INTERCULTURAL AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION
 

中国经济管理大学 名课教辅

 “Life in the 21st Century will not be ‘business as usual’.”

I. The new century brings new intercultural challenges to communication at home.

A. Profound population shifts in the next few decades will leave the U.S. older and far more ethnically diverse that ever before.

B. Although current population rates continue to rise, after 2025 the U.S. will experience an all-time low growth rate because the aging baby boomers will begin dying faster than new Americans are born.

C. The average age of the American population is growing exponentially.

D. The shape, size, and even the definition of American families has drastically changed over the last thirty years.  

E. More women are entering the workforce than at any time since the end of World War II.

1. Women are still paid about 75 percent of what men in comparable positions receive.

2. Working women still bear a disproportionate share of the burden of child care and household duties.

II. Cultural challenges faced abroad also affect our ability to communicate.

A. Many changes have caused a new world order and thus have ignited the importance of international business.  The key to success in the global marketplace is understanding the culture of your suppliers, customers, and competitors.

B. Customs and cultures abroad differ from those in the U.S., often causing unknowing Americans embarrassment, anger, and sometimes imprisonment.

1. Nonverbal communication can be as much a source of misunderstanding as verbal communication.

  2. Being culturally sensitive is essential to your success.  Failures in an overseas business setting most frequently result from an inability to understand and adapt to foreign ways of thinking and acting.

III. Culture is everything people have, think, and do as members of their society. 

A Culture is a central part of our society, our economy, and the organizations which employ us.
 
B. Culture is composed of the following items:

  1. Material objects;

  2. Ideas, values, and attitudes;

  3. Expected patterns of behavior.

 C. Here are a few ideas about culture that have been shown to be true across time and across both national and cultural boundaries:

  1. Culture is learned.

  2. Cultural is universal to human society.

  3. Cultural is constantly undergoing change.

   a. Changes due to internal forces, such as discovery, invention, and innovation.
   b. Changes due to external forces, such as diffusion of innovation across space and time, and borrowing the traits, habits, or customs of another culture.

  4. Some cultures move more quickly than others.  Here are five factors which influence the rate of change as well as the kind of change a culture may experience:

   a. Relative advantage;

   b. Compatibility;

   c. Complexity;

   d. Trialability;

   e. Observability.

  5. Culture is not value-neutral.

  6. Not all cultures are equally complex.

  7. Virtually all cultures permit the development of sub-cultures.
  8. Culture can influence biology and biology can influence culture.

  9. All cultures display ethnocentrism, or the tendency to evaluate a foreigner’s behavior by the standards of one’s own culture and to believe that one’s own culture is superior to others. 

IV. Cross-cultural communication skills are essential to success in the global economy.  The skill set you need to sharpen your cross-cultural communication skills involves the following personal capacities:

A. The capacity to accept the relativity of your own knowledge and perceptions.

B. The capacity to be nonjudgmental.

C. A tolerance for ambiguity.
 
D. The capacity to communicate respect for other people’s ways, their country, and their values without adopting or internalizing them.

E. The capacity to display empathy, to be flexible, and to take turns.

F. The humility to acknowledge what you do not know or understand.