Abstract

This book is a theoretical and practical discussion of intercultural communication and interaction and is aimed at academic courses as well as professional development programmes. It focuses, from a critical perspective, on the intercultural dynamics established between the members of multicultural groups/teams in various types of work environments. Selected academics and other experts on intercultural communication and interaction, representing different approaches and professional experience, joined, collaborated and contributed to the fulfilment of a three-year project where they developed a model in eight axes: - Intercultural Responsibility, Emotional Management, Intercultural Interaction, Communicative Interaction, Ethnography, Biography, Diversity Management and Working in Multicultural Teams. Each chapter provides an interdisciplinary account of its topic as well as an activity which aims to illustrate the ideas proposed.

Mobility has long been a characteristic of the globalized world, and the need to engage in a true meeting with people from other cultures has never been greater, both at a personal and at a professional level. We are now interconnected to such a degree that we need to transcend our own culture and identity and risk meeting the other at a cosmopolitan level in an ongoing process of reciprocal interaction and influencing. There is, however, an absence of appropriate professional training in this field. The editors and contributors to this book satisfy the need by offering a formal education to prepare you for the multicultural workplace.

Informed by both practice and theory, and indeed serving as a model for how one necessarily must feed the other, this volume is timely and deeply important. Its real strength is its ability to view intercultural training work in and of itself as an intercultural encounter among the practices of training and education, various academic disciplines, the fields of academia and business, and the worlds of theory and practice.

Manuela Guilherme is a Senior Researcher at the Centro de Estudos Sociais at the University of Coimbra. She conceptualised and coordinated the ICOPROMO project on which this book is based . She is the author of Critical Citizens for an Intercultural World: Foreign Language Education as cultural politics, Multilingual Matters, 2002.

Evelyne Glaser is director of the Centre for Business Languages and Intercultural Communication at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Her research interests include: intercultural communication, language acquisition, multicultural teams, aspects of global business and management, curriculum development.

María del Carmen Méndez-García is a lecturer at the University of Jaén (Spain), where she teaches linguistics and ELT methodology at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Since 2006 she has cooperated with the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe in the development of the project Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters.

This volume illustrates a new manner to examine intercultural communication competence in a global society. The editors have compiled a series of chapters from a variety of international and world class authors to examine real and symbolic mobility of people, identities, and cultures. The chapters examine, from professional and theoretical perspectives, how individuals in multicultural teams and workplaces establish and maintain effective relationships to fulfill the potential of diversity. It is a must read for scholars and practitioners of intercultural/multicultural work teams.

The book makes a highly valuable contribution to current understandings of the impact of mobility and globalisation in the day-to-day realities of companies and professionals and suggests engaging and relevant activities for addressing them.