It is highly desirable for students aiming for a career in international business to develop intercultural competence and awareness during their education. Not surprisingly we find a multitude of courses on cross-cultural communication in business schools over the world. However, the learning experiences and outcomes of these courses, seen from the students’ perspective, are largely unknown. Higher education is more socially, ethnically, and culturally diverse than ever. How do business students cope with this diversity when trying to develop intercultural competence? How does it affect their understanding of their own cultural identity? Assuming identity is a social construction, not an inherent quality, this paper investigates the cultural dimension of students’ “identity work” during a course in cross-culture communication in business. A qualitative analysis of over 200 self-reflexive answers to the question “what have you learnt about your own cultural identity”, indicates that students develop essential intercultural competence in and through their identity work. It seems as the harder they work to make sense of their cultural identity, often in conflict with alternative cultural identities, the more complex reasoning on all kinds of cultural issues they become capable of. This leads to the suggestion that teachers should include assignments, exercises, and questions to engage students in self-reflexive identity work to improve the students’ intercultural competence and awareness.

Authors:
Tomas Nilsson, Linnaeus University, Sweden

About the Presenter(s)
Tomas Nilsson (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Sweden. His expertise is in storytelling, rhetoric and organisational communication. Currently he is researching identity work in higher education.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasnilsson/

Additional website of interest
https://lnu.se/en/staff/tomas.nilsson/

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