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It is increasingly important in our globalised world for people to successfully manage interpersonal relationships. This is the first book to tackle this vital topic, by taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the process of relating across cultures. Drawing together key concepts from politeness theory, intercultural communication, and cross-cultural/intercultural psychology, it provides a robust framework for analysing and understanding intercultural encounters. It explores the ways in which individuals make judgements about others, deal with offence and conflict, maintain smooth relations, and build new relationships. These processes are explained conceptually and illustrated extensively with authentic intercultural examples and empirical data. With accessible explanations and follow-up activities, it will appeal not only to academics working in the areas of intercultural communication, pragmatic theory, conflict research and other related academic disciplines, but also to students of these topics, as well as professionals such as intercultural trainers and those working in the third sector.

open access article This article examines the ways in which professionals from different countries handle first encounters when they wish to initiate and establish business/professional relations. The majority of research on business relations in intercultural contexts has so far focused on misunderstandings, face threats, and conflict. There has been comparatively little research into the initiation and establishment of relations from a positive perspective. This article addresses this lacuna by analysing how Chinese delegates built positive relations with American counterparts on a visit to the USA. Drawing on insights from the analysis, it proposes a conceptual framework for future research in this area.

Many universities in different parts of the world are seeking to enhance the cultural diversity of their staff and student body and yet repeated studies have shown that good integration can be difficult to achieve. Although several studies have examined the reasons why such integration is difficult, there has been very little research into the actual process of social integration. This paper addresses this gap through a qualitative study of intercultural learning. Students were asked to focus on a behaviour that was personally or professionally important to them but that they were having difficulty adapting to. The paper reports the varying, unfolding experiences of six of these students as they faced the affective, behavioural and cognitive challenges of adjusting to different greeting patterns and the strategies they used for gradually overcoming them. Drawing on the literature and the findings, an intercultural growth model is proposed. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the findings for enhancing social integration at university.\ud \ud

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. This article explores the interconnections between culture, context, and language, with a special focus on face. Research into face has taken place in various fields and here we draw on insights from different disciplinary perspectives, notably linguistics and social psychology, to address the following questions: (1) To what extent can the various categorizations of face be linked with people’s individual-level values? (2) How do culture-level values interplay with context and language in affecting face sensitivities? The data for our study involved interactions between government officials during a Chinese delegation visit to the United States in which face concerns were prominent. Mixed support is found for existing theorizing, and the article ends by calling for more interdisciplinary research to help unpack the complex mix of interconnected factors.

According to a recent report, the top skill that employers are looking for in graduates is “An ability to work collaboratively with teams of people from a range of backgrounds and countries” (Diamond et al. 2011, 8). So as universities seek to internationalise, an important question is how successful they are in developing this skill. Both research (e.g. Summers and Volet 2008; Kimmel and Volet 2012) and anecdotal evidence suggest that it is a challenging task and that universities are struggling to achieve it. In this paper, we report a study on working in mixed national groups and its relation to intercultural skills. A total of 2000 responses were collected from students at a UK university to a questionnaire that had both closed and open questions. A range of statistical analyses were carried out on the quantitative data, and the open-ended comments were analysed thematically. The responses were compared across national/regional clusters and our findings indicate\ud that mixed national group work is widely perceived across the clusters as enriching and not particularly challenging. Correlations indicate that students perceive such group work as more important for the development of intercultural skills than crossnational friendships.

The article opens with brief examples of the varied contexts in which professionals with expert knowledge of intercultural communication are commissioned by organisations to help improve organisational and individual performance. The development needs that are evident in these contexts entail a broader repertoire of competencies than those generally reflected in the term intercultural communication skills, and so the next section elaborates on the concept of intercultural interaction competence (ICIC), reporting on the numerous sub-competencies which go to make up the ability to perform joint and purposeful activity effectively and appropriately across cultures. The third section reports on approaches to developing the ICIC of members of organisations, discussing desirable framework conditions for the development intervention, its possible goals, the nature of the cognitive, affective and behavioural development outcomes which can be achieved, and the content, methods and tools available to the intercultural developer. The article finishes with a brief consideration of the qualification profile of interculturalists engaged in this kind of work, pointing out that a multi-disciplinary background will enable interculturalists to meet a broad range of organisational and human resource development needs in the area of intercultural communication which go beyond the ‘mere’ development of communicative foreign-language skills.

The author's final peer reviewed version can be found by following the URI link. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Given the small number of existing studies of face in intercultural settings and the increasing attention given to participant perspectives in face research, this paper explores the gains and losses of face as perceived by Chinese government officials during a three-week delegation visit to the United States of America. These perspectives were obtained from the group's spontaneous discussions during regular evening meetings when they reflected on the day's events. Several key features emerged from the discussions. Firstly, face enhancement was a primary goal for the visit – enhancement of their own face as a delegation, of the face of the Ministry they belonged to, as well as the face of their American hosts. Secondly, the delegates attempted to manage these face goals strategically. Thirdly, they spoke of face as a volatile image that could rise and fall sharply and yet endured across incidents, days and weeks. The paper reports on and discusses these participant perspectives in the light of recent theorizing on face.

