ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a story passed on at various meetings associated with intercultural trainers. The chapter provides answers for how trainers can manage intercultural conflict in positive ways. Trainers began by reviewing the various approaches or styles that both individuals and cultural communities may prefer and adopt in a given circumstance: avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, and collaborating. They then focus on the nature of intercultural conflict itself. Trainers learned that while all intercultural conflict deals with differences in sense-making patterns, three common variations of this kind of conflict deal with conflicts over the meaning of objects or kernel images, the implications and nature of human relationships, and the way values, norms, and ideals are prioritized. Trainers also explored another form of conflict that is distinct, but often intertwined with intercultural conflict. Group membership itself was shown to produce ingroup biases. Trainers also reviewed how multiple histories, competition, and power are all breeding grounds for intergroup conflicts.
