Multinational Going Cultural: A Postcolonial Deconstruction of Cultural Intelligence

Abstract

Cultural intelligence (CQ) has emerged as a popular construct for understanding and dealing with the problems of cross-cultural adjustment and cross-cultural communication that transnational corporations face. In this article, we critique the discursive moves through which CQ is presented as a competitively advantageous tool for global organizations, deconstruct its theorization and measurement, and discuss its role in perpetuating transnational hegemony. This article thus exposes the implicit relationship between academic knowledge production and transnational organizational practice that maximizes profits while simultaneously downplaying transnational globalization's oppressive consequences such as job vulnerability, unemployment, and exploitation.     

Neoliberalism,Nationalism, and Intercultural Communication: A Critical Analysis of a Japan's Neoliberal Nationalism Discourse under Globalization

Abstract

This paper attempts to draw implications of neoliberalism for intercultural communication by critically analyzing a Japanese neoliberal nationalism discourse. In January 2000, a governmental report proposed adopting English as an official language of Japan. Utilizing the notion of representation as a methodological lens for the analysis, this essay first examines how Japanese culture and communication, which have played key roles in asserting Japanese “uniqueness” along with the Japanese language, are redefined in the report. This essay then investigates how Japan's relations with Asia and the West—two significant discursive “Others” for constructing Japan's identity—are depicted in the text and situate the representation of Japanese culture and communication in the discursive triad for further contextualizing the analysis.     

Internet Software Piracy in China: A User Analysis of Resistance to Global Software Copyright Enforcement

Abstract

China's entry into the global networked society has raised considerable debate over what is derived from the development and expansion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the hotly debated issues is Internet copyright piracy, which is critical to the credibility and stability of China's membership to the global networked society. This paper examines Chinese users’ online discussion about Internet software piracy as local resistance to global copyright enforcement exercised through globalization processes. The study uses Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework of Polanyi's (1957) counter-hegemony and Gramsci's (1971) counter-movements as a heuristic device to conceptualize the resistance points to globalization located within the dominant discourse on intellectual property rights, specifically Internet software piracy, by Chinese Internet users. Gee's (2002) discourse analysis framework is applied to produce seven recurring themes within online postings: cost, convenience, software companies, foreign developed countries, China's development, Chinese culture, and moral dilemma. The analysis on these dominant themes illustrates the cultural models held by Chinese users towards the issues of Internet software piracy: Internet as a public domain, socialist market economy, patriotism, and Chinese culture. These cultural models represent different types of resistance in Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework. Meanwhile, these resistance positions are integrated under the notion of Chinese nationalism to constitute a complete set of counter-discourses to global software copyright enforcement.     

Urban Planning and the Spaces of Democracy: New York of the Great Depression in 42nd Street,Dead End,and The City

Abstract

Three New York films of the Great Depression and its aftermath, 42nd Street (1932, Lloyd Bacon), Dead End (1937, William Wyler), and The City (1939, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke), embodied a new political aesthetics in screening urban democratic spaces during moments of social breakdown. This article draws from urban and cinema studies, as well as from social and cultural theory (Lefebvre, Benjamin, Kracauer), to show how these films contributed to a discourse of urban planning and cinematic democratic aesthetics on the possibility of an egalitarian, inclusive, participatory community in diverse city spaces. The article argues that the reshaping of this cultural discourse, through the films’ emphasis on the conflicting material domains of the skyline and the slum, came at the cost of undermining the metropolis and, in The City, of limiting the urban spaces of democracy.     

Global Status, Intra-Institutional Stratification and Organizational Segmentation: A Time-Dynamic Tobit Analysis of ARWU Position Among U.S. Universities

Ranking systems such as The Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Rankings of World Universities simultaneously mark global status and stimulate global academic competition. As international ranking systems have become more prominent, researchers have begun to examine whether global rankings are creating increased inequality within and between universities. Using a panel Tobit regression analysis, this study assesses the extent to which markers of inter-institutional stratification and organizational segmentation predict global status among US research universities as measured by position in ARWU. Findings indicate some support that both inter-institutional stratification and organizational segmentation predict global status.     

Slumdog Millionaire Meets “India Shining”: (Trans)national Narrations of Identity in South Asian Diaspora

Abstract

This study uses the filmic text Slumdog Millionaire to examine how the tension between the nation and the transnational was communicated within South Asian diaspora. Findings from the textual analysis of commentary in the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times of India show that identity is articulated in purist as well as hybrid ways among South Asian diasporans. A lack of comfortable fit between cultural identity and place is evident. The analysis also shows that diasporic identity, hybridity, nation-state, and transnational forces work in particular configurations to raise consciousness about subaltern oppressions and exclusions within multiscalar operations of power and representation in globalizing conditions. Implications for intercultural communication and transitions are discussed.     

Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.     

