Communicating across Cultures

From high-level business negotiations to casual conversations among friends, every interpersonal interaction is shaped by cultural norms and expectations. Seldom is this more clearly brought to light than in encounters between people from different cultural backgrounds, when dissimilar communication practices may lead to frustration and misunderstanding. This thought-provoking text presents a new framework for understanding the impact of culture on communication and for helping students build intercultural communication competence. With illustrative examples from around the globe, the book shows that verbal and nonverbal communication involves much more than transmitting a particular message--it also reflects each participant's self-image, group identifications and values, and privacy and relational needs. Readers learn to move effectively and appropriately through a wide range of transcultural situations by combining culture-specific knowledge with mindful listening and communication skills. Throughout, helpful tables and charts and easy-to-follow guidelines for putting concepts into practice enhance the book's utility for students.

Stella Ting-Toomey, PhD, is Professor of Speech Communication at California State University, Fullerton. The author or editor of 11 books, she has published extensively on cross-cultural facework, intercultural conflict, Asian communication patterns, and the effective identity negotiation model. She has lectured widely throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe, and is an experienced trainer in the area of transcultural communication competence.

"This thorough, straightforward book ties together theory and research to explain a previously elusive and unarticulated process for negotiating culturally based identities in intercultural relationships. Mindful identity negotiation theory, as Ting-Toomey refers to her approach, identifies the key factors in regulating the extent to which communicators feel understood, respected, and supported in intercultural communication. A comprehensive treatment and an excellent synthesis of the literature, this book will be especially useful as a text in upper-division undergraduate and graduate-level courses on intercultural communication." --Dudley D. Cahn, PhD, Professor, Communication & Media Department, State University of New York, New Paltz "This book presents an integrative theory that draws inspiration from social identity theory, symbolic interactionism, and the communication discipline. To communicate effectively, the author shows, we must be ready to shift frames of reference, use new categories to understa