Glossary
Accommodating (yielding): A conflict approach in which one party gives in to the requests or demands of the other
Acculturation: The process of learning another culture, and one’s sense of identification with that culture—in part or whole—either through moving to live in that culture or through two cultures living side-by-side in the same geographical space
Adjustment: Broadly defined, the process one goes through changing one’s behavior and adapting psychologically in transition to another culture
Adjustment stage: The third stage of the U-curve, in which travelers feel a growing sense of understanding and being able to live and succeed in the new culture Agency: The degree of choice one is aware of having in a particular situation
Alienated approach: An approach to returning home from another culture in which the traveler becomes
overly critical or bitter about the home culture
Altruism: The notion of doing good for someone, even a stranger
Anxiety: Feelings of uneasiness, tension, or apprehension that occur in intercultural interactions
Appreciation: The attitude and action of not only accepting a group’s behaviors, but also seeing the good in them, even adopting them, and actively including the individuals of a group
Arbitrator: A neutral, objective, third party who can resolve a conflict based on the facts of the conflict situation presented to her or him
Argot: Language used by those in a particular underclass, often to differentiate themselves from a dominant culture (e.g., prostitutes, prisoners)
Arms-length racism: A form of racism in which we might be friendly towards people of other races, but want to keep them at a distance, such as not having them as neighbors, friends, or romantic partners
Assimilation: Giving up one’s own culture to adopt another; that is, accepting both behaviors and underlying ways of thinking
Asylum seeker: Someone who is seeking legal protection from the new state, rather than simply moving there because of conditions of strife
Attitude: A disposition to relate to things, actions, or people in certain ways
Attribution: A process by which we give meanings to our own behavior and the behavior of others
Avoiding (withdrawing): A conflict approach in which individuals prefer to simply avoid confrontation with the offender or may be afraid of consequences resulting from a direct confrontation of the issue
Axiology: A set of assumptions about the role of values in research
Backchanneling: Verbal and paralanguage cues used to indicate one is listening to another communicator
Background phase: The initial phase of negotiation, in which parties assess their position, consider what they know of the other parties, and plan out their communication language
Basso’s hypothesis: A hypothesis by anthropologist Keith Basso, upon observing use of silence among the Apache, that people may use silence to respond to situations of uncertainty
Behavior valence: In expectancy violation theory, the positive or negative evaluation we give to a behavior that violates our expectancies
Belief: An assumption that someone has about the nature of something; a cognition (thought) about the connection between two or more concepts
Belief system: A set of interrelated beliefs, including values, world view, norms, and mores of a culture
Booty call: A relationship form in which two partners hold no expectation of relational intimacy or fidelity, but when one contacts the other for sex, the second person complies
Boundaryless careers: The notion of individuals moving between organizations with increasing frequency
Breadth: In social penetration theory, the number of topic areas about which we self-disclose
Cable systems: Communication systems that are limited by the reach of the wires, which transmit the TV signals
Capitalism: An economic system based on exchange through markets and the private ownership of capital
Categorical imperative: An ethical approach in which there is a clear right or wrong, regardless of culture or circumstance, based on logic
Categorization: The mental process of grouping things, attributes, behaviors, and people into like clusters
Channel: The medium through which a message travels from an information source to a destination.
Chronemics: The conceptualization and use of time
Civic engagement: Involvement in the community, regardless of politics
Classification: How we understand things and people in terms of categories
Co-cultural communication: Communication between people of different groups within a larger, dominant culture
Co-cultural group: A group or culture that exists within the same space as other groups or cultures, sharing some aspects of a dominant culture
Code: A set of related sounds/images that represent an idea
Code-switching: Changing linguistic forms of speech, whether between registers, between elaborated or restricted codes, or between languages
Collaborating (integrating): A conflict approach in which parties seek to maximize their own rewards while also facilitating the meeting of the goals of the other party
Color blindness: A strategy for reducing prejudice in which people attempt to ignore “race” or ethnicity in social interaction
Communication: The process of creating and sending symbolic behavior and the interpretation of behavior between people
Communication accommodation theory: A theory that seeks to predict how people might adjust their communication in certain situations, the various factors that lead to such changes, and the outcomes of different types of changes
Communication appropriateness: Following rules of a context or relationship in communication
Communication competence: A combination by which a communicator is both effective and competent
Communication effectiveness: The ability to accomplish one’s desired tasks through communication
Communication for social change/developmental communication: Communicative efforts to bring more development to other communities
Communication system: The set of signs and symbols one uses to transfer ideas, emotions, or impressions to others
Communicative engagement: Participating in civic dialogue and being fully aware and expressive in public deliberation
Communicator reward valence: In expectancy violation theory, the perceived reward or punishment that we think we can receive from a person who violates our expectancies
Competing (dominating): A “zero-sum” conflict approach in which one party is concerned primarily with meeting their own goals, seeking to win the conflict regardless of cost to the other party
Compromising (conceding): A conflict approach in which each party makes concessions, giving up some goals to achieve others
Conflict: A difference in values, processes, expectations, or results—real or perceived, and related to interpersonal relations or decision-making content—between two people or groups
