The Relational Roots of Intercultural Communication

This article reflects on the criticism of intercultural communication as being more interactive than relational—a criticism justified, it argues, only for some of the conceptual diaspora of intercultural communication found in business schools and commercial intercultural training. In its original academic home of communication theory, intercultural communication reflects the largely relational focus of other human communication studies foci (interpersonal, group, and organizational). The underlying relational concepts include Pearce’s coordinated management of meaning, Watzlawick’s axioms of human communication, Barnlund’s transactional model of communication; and contributions from anthropology such as Bateson’s cybernetics of cybernetics, and from sociology such as Goffman’s dramaturgical model of communication. Intercultural communication used these and related ideas in theorizing about Hall’s original idea that engagement with other cultures was a kind of adaptation to different ways of coordinating meaning and action. The idea of cultural comparison per se, particularly of national cultures, was largely a war-time effort by anthropologists to understand combatants’ “psychology”—an effort continued by business people, served by commercial trainers, to understand the world views of their global partners and competitors. These efforts tended to stress interaction rather than relationship, contrary to the original formulation of intercultural communication.