ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews important intellectual movements and influences in the worldwide study of intercultural communication and applied linguistics, highlighting the development of influential research paradigms. Using the broadest of Kuhn’s (1970) meanings for paradigm – strongly held worldviews/beliefs that undergird scholarship – the first part of the chapter shows how initial scholarship was interdisciplinary and largely aparadigmatic in the USA and Japan (1950–70s), which resulted in an emphasis on functionalist/postpositive inquiry in many countries.
The second part of the chapter describes the burgeoning scholarship in other world regions (1980s and 90s onward), and the very different research trajectories in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa, and Latin and South America, many of which centred on linguistic phenomena and followed interpretive as well as postpositive paradigmatic perspectives.
The third section describes the influence of critical theory (1990s–2000s) and the importance of investigating situated power interests and historical contextualisation in intercultural encounters. The chapter then describes more recent approaches that move beyond the Western tripartite paradigmatic framework to a more inclusive meta-theoretical umbrella, and concludes by noting that the current study of intercultural communication is worldwide, multidisciplinary, and multiparadigmatic – raising important questions concerning the future of the study of intercultural communication and applied linguistics.
