With rapid changes in the global economy, technology, transportation systems, and immigration policies, the world is becoming a small, intersecting community.
We find ourselves having increased contact with people who are culturally different. In a global workforce, people bring with them different work habits and cultural practices. For example, cultural strangers may approach problem-solving tasks or developing friendships and romantic relationships with different expectations and rhythms.
They may also have different communication desires, end goals, and emphases in an intercultural encounter. In this 21st century global world, people are constantly moving across borders, into and out of a country. Neighborhoods and communities are changing. In what was once a homogeneous community, we may now find more diversity and cultural values in flux.The study of intercultural conflict communication involves, at least in part, cultural group membership differences. Intercultural conflict is the perceived or actual incompatibility of cultural values, situational norms, goals, face orientations, scarce resources, styles/processes, and/or outcomes in a face-to- face (or mediated) context within a sociohis- torical embedded system. To be a competent conflict communicator in the 21st century, both the appropriateness and effectiveness features, together with the productivity, satisfaction, and ethical choice features are part of the intercultural conflict competence criteria (Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009). If inappropriate or ineffective conflict behaviors continue, the miscommunication can very easily spiral into a complex, polarized intercultural conflict situation.
Culture, from this backdrop context, is defined as a learned system of traditions, symbolic patterns, and accumulative meanings that fosters a particular sense of shared identity-hood, community-hood, and interaction rituals among the aggregate of its group members. Both cultural and individual conditioning factors in conjunction with multilayered situational factors shape intercultural conflict competence antecedent factors, process, and outcome.
The purpose of this chapter is twofold: (1) to offer a synoptic review and critique of our original conflict model, namely, the culture-based situational conflict model (CBSCM) published in 2001 in our book Managing Intercultural Conflict Effectively (Ting-Toomey & Oetzel, 2001), and (2) to propose an update model, the culture-based social ecological conflict model (CBSECM), to capture the dynamic change and the accelerated research growth in the area of intercultural conflict communication. The updated model is based on a merging of the classic model, CBSCM, with the social ecological framework as proposed in our concluding chapter in the first edition of The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication (Oetzel, Ting- Toomey, & Rinderle, 2006). We also believe that the study of contemporary intercultural conflict cases in this global, intersecting world should emphasize the importance of a multilevel, multicontextual analysis perspective.A multilevel perspective in analyzing an intercultural conflict case provides the opportunity to understand (and possibly challenge) what are the deeply held assumptions of a particular cultural conflict worldview or practice on multiple levels of influence. A multilevel theorizing process may illustrate that a particular intercultural conflict case history contains both consistencies and inconsistencies at multiple levels of analysis. Additionally, a multilevel perspective helps illustrate the multitude of factors that shape macrosystem-level, institutional membership-level, immediate community-level, workplace-level, or family socialization-level influence, and also individual- and interpersonal-level conflict interpretations within and across the nested units of emphasis.
More specifically, the chapter is organized in four sections. The first section briefly reviews the original CBSCM. The section ends with a critique of the limitations of the model. The second section explains the core principles and the analytical concepts of the social ecological model as a precursor discussion to our updated model in the next section. The third section discusses in depth the new model, the CBSECM, and the new elements in this model. The section ends with an application of an intercultural conflict case study in illustrating the utility and the versatility of the CBSECM. The last section ends with a call for directions for future theorizing and researching in testing and further fine-tuning the CBSECM and its related conflict competence practice.