while still attempting to help the naive traveler save face so they are comfortable in the new environment. This is a coarse example, but it is the core of Face Negotiation Theory. 

Developed by Stella Ting-Toomey, the theory "explains the culture-based and situational factors that shape communicators' tendencies in approaching and managing conflicts." When we say we are negotiating face, we mean to suggest that we are trying to balance the way in which others see us as well as the manner in which we behave in response to how we see others. Understood this way, we can break down different types of face that Ting-Toomey labels (a) self-face concern, or the protective concern for one's own identity image when one's own face is threatened, (b) other-face concern, or the concern for accommodating the other conflict party's identity image, and (c) mutual-face concern, or the concern for both parties' identity image.

Not exactly...but good try, Dustin! 

The theory argues that different individuals - and really, different cultures - place differential weights on self-, other-, or mutual-face concerns, and these sensitivities can have dire influences on the interpersonal communication process. For example, Oetzel and Ting-Toomey (2003) find that comparing individualistic and collectivistic cultures revealed stark differences in face sensitivity, with more collectivist cultures such as China engaging on more other-face concern and vice versa. Applying this more to our SPICE program, the same study even found some differences between Germany and other countries, with Germans reporting more direct-confrontational facework strategies (i.e., showing little other-face concern) overall. Of course it is the case that other individual and situational factors can play a role in this process (STUDENTS: Can you think of some of these?) but there is no doubt that one's cultural identity plays a major role in the relative important they place on self-, other-, or mutual-face. 

I can think of an example of this process playing itself out a few days ago, when I was paying for drinks in a German bar. It is common knowledge (at least, I found out later) that in Germany, tips left for drink service are usually much smaller - sometimes no more than €1 or 2 at most. This is because unlike in the US, German bartenders and waiters are paid a 'normal' wage and thus do not rely on tips for their salary (for those who don't know, most US service staff are paid about 1/2 of minimum wage with the assumption that they will make the remainder of their wages of tips). Yet in the US it is a self-face maintenance behavior to leave a decent-to-large tip particularly on a date or with friends, perhaps because we want to appear to be generous. So despite my knowledge of the German customs associated with tipping, I left a bartender a €4,80 top for a €15,20 drink bill (for the record, three glasses of Riesling, a delicious German variant of weisswein indeed!) in an effort to present a positive self-face. However, the move could have been easily viewed as a threat to the bartender's face (other-face) as it might have suggested that I felt he was in need of the money; in fact, it could have possibly been seen as a negative self-face move as I might have appeared to my friends (and really, others in the bar) as arrogant. 

Want to read more about Face Negotiation Theory? Below is a reference theoretical overview from the SAGE Reference (and a source of much of this posting). Otherwise, let's plan to meet at the normal time, 10:00 at Double B on Monday, 29 June and talk about this one! 

• Ting-Toomey, S. (2009). Face Negotiation Theory. Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. 372-375. 

Communication Accommodation Theory

Our first week discussion will have us talking Communication Accommodation Theory, first introduced to the field of human communication by noted scholar Dr. Howard "Howie" Giles of the University of California - Santa Barbara. In general, the theory attempts to explain how individuals come to adapt their communicative styles to one another as they spend more time with each other (see "Linguistic Power Struggle" to the left for an example).

While the theory is not specifically or uniquely restricted to the study of intercultural communication, it is not hard to see how the theory might help explain variance in both our initial and continued interactions with folks from another culture; after all, one way we can understand cultural differences is in terms of communicative behavioral differences (both at the verbal and non-verbal level). A particularly interesting phenomenon associated with this is that of code-switching, which tends to really get at folks who are bi- or multi-lingual (or really, code-mixing as they tend to 'mesh' different linguistic and para-linguistic styles together). As students of communication, we'll be on the lookout for these behaviors and we'll make note as we see it.

Where might this stuff matter? I'll say that it's heavily studied in the context of organizational communication - particularly as we see an increasingly global corporate environment. But even in simple interviews and interactions, we see evidence of CAT as well as influences on perceived social status (here's a study by Gregory and Webster, 1996 that speaks to this somewhat).

For that first class (we're meeting Monday, 22 June at 9am, over at Double B [walking directions]) we're going to talk about some of these concepts. But, you'll want to read the following articles (one is a short encyclopedia entry, the other is a standard research article) to become familiar with the theory - the citation is below (and if you have problems accessing this article, e-mail me for a .pdf copy from the WVU repository).

• Giles, H. & Baker, S. C. (2008). Communication Accommodation Theory. In Donsbach, W. (Ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Communication. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing 
• Gregory, S. W., & Webster, S. (1996). A nonverbal signal in voices of interview partners effectively predicts communication accommodation and social status perceptions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(6), 1231-1240. 

Otherwise, read this article and the links contained in the short entry below, and we'll talk CAT on Monday! (NOTE: CAT might explain why I format my dates differently when working with SPICE). 

Welcome to SPICE 2015!

Two months to go!

Morgantown, WV -- As we enter the final month of the Spring 2015 semester, planning is furiously underway to set up our third consecutive study abroad experience at the University of Erfurt.  For this year, nine students from WVU have been chosen to experience Erfurt while pursuing 9.0 hours of college credit from June to August, enrolling in classes such as Communication Ethics, Effects of Entertainment Media, Global Communication Campaigns, and International Intercultural Communication. Each course is offered in an consolidated four-week format, to give students an intense-yet-comprehensive experience in their chosen areas of study. 

For 2015, our WVU travelers are:

• Natalie Bedon
• Laurna Curby
• Samantha Hansen
• Emily "Blake" Louk
• Payton Newlun
• Norbert Klusmann
• Andrea Packwood
• Benjamin Wasser

Check back in a few weeks, and we'll have individual blog pages built for each of our travelers, where you'll be able to follow their adventures in Germany and throughout Europe as part of SPICE 2015.