ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies key issues and topics in intercultural communication set out in the preceding chapters and places them in the wider context of globalization and transnational mobility. It goes on to outline contributions that have been made in recent intercultural communication research, to highlight trends in research methods and to propose areas where further work can be carried out. These are tied in with some suggestions for pedagogic practice and continuing professional development, and we conclude with some thoughts about the possible future of intercultural communication. Paradoxically, two concepts that remain problematic in intercultural communication are the
idea of culture itself, and the ways in which this relates to the identities of human actors. As we have seen in this volume, the nation-state is still often regarded as the default signifier of cultural identification, although its centrality to the conceptualization of culture and to intercultural communication is contested (Holliday 2011). First, there are ‘cultures’ with which individuals identify that both exceed and traverse the boundaries of the nation-state. These include pannational geographical and political groupings such as ‘Asia’, ‘Africa’ and ‘Latin America’, professional and academic associations such as those listed at the end of this chapter as well as the transnational networks described below. Second, it has been forcefully argued (e.g. McSweeney 2002) that members of any cultural grouping or network – be it national or transnational – do not actually subscribe in a monolithic fashion to sets of behaviours, values and attitudes that are a priori homogeneous and consistent over time, as suggested by the early survey research (Chapter 1). Numerous qualitative studies in the field are now describing how more contingent facets of
human agency and a person’s sense of self are realized through communication in particular social contexts. On the one hand, social identity is arguably constituted through a series of performative acts that are responsive to the context of communication (Pennycook 2004). Here, ‘culture’ is performed by social actors in real time and, in a recent radical analysis of internet chatroom talk, only becomes noteworthy when made relevant in the talk of its Chinese and Korean interlocutors (Brandt and Jenks 2011). On the other hand, subjectivity is manifested
in a phenomenological sense of self that unfolds through time and is becoming increasingly fluid and unstable as members of modern social elites engage in ever more fragmented forms of activity (Bauman 2000). Narrative accounts of the ambivalent experience of Japanese students returning from overseas study (kikokushijo) provide evidence of the conflicts and contradictions that can arise from a protracted engagement with another culture (Ford 2009). The relationship between identity and culture has been discussed extensively within this volume (e.g. Chapters 2, 11 and 13) and remains a recurrent theme in what follows.
