Thinking Dialectically About Culture and Communication

Abstract

A survey of contemporary research reveals distinct and competing approaches to the study of culture and communication. These approaches reflect various metatheoretical assumptions, research goals, and beliefs about the role of power and relevance in contemporary research. In order to legitimate the various approaches and facilitate interparadigmatic discussion, this essay first examines the metatheoretical assumptions of current research and then proposes a dialectical approach to scholarship. First, we identify and describe four distinct paradigms of culture and communication, based on Burrell and Morgan's (1 988) framework: functionalist, interpretive, critical humanist, and critical structuralist. For each paradigm, we identify metatheoretical assumptions, concomitant conceptualizations of culture, the relationship between culture and communication, and contemporary research exemplars. We then propose a dialectic approach that facilitates interparadigmatic dialogue and offers new ways to conceptualize and study intercultural communication. We offer six dialectics of intercultural communication practice that could guide future research.A survey of contemporary research reveals distinct and competing approaches to the study of culture and communication, including crosscultural, intercultural, and intracultural communication studies (Asante & Gudykunst, 1989; Y. Y. Kim, 1984).' Culture and communication studies also reflect important metatheoretical differences in epistemology, ontology, assumptions about human nature, methodology, and research goals as well as differing conceptualizations of culture and communication, and the relationship between culture and communication.In addition, questions about the role of power and research application often lead to value-laden debates about right and wrong ways to conduct research. Whereas these debates signal a maturation of the field, they can be needlessly divisive when scholars use one set of paradigmatic criteria to evaluate research based on different paradigmatic assumptions (Deetz, 1996). The purpose of this essay is to focus attention

RESENSI BUKU : Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication

“…Kecenderungan saat ini penelitian berkaitan dengan konteks, kekuasaan, relevansi dan aspek yang mendestabilkan budaya yang mengarah pada jenis penelitian paradigma humanis kritis dan struktural kritis (Martin dan Nakayama, 1999) 1. Paradigma sebelumnya memperlakukan konteks dengan cara yang berbeda, Paradigma Fungsional menjadikan konteks sebagai variabel dan Paradigma Interpretif melihat konteks mikro.…”

Cooperative Struggle: Re-framing Intercultural Conflict in the Management of Sino-American Joint Ventures

“…At the same time, these models tend to foreground relational approaches to cultural differences while overlooking the potentially complex relational dynamics arising from the co-presence of political and economic differences. Thus, we locate Sino-American joint ventures and intercultural conflict within this larger context, and view culture itself as a site of struggle (Martin & Nakayama, 1999;Shome & Hegde, 2002) where the majority of intercultural interactions are highly asymmetrical (Cooks, 2001). We downplay these organizations as ideal sites where Chinese and American managers can synthesize cultural differences into a transcendent unity, especially when managers are expected to represent and protect their distinctive interests.…”

“…Such tensions can be managed in ways that create more or less space for questioning technical/ instrumental understandings of organizational effectiveness and for finding creative alternatives. Thus, we recognize the organizational, political, and economic forces that make culture a site of contested meanings (Martin & Nakayama, 1999) and the struggles that ensue over which meanings will take hold and prevail at particular points in time. In the next section, we sketch out the contours of these dynamics as cooperative struggle.…”

Counter Networks, Communication and Health Information Systems

“…Interpretive research is concerned with developing a deep and contextual understanding of the phenomenon. We focus on the subjective processes that surround the social construction of communication practices understood through the use of qualitative research methods (Walsham, 1993;Martin and Nakayama, 1999). The aim of such interpretive analysis is to understand rather than to predict behavior.…”