Co-Cultural Theory and Communication

Co-cultural communication theory, or co-cultural theory for short, emerged from the scholarly research of Mark Orbe in the 1990s. A co-cultural theoretical approach provides a lens to understand how traditionally underrepresented group members communicate within societal structures governed by cultural groups that have, over time, achieved dominant group status. The theory’s foundation was established by Orbe and colleagues by exploring the communicative lived experiences of underrepresented group members in the United States; the earliest work engaged the communication of co-cultural groups defined through race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, and sexual orientation. The theory centralizes the lived experiences of co-cultural group members and focuses on instances when cultural difference is regarded as salient. At its core, co-cultural theory explores one basic question: How do co-cultural group members use communication to negotiate their cultural identities with others (both like and unlike themselves) in a societal context where they are traditionally marginalized? Through discovery-oriented qualitative research, six factors emerged (field of experience, abilities, perceived costs and rewards, communication approach, preferred outcome, and situational context) as central to the selection of specific co-cultural practices. Since its inception, co-cultural theory has been embraced as a core theory for individuals interested in studying the intersection of culture, power, and communication.

Tourism and Intercultural Communication

Tourism as a global economic activity utilizes communication to create and represent cultural differences between the tourist and the Other through various media and spaces, despite the fact that such differences have become weaker and deterritorialized due to transnational mobility and globalization. Tourism communication reinscribes ethnocultural stereotypes, and this action is often motivated by a quest for cultural authenticity in the Other. The Other commodifies its cultural stereotypes with various discursive and semiotic tools and is often motivated by the exchange value of its cultural identity. Most previous scholarship on global tourism communication focused on North-South tourism mobilities, based on the stereotypical image of the tourist as an English-speaking white male. The recent demographic shift in world tourism presents us with a different picture. There are touristic encounters between people who move from one part of the Global South to another, and English does not necessarily serve as the default language of communication in these exchanges. There is also a shift in theoretical orientation in understanding what intercultural communication entails. Instead of treating culture and interculturality as essentially determined by broad variables such as nationality or ethnicity, attention is now given to the process that individuals engage in and perform via communication. Although there are some scholars who view intercultural communication in tourism as a positive force in raising people’s cross-cultural awareness, recent scholarship is mostly informed by a critical lens in that tourism is used to (re)produce, maintain, and justify relationships of inequality between the traveler and the local. A critical focus on intercultural communication provides important insights into our understanding of contemporary tourism and its situatedness within broader societal structures of power and ideologies.

Visual Rhetoric

Visual rhetoric is a relatively new area of study that emerged in the late 1900s when rhetoric scholars recognized the increasing centrality of the visual in contemporary culture. There is no consensus on the definition of visual rhetoric; different scholars use the term in different ways. Broadly, it refers to the analysis of the communicative and persuasive power of visual artifacts. These artifacts range from two-dimensional images such as photographs, political cartoons, and maps to moving images in film or television. They also include three-dimensional objects like murals, as well as places, spaces, and bodies. Although much scholarship on visual rhetoric focuses on the communicative aspects of visuals, there are also a number of studies that examine cultural practices of looking and interpreting. While visual rhetoric borrows from various methods and disciplines that also concern themselves with the visual, such as semiotics, aesthetics, and cultural studies, this bibliography focuses narrowly on the branch of study that emerged from US rhetorical studies within the discipline of communication in the 1970s. This bibliography begins with pieces that hail from other disciplines in order to recognize their influence in thinking about the rhetorical dimensions of visuals. From there, it moves to suggest general overviews and anthologies of this area of study, as well as some methods to evaluate images. Finally, the bibliography focuses on different forms of visual rhetoric that range from photographs to bodies.

Acculturation Processes and Communication

Acculturation processes and communication is a research area studying how communication changes when two or more cultures meet. Much research has focused on how sojourners or immigrants adapt their communication to meet the demands of a new cultural environment, while some scholars are interested in how the host culture or people change as a result of immigrants’ communication and culture. Communication broadly refers to attitudes, feelings, and behaviors associated with message exchanges in interpersonal interaction and the media. Historically, anthropologists have been studying acculturation among immigrants since the 1930s. Lysgaard and Oberg developed the U-curve model of cultural adaptation that moves from a honeymoon period into culture shock and onto adjustment, while Gullahorn and Gullahorn proposed the W-curve model linking the phenomenon of initial entry culture shock with reverse culture shock at the reentry into the home country. Communication scholar Young Yun Kim started using a communication approach to study acculturation and developed an interactive theory of communication acculturation in the 1970s. Since then, several theories have been developed to examine the role of communication in acculturation processes. Overall, research findings have indicated that longer lengths of stay in the host culture, social contact with the host people, host language competence, host media use, identification with the host culture, and social support from the host people all help sojourners or immigrants improve their attitudes and skills in interaction with the host people and satisfaction living in the host culture. Several factors have also been found to mediate the relationships between acculturation and communication, including uncertainty reduction, intergroup anxiety, intercultural communication apprehension, and personal-enacted and personal-relational identity gaps.

