The Handbook of Intergroup Communication

Howard Giles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136513602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Handbook of Intergroup Communication brings together research, theory and application on traditional as well as innovative intergroup situations, exploring the communication aspect of these groups.

The volume is organized into four domains – cross-disciplinary approaches to intergroup study; types/processes of communication between groups; communication between specific group types; and arenas in which intergroup communication takes place. Editor Howard Giles worked with an internationally-based advisory board to develop and review content, and the contributors included here represent those scholars doing innovative and well-regarded work around the globe.

The "intergroup" umbrella integrates and transcends many traditional conceptual boundaries in communication (including media, health, intercultural, organizational); hence the Handbook will appeal to scholars and graduate students not only in the core area of intergroup communication itself, but across varying terrains of study in communication and beyond, including intergroup relations and social psychology.

Part I

PROLOGUE

1

Principles of Intergroup Communication

Howard Giles

People’s communicative episodes can be defined by varying degrees of interpersonal salience. The extreme of this would be an interaction influenced only by participants’ moods and personalities, and one where their social identities were virtually irrelevant (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). A bank ad, from First Direct, illustrates this individual focus of attention, playing on doubtless past employee-customer tensions: “When you talk to First Direct, you’re treated as a person … personalized with a name … not as a number.” In contrast, would be interactions where participants’ group identities—their clans, cliques, unions, generations, families, etc.—almost entirely dictate the conversational dynamics; speakers’ idiosyncratic characteristics here would be almost immaterial. Such happened in the Ivory Coast in November 2004, where there was a conflagration with the French military, and statements by locals such as the following were seemingly commonplace: “French go home!… Everyone get your Frenchmen!” Henri Tajfel had always argued (somewhat mischievously) that at least 70% of so-called interpersonal interactions were actually highly intergroup in nature (see Petronio, Ellemers, Giles, & Gallois, 1998)—this could perhaps even turn out to be an underestimate. This Handbook is devoted to studies, insights, theories, and applications in contexts where intergroup-ness is very high and regularly happens, including organizational, healthcare, and other applied settings where social groups as specialties, religions, genders and so forth play an important role in determining how people interact with each other.

Although a number of edited volumes (Giles, 1977; Giles, Reid, & Harwood, 2010; Gudykunst, 1986; Harwood & Giles, 2005) and special journal issues (Clément, 1996, 2007; Reid & Giles, 2005) have appeared over the past 35 years on the topic of intergroup communication, this is the first Handbook to bear that insignia. High hopes for its impact are envisaged, given the large number of quite different intergroup situations encompassed, some explored for the first time (e.g., Chapters, 4, 16, 18, 22, & 23), new models and propositions articulated (e.g., Chapters 7, 15, 20, & 25), and the unique applications introduced (e.g., Chapters 14, 20, & 22).

Mainstream intergroup communication is rooted in a socio-psychological tradition, particularly social identity theory (SIT: see Chapters 2, 8, & ), as is evident throughout the chapters that follow. However, the aim of this volume is to reflect intergroup communication scholars’ commitment, in addition to and in contrast with its socio-psychological origins, to a wider set of empowering epistemological and methodological approaches, including those that are evolutionary, ethnographic, and conversation analytic (see Chapters 2–5).

The socio-psychological foundations of so-called intergroup theory were steeped in cognitive and motivational emphases. Little attention, albeit with some notable exceptions (e.g., Giles, 1978; Hogg & Abrams, 1998; Nagda, 2006; Potter, 2008), was afforded communicative ingredients. Moreover, many cognitive intergroup constructs (e.g., categorization, stereotyping) can be shaped by communicative practices in the first place (see Cargile, Giles, & Clément, 1996; Sutton, 2010; see Chapters 5 & 6). In this vein, intergroup processes such as social stereotyping are conveyed in and by the media including video-game magazines and video game covers (Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess, & Brown, 2011), as well as dictate, on occasion, topics for everyday discourse (e.g., Collins, Biernat, & Eidelman, 2009; Ruscher, Cralley, & O’Farrell, 2005). For their parts too, discrimination and conflict, even violence, are enacted in and sustained through intergroup dialogue and contact situations (Bissing & Sherman, 2011; see Chapters 12–14) and, not infrequently, are triggered themselves by contentious language status issues (e.g., Barker et al., 2001). Feeling marginalized as a member of a group, an affect permeating many chapters of this Handbook, is the result in part of messages absorbed by the less, and conveyed by the more, powerful (Brashers, 2008; see Chapters 9 & 28).

Interestingly, there have been few attempts at providing comprehensive working models that capture the flavor of the diversity existing across intergroup settings (see however, Shapiro, 2010), let alone ones that are predictive or interpretively informative of the communication dynamics involved in them. This is an important challenge, as inevitably different communication processes will undergird different types of settings (e.g., experience of stereotype threats; Shapiro, 2011). Giles et al. (2010) attempted this two-dimensionally, by recourse to the permeability of group boundaries on the one hand and the amount of intergroup contact social groups endured on the other (see Chapters 13 & 14). A complementary tactic toward this end has been to distinguish groups by means of their increasing/decreasing and absolute/relative group vitalities (Ehala, 2010a, b; Ryan, Giles, & Sebastian, 1982; see Chapters 3 & 8) or their degrees of reported discrimination or victimization (Bourhis & Landry, 2008), but any cast-iron comprehensive frameworks seem a way away.

