Assignment

Answer all five questions on this exam.

As a guideline, aim to use 250 to 300 words (or more, if you think they are needed) for each question.

This exam will be marked out of 100, 20 marks for each question.

1. Using Edward T. Hall's theories of high- versus low-context cultures as the basis for your discussion, consider the situation described below, analyze it, and outline what you would consider to be the most beneficial, and most culturally sensitive, solution to the problems that have arisen.

Imagine an American supplier of goods to a Japanese restaurant. The Americans are likely to wait for the Japanese to request something explicitly before they deliver it, leaving the Japanese to wonder (silently) at American insensitivity and obtuseness. The Japanese, on the other hand, may create relational confusion by reading unintended meaning into the American behavior. In the face of the confusion, Americans are likely to become more direct and explicit, which may lead the Japanese to become more indirect and circumspect, thus creating a spiral of increasingly incompetent exchanges.

2. Media are any technologies that extend humans' ability to communicate beyond the limits of face-to-face encounters. How can an Internet-based social networking site, for instance, allow you to improve your interpersonal and intercultural communication skills? In your discussion, provide specific, and detailed, examples, along with your analysis. What are the pros, and cons, of media-based communication?

3. The GLOBE Cultural Taxonomy examines cultural practices and cultural values according to the dominant patterns of a culture: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, in-group collectivism, institutional collectivism, gender egalitarianism, assertiveness, performance orientation, future orientation, and humane orientation. Using what you consider to be the three or four most important facets of GLOBE, discuss the following situation: your company has relocated to a Canadian city where Vietnamese culture is strongly established. Many of your employees will be from this culture. What can you do to improve communication between your management (who are not Vietnamese based) and the Vietnamese Canadians you are currently hiring?

4. Social categorizing, ethnocentrism, stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and racism can reduce people's willingness to understand and accept cultural differences. They are generally considered negative traits. However, prejudice, for instance, is widely understood to be an important strategy thathelps individuals organize and simplify the world they inhabit. Richard Brislin describes four additional benefits, or what he calls functions, of prejudice. Pick two of them, explain what they are, and provide a personal example of each (that is, an example where you employed prejudice, or someone employed prejudice against you). What conclusions can you draw about intercultural exchanges from the way prejudice operated in those contexts?

5. List and explain the five different types of intercultural adaptation. Which ones do you think will be most important to you as you continue to become an intercultural communicator? Why and how are those adaptations the most important?