CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter will enable you to:

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: WHAT IS IT?

‘Intercultural communication’ is one of those terms that everybody uses, and in many different and not necessarily compatible ways. Instead of starting with a definition, I will start with a description of three studies that come under the heading ‘intercultural communication’, and I will ask you to work out for yourself how the researchers who conducted and wrote these studies understand ‘intercultural communication’.

Study 1 is an investigation of the ways in which British and Italian service staff of an airline respond to service failure (Lorenzoni and Lewis 2004). Service failure is another term for ‘when something goes wrong’ such as baggage being lost or a customer not being able to get on their flight due to overbooking. The researchers administered a questionnaire to thirty-seven British and thirty-nine Italian ground, telephone and cabin staff who worked for the same airline. Both British and Italian staff were very similar in their ‘behavioural responses’, that is, they reported that they would respond similarly to service failure. For instance, most participants claimed that they would try to change an arrangement if doing so was within company regulations. If it was impossible to change an arrangement, they indicated on the questionnaire that they would explain to the customer why this was so.

While British and Italian employees said they would behave in similar ways in response to a service failure, the two groups reported different attitudes towards customers affected by service failure. For example, Italian service staff reported that they sometimes bent the rules a bit for ‘ compassionate cases’ but British workers did not.