Intercultural communication competence: Continuing challenges and critical directions

This essay reviews and extends calls for researchers and trainer/practitioners to clarify what is meant by culture, intercultural communication, and competence; ask critical questions about the validity and relevance of our work; and reconsider who benefits from research and training. Several limitations of previous research about intercultural competence are demonstrated, e.g., approaching culture as a nationally shared, homogenous, mental program developed through socialization, or as a communicative system associated with a single and unitary group identification. The author also problematizes instances when communication competence is presented as an individual impression rather than a contextually and relationally contingent process of negotiation and struggle. The author offers examples from her program of research that began in 1989 to illustrate how she began to give more attention to contextual factors, status hierarchies and power relations and differential benefits for diverse parties in intercultural encounters. The essay concludes with further recommendations related to how to incorporate broader notions of macro, meso and micro contexts, approach cultures as plural and contested; attend to status positions of interactants as negotiated and dynamic; and ensure that outcomes and consequences of intercultural competence research and training are oriented toward justice, equity and inclusion.