This meticulously detailed description and its analysis require almost no introduction, effectively they speak for themselves; and the case study is relevant to all business and government cross-cultural meetings. It has always been advisable to understand the cultural factors in international negotiations and Richard Lewis, for example, is only one of many writers who have been arguing for decades that negotiation is becoming a science, dominated by the USA. Lewis writes that anyone who has mediated, for instance, at a Japanese-US joint venture knows that the moment intercultural factors enter the equation, the landscape can change utterly.

© 2015, © 2015 Taylor & Francis. When promoting intercultural learning in the context of study and placement mobility, intercultural educators are specifying what students should be learning. Research not only confirms the genuine impact of real-life intercultural contact on intercultural learning, but also shows how this impact can be enhanced through institutional support and the integration of intercultural learning into the curriculum. In this position paper, we propose a number of considerations that need to be taken into account in setting learning objectives for mobile students. Referring to research and policy documents mostly in relation to the European mobility context, we address consecutively what students are learning in study and placement mobility; what they say they want to learn; what they should learn for; and finally, what they should be learning. We conclude that intercultural educators should pay heed to what students are actually learning in study and placement mobility over a time span that transcends the current sojourn abroad. We also recommend that educators take steps to support students in mobilising the intercultural skills they acquired abroad for increased employability. ispartof: Intercultural Education vol:26 issue:1 pages:62-72 status: published

Interaction between members of different cultural groups can be challenging in many different ways, as the experiential examples throughout this book illustrate. In Chapter 2 we explored the many different ways in which cultural groups can differ — values, orientations to life, beliefs, attitudes to time, communicative conventions and styles, and so on. Yet it is these elements that provide us with our reference and orientation system — a cockpit of instruments that guide our behaviour. So when we engage in intercultural interaction, we are faced with a range of challenges — our ‘instruments’ function less well or not at all, and in order to handle the uncertainties we face, we need to master sophisticated skills in managing ‘cultural complexity’ (Hannerz 1992).

During the last three chapters we have explored the intercultural competencies needed for effective and appropriate intercultural interaction, focusing particularly on the process of interaction. In this chapter we turn to the individual and consider the impact that intercultural interaction can have on the psychological welfare and growth of those who experience such interaction, especially in unfamiliar cultural settings. In Chapters 10 and 11, we examine ways of researching this adaptation process and the extent to which people feel they have adapted well.

We mentioned several times in Chapter 8 that one important purpose of intercultural assessment is to promote reflection and to aid the development of ICIC. This chapter focuses specifically on the development process, and deals with two main contexts: professional contexts and school education contexts.

Introduction / Helen Spencer-Oatey and Helga Kotthoff -- Section I. Multidisciplinary perspectives on intercultural communication: Editors' introduction -- 2. Discourse, cultural diversity and communication: a linguistic anthropological perspective / John Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz -- 3. A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture / Vladimir Žegarac -- 4. Psychological perspectives: social psychology, language and intercultural communication / Madeleine Brabant, Bernadette Watson and Cindy Gallois -- 5. Emotion and intercultural adjustment / David Matsumoto, Seung Hee You and Jeffrey A. LeRoux -- 6. Multidisciplinary perspectives on intercultural conflict: the 'Bermuda Triangle' of conflict, culture and communication / Nathalie van Meurs and Helen Spencer-Oatey -- Section II. Intercultural perspectives on communicative practices and processes: --^

This paper explores the management of rapport in intercultural business interactions. It compares two Chinese-British business welcome meetings that were held by the same British company. Despite many similarities between the two meetings, both the British and the Chinese were very satisfied with the first meeting, while the Chinese were very annoyed by the second. This paper describes the similarities and differences between the two meetings, and explores why they were evaluated so differently. It argues that research into the management of relations in intercultural communication needs to use a broader analytic framework than is typical of intercultural discourse research, and that it needs to gather a wider range of data types.

This paper explores how people’s expectations regarding talk and non-talk can affect intercultural interactions. Using discourse data from two Chinese-British business meetings together with follow-up interview comments, it describes instances when the participants reacted differently to talk/non-talk, and considers why the differing reactions occurred. It maintains that ‘silence’ can be manifested in ways other than physical non-talk, and argues that people’s perceptions of silence depend on their expectations. Mismatches in expectations, which can occur frequently in intercultural interactions, can result not only in subjective feelings of ‘uncomfortable silence’, but may also lead people to feel they have been ‘forced’ into silence or have not been ‘allowed’ to be silent.