Diversity and Social Interaction at Work

Today’s workplaces are characterized by interactions among people with diverse backgrounds. These interactions may occur face-to-face or in technology-mediated settings; as interpersonal exchanges between co-workers, supervisors, and subordinates or between business partners and clients; in small groups and teams or as one-off encounters with customers. The persons engaged in these interactions jointly strive for the shared goals of their organization though they may come from different countries, speak different first languages, or identify with different ethnic, gender, or age groups. This chapter explores the role of diversity in different workplace contexts and situations. First, we unp…

Experiencing Cultural Contact at Work : An Exploration of Immigrants’ Perceptions of Work in Finland

Intercultural Workplace Communication

The workplace is a highly meaningful context for intercultural communication where persons who come from different countries, identify with different ethnic groups or speak different languages get to collaborate and develop relationships with one another. Needless to say, interpersonal communication in the workplace has always been a primary area of interest for intercultural communication research. Early scholarship focused on the preparation of U.S. military personnel, diplomats, business people, and missionaries for overseas assignments. However, the increasing pluralization of the social landscape has bolstered research endeavors. These days, the scope of intercultural workplace communi…

From ‘intercultural-washing’ to meaningful intercultural education: Revisiting higher education practice

This is the first special issue that JPHE hosts—and could there be a more suitable forum for an issue dedicated to exploring and encouraging a critical dialogue around transformative intercultural communication teaching practices in higher education (HE)? What has led us to engage with the theme of making intercultural education meaningful is a shared observation that there seems to be an increasing disconnect between recent developments in intercultural communication theory and practice. With so much critique published over the years, we are perplexed as to why traditional notions of culture still prevail not only in mainstream intercultural communication research but also in institutional…

Cultural Identity in Everyday Interactions at Work: Highly Skilled Female Russian Professionals in Finland

The dominant research strands into social interaction in culturally diverse workplaces have focused on issues of organizational efficiency and discrimination, and they have treated cultural identity as static, monolithic, and universally shared. This study aims to problematize this view. It is argued that our understanding of cultural workplace diversity could be extended through the integration of interpretive and critical interpersonal communication theorizing on cultural identity as dynamic and processual, constructed between and among people in everyday workplace interactions and in relation to larger social, political, and historical forces. This argument is illustrated by an analysis …

Communicating interculturality in the workplace

Language ideological landscapes for students in university language policies: inclusion, exclusion, or hierarchy

Many universities in non-English speaking countries have been adopting English as a medium of instruction to internationalize their education. We set out to compare the language policies of a Finnish and a Japanese university using the lens of language ideology – a set of normative beliefs about the social dimension of language. Data were collected from selected documents of the two universities, and analyzed utilizing critical discursive psychology. This social constructionist approach allows mapping out language ideological landscapes – interrelationships among different co-occurring language ideologies – from which students may draw ideas about how they orient themselves towards their pe…

The Development of Intercultural Relationships at Work: Polish Migrant Workers in Finland

This article offers an interpersonal communication perspective on relational processes in a workplace affected by the international flow of labor migration. We investigate how temporary migrant workers and their foreign colleagues perceive developing interpersonal relationships with each other through an analysis of in-depth interviews with employees of a Finnish recruitment agency and Polish metal workers it has recruited. The recruitment agents talk about their relationships with the recruited Polish workers; the Polish workers also describe their relationships with their Finnish colleagues at the customer company. The context under investigation emerges as rich in relational processes. T…

Communicating interculturality in the world of work

Lectio praecursoria puheviestinnän väitöskirjaksi tarkoitetun tutkimuksen Communicating interculturality in the workplace tarkastustilaisuudessa Jyväskylän yliopistossa 24.10.2015. Vastaväittäjänä toimi professori Fred Dervin (Helsingin yliopisto) ja kustoksena professori Maarit Valo.

Sharing cultural knowledge at work: a study of chat interactions of an internationally dispersed team

Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan etnometodologisen jäsenkategorisoinnin analyysin avulla, kuinka kansainvälisesti hajautetun tiimin jäsenet jakavat kulttuurista tietoa Skype™ -keskusteluissaan. Tarkemmin katsotaan sitä, miten osallistujat luokittelevat itsensä ja muut tiimin jäsenet ’kulttuurisiksi tietäjiksi’ ja ’ei tietäjiksi’. Analyysissa havaittiin neljä tapaa, joilla tiimin jäsenet jakoivat tietoa samalla kun he hallinnoivat tehtävien jakelua ja suorittamista sekä rakensivat yhteisymmärrystä vuorovaikutuksessa. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että kulttuurinen tieto on dynaamisesti muuttuvaa, kontekstisidonnaista ja vuorovaikutuksessa rakentuvaa. Sen sijaan että kulttuurisuus haittais…

Implementing Critical Approaches to Interculturality in Higher Education

Critical approaches to interculturality have gained visibility over the years, both within and outside of academia. And yet, the increasing drive across European higher education institutions to implement internationalization strategies is often articulated around assuming traditional notions of culture, diversity, and intercultural communication. This gap between critical research in interculturality and concrete implementation of intercultural education is what drove us to ask colleagues how they put critical approaches to interculturality into practice. nonPeerReviewed