Edwin Hoffman en Arjan Verdooren - Diversity competence

Introduction

ty, normality and stability, it makes sense that intercultural experiences revolve around feelings of strangeness, unfamiliarity and foreignness. The main challenge in such situations is thus to normalize the strangeness in the interaction, creating a normality and familiarity in the interaction that en able the interaction to continue and offer participants the opportunity to pur sue their interaction goals. To this end, it is not necessary for people to adapt to each other, but rather to create a connection or even a state of mind, from where differences can be further explored, negotiated or even safely ignored. As mentioned above, differences can relate to other group memberships (and hence cultures) besides ethnicity, religion or nationality. In addition to Rath je’s approach, we would argue that the differences that cause experiences of strangeness need not be cultural in nature at all; instead, they could be person al, socio-economic or technological in nature. We therefore prefer not to speak of intercultural competence, but of diversity competence: the ability to turn experienced strangeness that occurs as a result of a difference of any kind into an experience of familiarity that enables the participants of the interaction to continue their pursuit of interactional goals. This competence is not a ‘magic bullet’ guaranteeing successful interaction, but it is an important precondition for eventual success. Increasing complexity of diversity competence development The development of diversity competence entails an increasing complexity that people can employ in intercultural situations. The more people become acquainted with various cultural phenomena and intercultural dynamics, the more different scenarios and interpretations they can employ in intercultur al situations that can help them to normalize the situation and create a sense of familiarity. Paradoxically, this increased knowledge and development ena bles them to realize how much they do not know and to accept the complexity and unpredictability of (intercultural) interactions, thus fostering an attitude of openness, empathy and reflectiveness, which is in turn decisive for the outcome of interactions. In this regard, Paul Mecheril (2013, p. 16) speaks of the impor tance of ‘competenceless competence’. Power and ethics are critical diversity issues Even though we argue that international, interethnic and interreligious inter actions are not necessarily more challenging than other interactions, and that normalization is the main strategy for responding to experiences of strange ness, we believe it is important to point to two critical issues around diversity: power and ethics.

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