Competence in building intercultural relations: Case study insights into the development process

Abstract

The effective building of relationships across cultures is of central importance in today’s globalising world. However, although it is identified (either explicitly or implicitly) as a key element of intercultural competence (e.g. Griffith and Harvey, 2001; Gudykunst, 2004; Spencer-Oatey and Franklin, 2009) in a number of models, and various process steps for developing it have been proposed, there have been few qualitative studies that have examined its development at a detailed level. This paper addresses this lacuna of research by reporting an in-depth empirical study of a group of Chinese government officials who visited the USA for three weeks, with the explicit aim of ‘building relations’. It explores the Chinese participants’ experiences from a ‘developing competence’ perspective.