Conflict aftermath: The outcome of an evaluation of outcomes as being productive or unproductive at each stage
Confucian work dynamism: A cultural orientation based in Confucian philosophy that values respect for tradition, thrift, persistence, and personal steadiness—that is, a long-term pragmatism
Connotation: The set of feelings an individual associates with a particular word
Constitutive approach: A view of social reality that suggests that we create social reality through communication, rather than culture, sex, and race merely predicting how one communicates
Contact cultures (high and low contact cultures): Cultures that differ in the degree to which members tend to seek more sensory input during face-to-face interaction through various nonverbal channels
Contact hypothesis: A theoretical statement that suggests that the more time people from groups that do not like each other spend with each other, the better group relations will become
Convergence (1): The process of changing one’s behavior to be more like that of the person with whom one is speaking
Convergence (2): A hypothesis that suggests that as a result of a set of imperatives embedded in today’s globalizing business economy and communication technologies, more and more organizations follow similar structures and operational patterns across markets and foreign nations
Conversational episode (CE) or communication ritual: A portion of a conversation that has a distinct beginning and ending
Core countries: Wealthier nations that drive economic and media growth in the world
Corporate social responsibility: The obligatory services and practices organizations should provide to their global communities as a gesture of symbiotic gratitude
Crisis stage: The second stage of the U-curve, in which travelers go through a period of stress, often feeling a need to complain or withdraw, with symptoms of stress, fatigue, powerlessness, depression, or even psychosomatic sickness
Critical: An approach to research with assumptions that social inequalities and injustice exist and that research and theory should seek to address these
Cross-cultural communication: Research that involves comparative studies between cultures
Cross-over: Adaptation of media products from one country to another
Cultural communication: The study or practice of communication in a single culture
Cultural heterogeneity: Dissimilarity and diversity among cultural components.
Cultural imperialism: The view that global media are the purveyors of certain cultural and political—usually Western—values to the exclusion of others in the weaker countries of the world
Cultural intelligence: An outsider’s seemingly natural ability to interpret someone’s unfamiliar and ambiguous gestures the way that person’s compatriots would
Cultural myth: A narrative that is popularly told to teach preferred ways of behaving
Cultural relativism: An approach to ethics and social research that states that we should not make moral or ethical judgments upon other cultures and that each culture should determine for itself what is right
Cultural synergy: The nature of relationships and networks that can develop between individuals and organizations, when people become culturally aware and competent in cross-cultural communication situations
Cultural trope: A literary formula upon which media producers draw, in which media have certain formulas—types of shows, standard plot lines, typical characters, etc.
Cultural values: Values held by the majority of members of a given culture
Culture: The way of life of a group of people, including symbols, values, behaviors, artifacts, and other shared aspects, which continually evolves as people share messages; and is the result of struggle between different groups who share different perspectives, interests, and power relationships
Culture shock/cultural adjustment: A sense of anxiety experienced in a new culture, usually over a longer period of time, as a result of losing a sense of the expected social cues one has in one’s own culture
Deculturation: The process of unlearning one’s own culture when one lives for an extended period of time in a different culture
Denotation: The relatively objective dictionary-type definition of a word
Depth: In social penetration theory, the intimacy of detail that we self-disclose
Developmental communication/communication for social change: Communicative efforts to bring more development to other communities
Dialectic: For Aristotle, the rigorous methods for testing competing claims used by scientists and other experts
Dialectics/dialectical tension: A tension between opposing “poles” or aspects of a relationship in which both ends of each tension are always present, both contradicting and completing each other
Dialogic ethic: An ethical approach in which we converse directly with people of other cultures before affirming ethical stances that involve those people
Diaspora: Where the people of one geographic area and group spread out across many different cultures
Diasporic citizen: A person who is a member of a population that has moved or been displaced
Differentiated and undifferentiated codes: Language codes characterized by more (or less) levels of difference between speech registers, depending on the person with whom one is speaking
Diffusion: The spread of artifacts, behaviors, and ideas across a group or culture or between groups or cultures
Directive: In speech acts theory, speech used to influence the behavior of another person
Discourse: There are two competing definitions. One is a type of language usage for a particular situation (e.g., courtroom discourse, interview discourse); the other is the way that a notion is described in terms of other ideas in society (e.g., the discourse of beauty)
Discursive elements of language: Elements of language use linked to a broader pattern of meaning
Display rules: Cultural rules about the display of emotion, indicating when, to whom, in what context, and how much we should show certain emotions
Distributive, or positional negotiation: Negotiation that involves competitively pushing for one’s own goals and agenda with little regard to the other party
Divergence (1): When one highlights one’s own communication style when talking with people from other groups to mark it as different from their communication
Divergence (2): The further fragmentation of peoples into smaller identities and networks of association
Divergence (3): The perspective that focuses on cultural differences and the relative meanings individuals, cultures, and organizations associate with global forces that bring about changes in their respective environments
Division: The different beliefs and ways of interacting that potentially lead to intercultural conflict.
