The Six Imperatives for Studying Intercultural Communication
Developing intercultural communication skills helps people in both business and personal situations. The textbook Intercultural Communication in Contexts discusses six different imperatives that describe the importance of communicating with people from different cultures.
1. Self Awareness
Studying intercultural communication can help people understand about their own culture. People come to understand that certain languages, holidays, traditions, and food and distinct to their own culture. Understanding that helps people learn about the traditions of other cultures as well. Learning about other cultures fights ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism means thinking that ones own culture is the best, or better than other cultures. What’s right for one culture might no be right for another, but self awareness leads to acceptance of owns own culture and of others.
2. Demographics
The word “demographics” means the types of people that make up a population. Type can be defined many different groupings, including race, age, income, and sex. It’s imperative to learn about intercultural communication because the demographics of the area are changing rapidly. Rising demographic populations include Asian Americans, Hispanic American, African Americans, and the elderly. All around, lowered travel expense has made the world a more diverse place and it’s important to learn how to communicate with members of different demographic groups.
3. Economic Imperative
The Internet and ease of travel has made the world into a global economy. Multi-National corporations may have a home office in one country and satellite offices or stores in various locations all over the world. Every country has different business traditions and communication methods and it’s vital for global businesspeople to learn and understand these business traditions. For example, the Chinese have several specific rules for business dealings. The Chinese have something they call Guanxi, which means “relationship,” which is the foundation of many business dealings in China.
4. Technology
Right now, communication technology keeps us doing business in what is known as a global village. The term global village refers to the connected world that we live in where anyone can communicate with anyone else no matter where they live. This unprecedented access to people from other cultures is another important reason that we need to study how to communicate with societies from around the world.
5. Peace
Understanding and ability to communicate with other cultures promotes peaceful relationships with groups around the world. Several global problems stem from old feuds between countries caused by colonialism. Colonialism is combining several diverse groups of people into one colony because they’re in the same geographic area, and/or remotely controlling another country. While many colonies have dissolved, resentment still exists and it’s important to keep lines of communication open.
6. Ethics
Ethics are sets morals followed by groups of people. It could be considered ethical to learn how to communicate with diverse people from other cultures. People rely on their cultural norms to tell them what they should do, so, it’s no surprise that what is considered moral or ethical changes from culture to culture. There are ethical judgments that are pretty much the same no matter what the culture, this includes: no stealing, no murdering, and no lying. These moral obligations extended to both intercultural communication and multinational business. In the case of multinational business, companies ethically and legally have to follow international business law.
References
Martin, Judith, & Nakayama, Thomas (2012). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (6th Edition), McGraw-Hill, New York, NY
