Research on intercultural communication: a critical realist perspective

Abstract

Research in Applied Linguistics in general, and intercultural communication and learning in particular, has been greatly influenced by poststructuralist and postmodern thinking. In the attempt to overcome the legacies of essentialism and structuralism, investigations and academic discussions concentrate on local, discursive constructions of identity and meaning-making processes. Criticality in research from these perspectives revolves largely around the deconstruction of essentialist categories such as ‘self’ and ‘other’ or ‘culture’ and ‘language’, by revealing hybridity, mixing, and heterogeneity of multilingual and multicultural encounters. More recently, though, these perspectives have been criticized for their exclusive focus on micro-aspects of communication and the tendency to marginalize the effects of more durable social structures and relations (Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012; Zotzmann & Hernandez, 2013; O’Regan, 2014). The present article explores an alternative philosophical perspective and the insights it can provide: Critical Realism (CR), as developed by Roy Bhaskar (1979, 1986) and further elaborated by Margaret Archer (1995, 1996, 2003) and Andrew Sayer (1997a, 1997b, 2000) among many others. Critical Realism moves from normative critique, i.e. critique of representations and categories, to explanatory critique, i.e. attempts to capture the interaction between the embodied self and agency of individuals on one side, and structures as ‘the enduring, affording and constraining influences of the social order’ (Sealey & Carter, 2004, p. xiii) through a stratified ontology on the other. It can thus foster a more critical theorization of the forces at play in instances of intercultural communication and learning

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