The field of intercultural communication in the United States began with the establishment of the Foreign Service Institute in 1946.
This new field was interdisciplinary and pragmatic. It emphasized nonverbal communication in international contexts.
The perceptions and worldviews of scholars have an impact on the study of intercultural communication and led to three contemporary approaches: the social science, interpretive, and critical approaches.
This textbook advocates a dialectical approach that combines these three approaches.
A dialectical approach emphasizes a processual, relational, and holistic view of intercultural communication, and it requires a balance of contradictory views.
Intercultural communication is both cultural and individual, personal and contextual, characterized by differences and similarities, static and dynamic, oriented to both the present and the past, and characterized by both privilege and disadvantage.
