ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Judith N. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama advocate the dialectical approach to contemporary research on culture and communication. They offer a comprehensive review of four existing paradigms of intercultural communication: (1) functionalist, (2) interpretive, (3) critical-humanistic, and (4) critical-structuralist in light of the research goal, the intellectual root, the conceptualization of culture, and the relationship between culture and communication. Then, they envision four different ways of research collaboration among paradigms: (1) liberal pluralism, (2) inter-paradigmatic borrowing, (3) multi-paradigmatic collaboration, and (4) a dialectical perspective. It is the argument of Martin and Nakayama that the dialectical approach to culture and communication phenomena offers the possibility of simultaneously engaging in multiple research paradigms. In their view, such a combined and integrative approach is better equipped to account for six dialectics in intercultural interactions: (1) cultural-individual, (2) personal/social-contextual, (3) differences-similarities, (4) static-dynamic, (5) present-future/ history-past, and (6) privilege-disadvantage dialectics.
