Intercultural experiences and practices in a Chinese-Japanese joint venture: a study of narratives and interactions about and beyond "Chinese" and "Japanese"

This dissertation is a study of intercultural communication between Japanese and Chinese employees in a merger advertising firm comprised of a state-managed Chinese firm and a private-sector Japanese firm. In this study, I examine whether national-cultural factors are related or unrelated, or are made meaningful or meaningless by setting members, to particular communicative events and how, claiming that national-cultural factors are just one kind of influence on communicative events and that there are other kinds of important influence. My focus is on understanding the setting members’ experience and practice of intercultural communication. In investigating these, I first examine, through analysis of individuals’ narratives, how individuals construct the meaning of particular intercultural communicative events as experience. Secondly, I examine through detailed discourse analysis of interactions how various situational and extrasituational factors become entangled, or untangled, in the process of actual interactions, shaping communicative practice in the intercultural setting. Through the narrative analyses, I present that as much as various factors construct the Chinese-Japanese dichotomy and its meaning(s) within particular experiences of particular setting members, the Chinese-Japanese dichotomy also serves as a resource and rhetorical tool for the setting members to make sense of their intercultural experiences or to identify themselves as meaningful to such experiences. Through interaction analysis, I argue that interlocutors in intercultural settings can be communicatively competent despite their linguistic incompetence or language barriers; linguistic inability, or a lack of cultural knowledge, does not necessarily indicate communicative incompetence. Based on my findings about setting members’ experience and practice of intercultural communication, I state ideas regarding what we as individuals as theorists and practitioners of intercultural communication need to know to better live in the intercultural world and what we as intercultural communication researchers need to do in the future.