In the meantime and subsequent to this Prologue, readers will be let loose among the intricacies and depths of a panoply of very contrastive intergroup settings. Yet, these settings should not be considered as discrete empirical and theoretical silos that are confined to the particular context being studied. Rather, and this may be one means in the long run of developing a unique intergroup communication theory, readers are encouraged to hold on to any constructs, phenomena, and processes found in a given setting and to apply them innovatively to other intergroup situations where they may be invisible, yet nonetheless may be highly pertinent; stigmas and stigmatization would be cases in point (see Rintamaki & Brashers, 2010). This, of course, raises the critical ideological specter and debate as to whether theories should be trans-contextual (e.g., SIT) and/or whether they should take account of, and be embedded within, the specific intergroup settings analyzed (see Chapters 4–6).

This chapter then, freed to an extent by the shackles of theoretical dogma (see Taylor, King, & Usborne, 2010), will explore ways in which communicative practices can transcend particular intergroup settings—and the academic niches that can attend them (see Chapter 23)—in forging, creatively maintaining, blurring, and even obliterating group boundaries. In what follows, kaleidoscopes of intergroup phenomena are explored, with a view ultimately to formulating a modest yet unique set of Principles of Intergroup Communication at the conclusion of this chapter.

Marking Group Identities Communicatively

The range of behaviors intricately related to intergroup identities are, as we shall see, vast. As child readers of Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches, some American readers might remember that seemingly trivial markers—in this case mythical creatures separated from each other by having stars on their bellies or not—can be socially meaningful (see also the “tribes effect,” Shapiro, 2010). Written before the main parameters of modern intergroup theory were being concocted (1961), Seuss’ work can be construed as implying a set of intergroup observations, three of which will be highlighted.

First, group identities need to be marked communicatively. Although there is a decided focus on how language cues are social markers (see section below), it will be shown in this chapter how social identities can be marked by various non-linguistic means, such as in music (Giles, Hajda, & Hamilton, 2009) and dance (Dingfelder, 2010), buildings, clothing (see below), and so forth. Predictably, the communicative markers of dominant groups command social and political capital. Accordingly, subordinate groups will gravitate to or accommodate dominant groups’ communicative habits—sometimes monitoring mainstream media as models toward this end (Somani, 2010)—so as to be accepted as bona fide members of them (Gallois, 2008; see Chapters 2, 16, 17, & 25). The ways of doing accommodation work—variously termed forms of assimilation, individual mobility, and acculturation—involve multiple levels of communication (Giles, Bonilla, & Speer, 2012; Jasinskaja-Lahti & Mähänen, 2009). The recent provocative and publicized reports of clinics for so-called reparative therapy in the Unites States, where gays can seek help in shedding their homosexual identities and behavioral inclinations, would be a case in point (see Stolberg, 2011). Gays not wishing to “come out” have to adjust their eating practices, hand movements, gait, dress style, word and other vocal and nonverbal choices (for caricatures of this, see the movies The Birdcage, 1996, and In and Out, 1997), making this a quite stressful and foreboding exercise.

Laser eyelid surgery aimed at Asian Americans, alongside cosmetic surgery for older adults (see Chapter 17), are other procedures of nonverbal communicative accommodation as they can influence how people are categorized and reacted to. Interestingly, a number of scholars have recently pointed to the use of accent as being evaluatively more important, even for very young children, in forming impressions of others than other social factors, including race (e.g., Rakić, Steffens, & Mummendey, 2011). Hence, accent mobility can be a very successful means of becoming a bona fide member of an outgroup. However, such accommodative movements need not necessarily always be in the direction of the dominant group; indeed, sometimes this is impossible. Hence, many lower caste Hindus in India converted to Christianity until, in Tamil Nadu province in 2002, such acts were outlawed.

Second, making accommodative moves in the direction of a dominant group can blur communicative boundaries between subordinate and dominant. In other words, too many others speaking the ingroup code (see the language of numbers below), despite any prevailing ideology of meritocracy, will dilute a differentiating boundary for a dominant outgroup. If sufficient numbers of the subordinate group can, or are allowed to, achieve this multiply-complex task, it can creatively mobilize the dominant group to respond, retaining their communicative privileges by proactively amending their ingroup communication practices (by new evolving pronunciations, vernaculars, etc.); the group boundaries are thereby restored. Interestingly, such accommodative moves will emerge if subordinate group members believe they only have even a 2% chance of assimilating successfully (Wright, Taylor, & Moghaddam, 1990). In reality, the few that manage to crash through the so-called glass ceilings are often used as tokens: “they” climbed the ladder, how come you can’t!? Interestingly, dominant groups can also commandeer prized communicative properties of other groups (e.g., Whites adopting the Black handshake and rap music), thereby diluting their unique artistic innovations. In addition, it is telling that the process of becoming a U.S. citizen is called “naturalization”; in some ways then, immigrants are induced to feel this hallowed status makes them somehow more “natural.”

Third, subordinate groups will continue the incessant “accommodative cycle” until such time (sometimes quickly, at other times taking centuries) as they believe “enough is enough,” with little ultimately having being achieved for their groups’ status. This may emerge when group members come to the conclusion that it is almost extraordinary that they have achieved so much performatively on some dimensions (perhaps in sport, entertainment, and/or culturally) given oppressive measures of the dominant group. Leaders who are vocal, communicatively competent, and have failed to pass into the dominant group despite their efforts and energy (Taylor & McKirnan, 1984; see Chapter 28) may call a rhetorical halt to such accommodative activities among their group. Such leaders may have come to realize that their failure to be accepted as a member of the dominant group was due to their group, and not to their individual, attributes; in fact, acquiring more and more qualifications will not assist their aspirations much at all until t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Contributors
• Part I Prologue
• Part II Diverse Approaches
• Part III Communicative Phenomena and Process
• Part IV Social Groups and Communication
• Part V Applied Domains and Communication
• Part VI Epilogue
• Author Index
• Subject Index