Disciplinary Approaches to Culture: Intercultural Communication

The definition of culture has a rich and varied history. The variation is seen in the hundreds of definitions compiled by a group of communication scholars led by John Baldwin in 2006. While there exist many different definitions, there are three that are currently commonly accepted in intercultural communication studies—each has been influenced by various disciplinary traditions, including anthropology, psychology, and linguistics, and most recently by critical theory and cultural studies. In fact, Edward T. Hall, the founder of the field, emphasized that the field itself should be interdisciplinary as any one discipline does not have all the answers to intercultural communication. This entry demonstrates how each definition leads to different ways of understanding intercultural communication.