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Intercultural Communication: An Overview 1
Introduction
This chapter is intended to serve as an overview of intercultural communication studies by introducing key issues and assumptions, describing some of the major studies in the field, and pointing out problematic aspects. Traditionally, intercultural communication studies have been most widely understood as comprising studies, whether of a comparative or an interactional nature, that take cultural group membership as a given. This predominant essentialism makes intercultural communication studies an exception in the social sciences, where social constructionist approaches have become the preferred framework in studies of identity (Piller 2011). Rather than taking culture and identity as given, social constructionism insists that it is linguistic and social practices that bring culture and identity into being (Burr 2003). The essentialist assumption that people belong to a culture or have a culture, which is typically taken as a given in intercultural communication studies, has given the field a somewhat old-fashioned, dowdy, not-quite-with-it, even reactionary image, an image which one recent commentator describes as follows:
To many teachers and researchers working … under the broad designation of media and cultural studies, the subfield of “intercultural communication” might seem a bit suspect. … there is a legacy of rather functionalist and technicist tendencies in the background, a legacy that has had its ...