Worldview in Intercultural Communication

Worldview in intercultural communication represents an intercultural adaptation of worldview research originally from the humanities, theology, philosophy, and social sciences, particularly anthropology and linguistics. The concept refers to cognitive structures and holistic belief systems often shared by members of a culture perceived to influence one’s life space intersecting with deeply held assumptions on topics such as events, relationships, natural forces, deity, power, social hierarchy, and change that explain not only one’s cognitive map but also communication regarding current experiences and future event predictions. The notion can be said to inform the deepest layers of a culture’s experience. Some scholars trace the modern use of the concept to the 19th century with Humboldt’s application of the terms Weltanschauung and Weltbegriff, referring to beliefs defining how a culture or an individual interprets and interacts with the world. In sum, intercultural worldview is a quasi-metaphysical mental map influencing one’s thinking, doing, communicating, and discernment of others, nature, and self.

Participatory Action Research

Participatory action research (PAR) represents an epistemological framework, pedagogical approach, research methodology, and process for collaborative social action. PAR processes connect research, education, and action with the aim of addressing inequities to achieve social justice and societal transformation. By disrupting dominant notions of who holds expertise, PAR centers the situated knowledge of marginalized groups who are directly impacted by sociopolitical inequities. Central to PAR are the epistemological questions of whose knowledge counts, what counts as knowledge, who benefits from knowledge, and the purpose and audience for which knowledge is used and disseminated. One of PAR’s central tenets is that the people directly impacted by a societal issue, who must navigate systems of oppression, hold the most knowledge and wisdom regarding the complexities of the issue—and the structures, contexts, processes, and systems that (re)produce it—and how to solve it. PAR acknowledges that those directly impacted by systemic injustices have the most to lose and the most to gain in transforming the root causes of these issues and, therefore, are best positioned to motivate and lead others in partnership to address the root causes of social injustices. While PAR does not represent a collection of discrete practices, various PAR forms and approaches represent contested meanings linked to competing ideological underpinnings, societal interests, purposes, and interpretations depending on the contexts in which it emerges. For example, in some forms of PAR the purpose is to support participants in achieving greater control over their social and economic lives through intergenerational action aiming toward structural change, transforming systemic power relations, social justice that intersects with educational, socioeconomic, gender, queer and trans, disability, and racial justice. PAR recognizes that societal institutions, including schools, typically do not support historically marginalized groups in deepening their analysis of the root causes of injustices they face. The PAR process allows coresearchers to uncover the discourses and ideologies that normalize structural violence. Informed by popular education methods and social movements, PAR employs participatory pedagogical approaches that engage marginalized people in analyzing their lived experiences and contexts to disrupt grand narratives that bolster systems of domination and structural disinvestments in marginalized people’s institutions and communities. As a research methodology, PAR can include qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods and can include creative methods such as PhotoVoice. PAR products draw on research findings and recommendations to call for new initiatives, practices, and policies and can take many forms such as a presentation to powerholders, an art exhibition, a film, an organizing campaign, or a theatrical performance. PAR allows space, opportunities, tools, and structured processes to enable marginalized groups to examine inequities and injustices and to critique the dynamics of power and neoliberal logic that may manifest in their worlds and within the research team.

Food Studies and Communication

Food is much more than fuel for our bodies. It is an essential part of human cultures, and as such it carries meanings that shape and reflect individual and communal identities in terms of race, ethnicity, class, age, social class, and status, among others. It is both deeply physical and highly symbolic. Challenging the fundamental opposition between inside and outside, eating requires ingestion, bringing the outside inside, which is both exciting and terrifying. For this reason, food is both a source of pleasure and comfort and a cause for anxieties and concerns ranging from purity to propriety, heath, and wellness, just to mention a few. All food communicates meaning. We are implicitly trained to get cues from the world that surrounds us, and food is not excluded from these dynamics. We can obtain information from products and ingredients; from dishes and recipes; from the material objects that surround the act of eating, from tableware to furniture, interior design, built environments such as markets, stores, and supermarkets; from urban design and landscapes; from performative acts that include selling, cooking, serving, and eating food, as well as even disposing of leftovers; from every component of food systems, from agricultural production to manufacturing, packaging, transportation, distribution, trade, retail, and consumption; invisible infrastructures such as supply chains, cold chains, and more recently electronic traceability and blockchain. This bibliographical article focuses on the study of the intentional forms of communication that revolve around material, visual, and textual representations of food, and how they reflect, shape, or at times even problematize the explicit and implicit meanings food is able to generate. Research on these matters has grown in recent years with the emergence and growth of food studies as an interdisciplinary academic field. However, scholars from other disciplines, from literary studies to art history, media studies, gender studies, and politics, have engaged with the role of food in communication, often embracing multidisciplinary approaches in dialogue with food studies. The article is divided in two parts. The first part examines publications that look at food in different means of communication, from TV to fine arts and digital media, investigating the specificities of each means in its relationship with food discourse and practices. The second part instead explores research on food representations in the communication that involves different aspects of cultural and social life, from gender to politics. Some overlapping between the two sections is inevitable, but nevertheless the organization of the bibliographical entries in these two large sections can help the reader better navigate the content of the article and the rapidly expanding literature.

