Edwin Hoffman en Arjan Verdooren - Diversity competence

Introduction

those groups, because their participation in globalized cultural fields can bring unexpected common references, ideas and habits. We believe that an approach to intercultural communication and competence should take these developments into account. This does not mean that previous theories or approaches have become irrelevant: it does mean that they should be reviewed, interpreted and, where necessary, expanded in the light of the cur rent global context. This book is an attempt to do so. 2 What is the aim of this book? Our aim has been to write a practice-theoretical book, i.e. one that provides practical guidelines that are firmly based in theory and research, while at the same time exploring the practical implications of relevant theories and studies. By doing so, we hope to contribute to the existing literature on intercultur al communication and competence. In our view, this literature is either high ly practically oriented, often relying on anecdotal sources (which is useful for practical reflection, but not for academic development), or highly theoretical (which serves academic purposes but rarely provides feasible practical applica tions). We hope that this book will, to some extent, bridge this gap. For this reason, the book provides a generous amount of theory, and can there fore be read as an overview of ideas on and studies of intercultural communi cation and competence. At the same time, we will argue for a specific vision of and approach to intercultural communication and competence, which will also provide the structure and build-up of the subsequent chapters. However, we make our argument from the conviction that there is no defini tive truth about or approach to intercultural communication. We do not sub scribe to the science-philosophical view that science can provide an absolute and definitive answer to social matters by researching and measuring social life (known as positivism). This is not to say that such studies cannot yield interest ing insights and suggestions, and from that perspective we gladly make use of their results in this book. We believe that a more critical approach to any kind of knowledge and its sources (known as constructivism) brings highly impor tant questions to the intercultural field, yet often offers relatively few answers – especially for practitioners. In this book we try to carve out some of the im plications of such questions. In the end, what this book offers is a proposal on how to see and ‘do’ intercul tural communication. This proposal is based on existing theory and research

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