Revisiting intercultural communication competence: Where to go from here

This short essay is a reflection and assessment of 25 years of scholarship on the important topic of intercultural communication competence. The essay acknowledges significant theoretical contributions to date, including the 'ABC' (affect, behaviors and cognition/knowledge) triumvirate of most current models and describes three suggestions for future theoretical research: (1) move beyond individual-focused, reductionistic models to frameworks to capture a more holistic, relational, and spiritual view of intercultural communication competence. (2) Move from a focus on national culture groups that are presumed to be homogenous, and from an implicit conceptualization of culture as bounded and stable to conceptualizations that acknowledge the fluid, dynamic, contested nature of cultures, multiple cultural identities, and intercultural interactions and (3) acknowledge that power relations are part of every intercultural encounter. Looking forward, the essay proposes a dialectical approach - emphasizing the ongoing, processual, the both/and (contradictory) - that allows for a complex, dynamic, historically- and contexually-situated conceptualization of intercultural communication competence.