Cultural discourses of privacy: Interrogating globalized workplace relationships in Japan

Using Carbaugh’s (2005. Cultures in conversation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 2007. Cultural discourse analysis: Communication practices and intercultural encounters. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 167–182) cultural discourse analysis and Petronio’s (2002. Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory, this study highlights four cultural premises that garner intercultural privacy management between foreign English language teachers (ELTs) and Japanese coworkers (JCWs) in Japan. The analysis revealed that ELTs: (a) expected not to be a “free space” for privacy inquisition by JCWs, and (b) expected voluntary reciprocity in (egalitarian) workplace relationships. JCWs viewed: (a) privacy inquisitions as acts of kindness/caring and (b) soliciting help from a supervisor as providing opportunities for better care. This study calls for attention to intercultural privacy management and enhances CPM’s cultural criteria.     

The Regional Dimension: How Regional Media Systems Condition Global Climate-Change Communication

Abstract

Global perspectives and national approaches have dominated studies of climate-change communication, reflecting the global nature of climate change as well as the traditional research focus on national media systems. In the absence of a global public sphere, however, transnational issue attention is largely dependent on regional media systems, yet the role this regional dimension plays has been largely overlooked. This article presents a comparative study of climate-change coverage in three geo-cultural regions, The Middle East, Scandinavia, and North America, and explores the link between global climate-change communication and regional media systems. It finds that regional variations in climate-change communication carry important communicative implications concerning perceptions of climate change's relevance and urgency.     

Knowledge for the West,Production for the Rest?

This article develops the argument that a ‘knowledge economy,’ despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of ‘knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products’). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.     

Communicating citizenship in China’s digital society

ABSTRACT

This research explores the (inter-) cultural dimension of communicating citizenship in China’s new media environment. It adopts speech codes theory as a theoretical and methodological framework to examine the historically situated and socially constructed meanings of citizenship and the normative communicative conduct for practicing “good citizenship” in China. Through a systematic analysis of Chinese online discourse surrounding two social events, this study captures one speech code pertaining to communicating citizenship that is premised on a paradox – citizenship is interpreted by the Chinese as a legal entitlement that they deserve, but it is simultaneously treated as an aspirational and unattainable ideal. Additionally, speaking sensibly and morally with a communal orientation is heavily emphasized in this speech code as it is considered a valuable communicative practice for performing “good citizenship.” Finally, participating in online collective actions such as “topping posts” is rendered an acceptable and effective way to communicate and enact citizen rights in China.     

Contextual Negotiation of Cultural Identifications and Relationships: Interview Discourse with Palestinian,Israeli, and Palestinian/Israeli Young Women in a U.S. Peace-Building Program

Abstract

An integration of critical and interpretive perspectives frames the analysis of interview discourse from participants in a U.S. peace-building dialogue program during 1997–1998. Israeli, Palestinian, and Palestinian/Israeli identified participants’ discourse reveals that they negotiate multiple and contextually contingent cultural identifications, and that the context both enables and constrains their relationships with each other. Discursive themes demonstrate the complexity and struggle in which participants position themselves and exercise levels of agency, and negotiate their cultural and intercultural relationships. The findings of the study substantiate calls by scholars and practitioners to incorporate contextual factors such as history, politics, social hierarchies, and agency into research and training models of intergroup dialogue.     

The rhetorical force of “global archival memory”: (Re)Situating archives along the global memoryscape

ABSTRACT

This essay engages the possibilities and pitfalls of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program for fostering “global archival memory.” Archives function as rhetorical weapons for both political control and social justice within national and regional contexts. The constitution of global archival memory shifts archives’ borders beyond nation-bound contexts, creating space for contention, deliberation, and debate within a presentist transnational arena. Approaching archives as symbols capable of marshaling cross-cultural identifications furthers memory scholars’ conceptions of transnational memories and communities. It responds to rhetorical scholars’ calls to further engage archives, while drawing on archival studies, memory studies, and rhetorical theories of memory.     

World 2: On the Significance and Impossibility of Articulation

Abstract

This article rethinks the notion of articulation as formulated in the ‘studies‐discourse’: cultural studies, gender studies, science studies. I analyse the inner workings of the concept of articulation against the background of Luis Buñuel’s film Tristana. Using the language of Spanish cultural practices, Buñuel offers the negative story of an oppressive society. The film foregrounds the role of a primordial asymmetry between the sexes in obliging articulation. This is suggestive of how articulation is interwoven with, and undone by, a radical refusal which unveils the ongoing incommensurability and inevitable disparity between the world in which we dwell and a world which remains unvoiced in the ‘studies‐discourse’: World 2, an imperceptible world which questions the fantasy of an overall and limitless emancipation inherent in the mythology of liberalism.     

The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog: Race,Criminality and the ‘Pit Bull’

Abstract

Though it is generally acknowledged that there is a relationship between racist discourse and the figure of the non-human animal, this relationship is almost always assumed to be analogical: oppressed groups are compared with or treated as non-human animals. But the recent dogfighting case against NFL Quarterback Michael Vick and the attendant suspicion of ‘pit bulls’ suggests that racism today has a more complex relationship with (certain types of) animals than the analogy would capture. An analysis of this discourse both calls for and revises Foucault's notion of ‘the dangerous individual’ as an explanatory concept for contemporary racism. The concomitant revulsion toward both dogfighting and ‘pit bulls’ suggests an expression of fear of a perceived threat to normative whiteness, insofar as these ‘dangerous’ dogs are figured as carriers of the contagion of racial abnormality.     

