Intercultural Communication - Other Theories

Other Theories

• Meaning of Meaning Theory - "A misunderstanding takes place when people assume a word has a direct connection with its referent. A common past reduces misunderstanding. Definition, metaphor, feedforward, and Basic English are partial linguistic remedies for a lack of shared experience."
• Face Negotiation Theory - "Members of collectivistic, high-context cultures have concerns for mutual face and inclusion that lead them to manage conflict with another person by avoiding, obliging, or compromising. Because of concerns for self-face and autonomy, people from individualistic, low-context cultures manage conflict by dominating or through problem solving"
• Standpoint Theory - Is an individual experiences, knowledge, and communication behaviors are shaped in large part by the social groups to which they belong.
• Stranger Theory - At least one of the persons in an intercultural encounter is a stranger. Strangers are a 'hyperaware' of cultural differences and tend to overestimate the effect of cultural identity on the behavior of people in an alien society, while blurring individual distinctions.
• Feminist Genre Theory - Evaluates communication by identifying feminist speakers and reframing their speaking qualities as models for women’s liberation.
• Genderlect Theory - "Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication. Masculine and feminine styles of discourse are best viewed as two distinct cultural dialects rather than as inferior or superior ways of speaking. Men's report talk focuses on status and independence. Women's support talk seeks human connection."
• Cultural Critical Studies Theory - The theory states that the mass media impose the dominant ideology on the rest of society, and the connotations of words and images are fragments of ideology that perform an unwitting service for the ruling elite.
• Marxist Theory - Marxism is a theory based on Dialectical Materialism, which aims at explaining class struggle and the basis of social relations through economics.