Dualism: A supposed opposition of two concepts or characteristics, for example as they pertain to identities, in which the terms contradict each other
Duality: A combining of two oppositions in discourse (imagery or words) in which the two oppositions seem to work together
Efficacy, self-efficacy: A belief that we can accomplish a task to which we set ourselves
Eiffel Tower: A metaphor for corporate cultures that represents a bureaucratic division of labor with clearly prescribed roles and functions for individual workers
Elaborated code: A way of speaking in which people spell out the details of meaning in the words in a way that those outside of the group can understand them
Emblem: A gesture that has an explicit verbal translation that is known among most members of a group
Emic approach: An approach to researching culture in which researchers seek to set aside their own understandings and understand a culture’s meanings or behaviors from the perspective of the culture
Enculturation: The process of learning one’s own culture
Epistemology: A set of assumptions about knowledge and what counts as data
Ethical egoism: An ethical approach in which we make choices based simply on what seems good or beneficial to us, without regard for others
Ethics: How one judges the rightness or wrongness of our interactions with others
Ethnic cleansing: The attempt to remove a population by murder or forced deportation from a country or area of a country
Ethnicity: A sense of shared history and geographical ancestry, usually along with other markers, such as culture, language, or religion
Ethnocentrism: A perception in which people see their group as the center of everything, possibly superior to others, using their group or culture as a reference to judge other groups
Ethnography of communication: A method of research and writing that involves detailed observing, usually involving interaction with people, to understand the lives of a group of people
Ethnophaulism: A racial slur, or name for another group
Etic approach: An approach to researching culture in which researchers start with a framework or theory developed outside of cultures and apply it to cultures, for example to compare cultures on some dimension
Exacting style: A communication style in which speakers give information as necessary
Exaggerated style: A communication style in which speakers use language not so much to describe reality precisely, but to embellish upon it (e.g., exaggeration, metaphor)
Exclusion: A response in which a dominant cultural group simply negates the existence of an immigrant or minority group, having no relations with them
Exogamy: Marrying outside of one’s perceived group, as opposed to endogamy, marrying within one’s group
Expectancies: Expectations for nonverbal and verbal behavior based on our culture, our personal preferences, and our knowledge of the other communicator
Face: The image that people want others to have of them in interaction
Family: A metaphor for corporate culture that implies a traditional head of the household, or “father” figure at the top of the organizational hierarchy
Fansubbed: Translated subtitles on video content that are generated by fans rather than the producers
Faux pas: A mistake one makes in one’s own or another culture; a breach of etiquette that brings embarrassment to self or others
Feedback: Some sort of verbal or nonverbal response, to the sender
Felt conflict: When the parties in conflict personalize their issues and involve egos in the assessing of their individual motives, and those of the institutions and others. This stage may occur as a result of constant organizational demands that cause anxiety within an individual
Formal time: A time reference to a specific time on the clock
Friends with benefits: A relationship form in which two partners agree that they are just friends, but they occasionally have sexual interaction
Fundamental attribution error: An error of perception in which we overestimate the role of personal characteristics in someone else’s behavior and do not place as much weight on context
Gender: The cultural and social expectations of one’s sex.
Global media: Sources of mass communications that involve the transmission of messages, formats, programming or content across national boundaries
Global organizations: Organizations that treat the entire world as an integrated and highly interdependent whole
Globalization: The interconnected nature of the global economy, the interpenetration of global and domestic organizations, and communication technologies that blur temporal and spatial boundaries; the social, cultural, economic and political integration of different parts of the world, facilitated by the movement of goods, capital, ideas and people between nations
Glocalization: A mix of "globalization" and "localization", meaning the interaction of global and local processes, products and influences
Golden mean: An ethical approach in which people avoid extreme positions, or choose the middle road in making ethical choices
Guided missile: A metaphor that represents organizations that are task-oriented, focus on the end goal, and assign responsibilities to teams or project groups with different levels and kinds of expertise
Guilt: A negative emotion that entails personal responsibility for a wrong committed
Guilt culture: A culture in which people are more likely to be motivated by a sense of remorse when they behave badly, based on a sense of personal responsibility
Haptics: Nonverbal behaviour involving touch