Contextualized Communication as a Path to Multicultural Understanding and Collaboration

This chapter reviews the recommendations within this book for creating culturally inclusive communication climates. Focusing on the Interactive Model of Contextualized Communication, all of our propositions ultimately speak to the center of the model, maximizing the zone of overlap wherein communicators’ culturally normative communication styles are acknowledged, respected, and adapted for the sake of communication effectiveness and shared understanding. The sender’s intention and the receiver’s interpretation are more likely to be in sync, the more deeply they each understand the cultural context of the other and the message, relationship, time, and space contexts in which the signal was encoded or decoded. Such effective communication can be the seedbed for finding common ground and collaboration.