Identity management theory (IMT) proposes that whether an interacting pair of people consists of persons from China and the United States, Nigeria and Russia, or Bulgaria and Brazil (for example), the two communicators transact a relationship using identical, and thus universal, communication strategies. Imahori and Cupach developed IMT to map the stagelike evolution of relationships between two communicators from divergent cultures. Just as Sigmund Freud argued that the structure of the human psyche is invariant across cultures, they claimed that the same is true of intercultural communication strategies, regardless of the cultural boundaries being negotiated.

This entry begins by defining IMT and then explains the difference between IMT and the Multicultural Identity Enactment Model (MIEM), which is an extension of IMT. The entry concludes with ...

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