Lope de Aguirre,the Tyrant,and the Prince: Convergence and Divergence in Postcolonial Collective Memory

Abstract

In Latin America, collective remembering is shaped by stories of colonizers whose voracious ambitions left an indelible mark on the landscape and its people. This essay examines a set of narratives about a legendary colonizer, Lope de Aguirre, that continue to be invoked in the collective imagination on the island of Margarita, in Venezuela. Drawing on Bormann's Symbolic Convergence Theory and Bakhtin's work on cultural discourse, this analysis shows that on the one hand, the narratives converge to support official records of Aguirre as an archetype of colonial brutality. Yet on the other, alternate versions of the stories reveal a more discordant picture, one that complicates Aguirre's character and reevaluates his influence on the island and in the wider context of Latin America.     

“A Delicious Way to Help Save Lives”: Race,Commodification, and Celebrity in Product (RED)

Abstract

The Product (RED) campaign raises money to fight AIDS in Africa by helping to sell brand-name merchandise to affluent consumers. This paper examines the racialized representations of the (RED) website and the campaign's use of a consumer–celebrity fund-raising model. Through the analytical lens of critical cultural studies, I argue that (RED) commodifies Africans and “African-ness” under a celebratory guise, and reinscribes a narrative of Africa as a “problem child.” The campaign paradoxically trades on the very disparities of global capitalism that propel the AIDS crisis. It is central in (re)producing the human consequences of globalization, shoring up a symbolic and material marketplace marked by extreme poverty and extreme consumption.     

The coastal cultural heritage facing coastal management

This paper is concerned with the role of cultural heritage in coastal areas, including land belts and coastal marine waters in the prospect of operating sustainable development-aimed strategies. It is a part of the investigations carried out in the framework of the Progetto Finalizzato Beni Culturali (Special Project Safeguard of Cultural Heritage) convened by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR, the Italian National Research Council). Essentially, it aims at contributing to the discussion on how the mise-en-valeur of the coastal cultural heritage may be framed within integrated coastal management programmes. In this view, the discourse on the coastal cultural heritage runs along this pathway: (i) global (climatic) change and globalisation are assumed to be the key components of the external environment with which the coastal area interacts; (ii) the conceptual framework of coastal management, as it can be deduced by the background guidelines from Agenda 21 (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED), is considered; (iii) the legal framework, which the coastal area is characterised by, is taken into account by focusing on its implications on the management patterns. At this point, attention is concentrated on the role of cultural heritage in the framework of integrated coastal management approaches. It is considered, how this pivotal component of the coastal area has been dealt with bythe intergovernmental organisations. Special consideration is attributed to the European Code of Conduct for Coastal Management Zones, since it considers the ecological patrimony and cultural heritage as giving shape to a unique ethically-endowed reality, which materialised through landscapes and seascapes. The final step consists of the design of a tentative Code of Conduct for Coastal Cultural Heritage consisting of some background and operational principles.     

“You're Invading the World and You Don't Even Know Where Slovenia Is!” An Analysis of an Online Forum Among American,Australian and Slovenian University Students

Abstract

This paper is about an international electronic forum set up among university students in the United States, Australia, and Slovenia. It seeks to (a) develop a richer understanding of how Americans view themselves in relation to a globalizing world, (b) examine how American, Slovenian and Australian university students use an interactive online context to advance and challenge particular points of view within, and across, domestic boundaries, and (c) reflect on the ways in which the participants, in particular the American participants, might be said to have been moved, or not moved, to reassess their (national) views on various issues of global significance.     

Cool governance: Japan’s ubiquitous society,surveillance, and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The rapid reform of the Akihabara district of Tokyo during the first decade of the twenty-first century, in conjunction with the Japanese government’s policy on the global promotion of Cool Japan, has been envisioned under the Japanese government’s new direction of becoming a ‘ubiquitous society’. From the postwar period when Akihabara became the techno-gadgetry hub of Tokyo, into the twenty-first century where it transforms itself into the Mecca of anime and video games, Akihabara has become the embodiment of national hope and technological future. Noticeably, what also implemented alongside this advance of techno-future is a new form of governance and surveillance. After Katō Tomohiro’s murderous rampage in Akihabara in 2008, numerous CCTVs have been installed to secure the neighbourhood from crime and news of this solution became a spectacle in international media. This form of ubiquitous techno-governance integrated as part of everyday life had already been imagined in anime such as Dennō Koiru (Coil A Circle of Children), which broadcast on Japan’s national broadcast station NHK in 2007. In light of the concerted effort of the Japanese government’s promotion of anime to the global consumers seamlessly integrating the urban developmental project of Akihabara, the production of Dennō Koiru at that historical juncture presents a pertinent foreshadowing of Japan’s ‘society of control’. This article will examine the notion of ubiquitous society and surveillance in Dennō Koiru and situate its production against the backdrop of Japan’s growing techno-governance vis-à-vis its creative industries in the twenty-first century.