Learning Intercultural Communication Competence Linda Beamer

As we all know, the workplace is ever becoming a diverse place, yet there's a lack of multicultural practice within business culture. The thrust of Beamer's article is concerned with creating a paradigm in which to pull from, that explains intercultural communication competence is learned/taught (399). She states: "The best way to understand intercultural communication is to focus on the decoding process and the role of perception in communication" (400).
Decoding is done by the recipient of a message and do to social and cultural ideals, the message may not be clear, that is, the sender may not have the same set of mores as receiver, thus having different signs which obscure meaning for the receiver. Perception, on the other hand, is knowing that a message is being sent. Beamer clarifies this idea with differentiating signifier and the signified: "The signifier...is the sensorially perceived signal without meaning yet attached. The signified is the meaning" (401). To put this into understandable terms: I see a yellow sign on an Idaho highway with the blackened-out image of a goat. I've never seen this image on a sign before because I'm from Nebraska and we have cows, not goats. But I am from the same culture in which the sign was produced, and I have seen similar signs in Nebraska, so I know that I should be on the lookout for wandering goats. I have perceived the sign and was able to decode the message based on previous knowledge and cultural influences.
So, to increase intercultural communication competences requires those making the signs to be constantly aware of what other cultures use, by looking at their "values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors" (402). Beamer introduces The Intercultural Learning Model as a way of demystifying the ways in which professionals can develop intercultural communication. This entails five levels:

• Acknowledging diversity
• Organizing Information by Stereotypes
• Question the Stereotypes
• Analyse Communication Episodes
• Generating "Other Culture" Messages      (404)

This model is both "incremental" and "cyclical" in that it's continually reinventing itself to better fit the needs of the intended audience (404).

The breakdown of the model:
Acknowledging diversity: what it sounds like- to conscientiously realize that there are differences between cultures that could block meaning for the receiver by the sender.

Organizing information by according to stereotypes: Beamer gives the example of Arabs may stand closer to you when they're speaking or that Chinese will refuse hospitality when first offered (406). She acknowledges that stereotypes don't make a culture and that's why the next level is important.

Posing questions to challenge the stereotypes: questioning stereotypes can open up the ways in which a culture may view business-related stuff like: time, technologies used, and how they make decisions (406). To aid in questioning stereotypes, Beamer offers these suggestions:

• Thinking and Knowing: how a culture "acquire, organize, and transmit information" (408)
• Doing and Achieving: as it sounds- what a culture does and how they go about getting it
• The Self: if the culture values individualism or interdependence
• The Organization of society: if there's a strong caste system versus an egalitarian culture 
• The Universe: if a culture looks at the world revolving around humans (humans in the center), or if the world/deities are at the center.

Analyzing communication episodes: once copious amounts of information has been gathered, then the knowledge can be applied by looking at past communication. This is where one can look at what went right, what went wrong, and what was in the middle with regard to effectively communicating signals for a culture.

Generating "other culture" messages: now senders can empathize with a culture's communication style. They can create news signs based on the culture's needs or modify existing models.

Connections:
Thrush article pointing to same issues as Beamer; the workplace is diverse and we need ways of communicating cross-culturally. Thrush is different in that she adds the layer of masculine and feminine. This was missing from Beamer's article- and maybe it should have been because I got the sense that Beamer was thinking about multicultural communication from a masculine perspective, and maybe could have gone to how female perspectives can add complexity to culture.

Fukuoka, et. al.: Complicate Beamer by asking are cultures that different or is it that "assumptions" about what cultures want is what makes the difference. They look at manuals and how many illustrations are in Japanese versus American. And that's where I lose the connection because then their inquiry became more about how these respective cultures liked/didn't like lots of pictures in their manuals.

Breuch: This may be a stretch to pull a connection from "technical literacy" into multicultural communication, but the former does hinge on the latter. Breuch's posit that computers are not "neutral" but rather "political in development and use" (487), which makes me think of Beamer's notion of looking at stereotypes and how a computer could play into that. Would a professional in another culture feel "othered" in some way if she didn't possess the same tech literacy? Or would she feel more included by having that shared knowledge?

Selber et. al.: They make the call to see tech literacy as "a complex set of social practices through which meaning is made collaboratively" (501), drawing on Beamer's Posing Questions to Challenge Stereotypes to make communication inclusive v. exclusive. In other words, the more eyes on the project the better communication will be transmitted.

Questions: While we all see that the workplace is changing in diverse ways, and folks like Beamer have given an explicit way of going about teaching multicultural communication, do you wonder if the real work is in making more people aware, and therefore care, about the changing environment? Are there ways in which teachers could do activities that show the effects of missed communication? Or do teachers go over this stuff, and not push too much of the literary crit way of doing things that Russell and others are concerned about?