Cultural Identity

Cultural identity is a multidimensional concept that has fascinated scholars, researchers, and practitioners in (intercultural) communication and related disciplines over time. The year 2020 has witnessed renewed interests in and debates about a multiplicity of cultural identities, which demonstrate the concept’s relevance in everyday interactions across local and global contexts. For instance, both the rise of conservatism across the globe (including white nationalism in the United States during the Trump administration) and the push for greater equity and inclusion for all (e.g., Black Lives Matter movement, sexual misconduct policies, and gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces) have garnered and regenerated needs to better understand cultural identity as a complex and contested communication construct. Analytically, cultural identity encompasses a wide range of socially constructed categories that influence how a person knows and experiences his/her/their social world (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, socioeconomic status, ability, sexuality, religion, and more). As a social construct, cultural identity deals with important questions about conceptions, understandings, and lived experiences regarding the self in relation to others across time, space, and context. In particular, cultural identity—as opposed to identity—focuses on questions regarding membership in, acceptance into, (dis)identification with, and/or negotiation of (un)belongingness to various groups vis-à-vis communication. Questions about “difference” in a myriad of ways are at the heart of inquiries about cultural identity. That is, cultural identity is better understood as “cultural identities” as always already plural, intersecting, and evolving along various power lines that relate to histories, politics, and social forces. Communication scholars have studied the concept of cultural identity from different perspectives and approaches (e.g., functionalist, interpretive, and critical lenses). In this article, influential works are identified and reviewed in related fields such as psychology, sociology, and cultural studies that have shaped the study of cultural identity in (intercultural) communication in US academia. Then, core texts and articles in communication are considered that represent key issues, core debates, and central arguments about cultural identities, which are followed by textbooks and readers, a review of journals, and prominent theories of cultural identity by intercultural communication scholars in the United States. The article ends with major areas of study.

Communication and Culture in Multinational Organizations

Scholarly work and research on communication in multinational organizations continues to grow, responding to the increase of organizational complexity in a global environment where international teams, initiatives, and joint ventures have become common. Accompanying that growth were efforts to establish a clear focus and define boundaries of organizational communication research, particularly emphasizing multinational organizations. How to define communication in the context of multinational organizations? While a comprehensive review of the answers to this question could yield a handbook of communication in organizations, a clear answer can be given outlining the assumptions and political interests underlying different perspectives and theoretical conceptualizations. Therefore, instead of answering the question of what communication is in multinational organizations, this article follows the question proposed by Stanley Deetz. In The New Handbook of Organizational Communication, edited by Fredric M. Jablin and Linda L. Putnam (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2001), Deetz asks, “What do we see or what are we able to do if we think of organizational communication in one way versus another?” (p. 4). Deetz poses the question in order to better understand our choices of setting boundaries for the study of communication in organizations. Deetz reviews three different ways of conceptualizing communication in organizations. The first one emphasizes the development of organizational communication as a specialized area where departments and associations are organized around it; the second approach views communication as a phenomenon that exists in organizational context; and the third one regards communication as a distinct mode of explaining organizations. Recently there have been burgeoning studies in which communication scholars approach communication in organizations using the third approach. Those studies provide psychological or social-cultural explanations of organizations. This review summarizes several major topics on communication in multinational organizations that have been studied over the years. Rather than providing a comprehensive review of the field, the select perspectives and topics discussed here reflect major research foci and approaches associated with the study of communication in multinational organizations in the last few decades. This discussion also captures the recent shift from classic organizations to knowledge-intensive organizations in the context of 21st-century organizational life.

Open Access

Put simply, “open access” is the sharing of scholarly research at no cost to end users. Although it was first popularized in the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin statements in 2002 and 2003, there is still no universally agreed-upon definition for the term. At a minimum, a work must be freely available at no cost. Most proponents agree, additionally, that work must be released under a license that allows for it to be freely copied, used, and modified to qualify as open access. Although open access typically refers to scholarly journal articles, it can also be applied to monographs, gray literature, and other types of scholarly and nonscholarly work. Research is made available as open access in a number of ways. The two main models are “green” open access, where published works are placed in a free-to-access repository, and “gold” open access, where journals publish articles under a license that allows readers free access to their contents. In the nearly twenty years since the first open access declarations, its proponents have been broadly successful in propagating the movement’s ideals, with the result that more and more research in many subject areas has been made available under a green, gold, or other open access model. Many studies have shown that publishing a work as open access increases the number of citations it receives and improves its scores on a variety of metrics, although not all studies show a positive relationship. The growing support for open access, and upcoming initiatives like Plan S, in which a consortium of funders will require open access publishing as a condition of receiving funding, as well as continuing interest in open access from scholars, libraries, publishers, funders, and societies alike, means that open access is set to become ever more relevant to those studying scholarly communications, and research on the topic continues to grow accordingly. Research about open access is often practical in nature, and typically comes from scholars and researchers of scholarly communication, the publishing industry, or library and information science; however, because the benefits of open access apply to those in nearly all fields of study, researchers should be prepared to find studies and proponents that are interdisciplinary in nature or are published in journals outside of the sphere of communications.