Intercultural Incompetence: A Case Study on Systematic Culturalizations of Interpersonal Interaction

A common way of knowledge transfer about foreign culture particularities is the use of critical incidents. Generated by an empirical way of investigation or just taken from personal experiences, these stories contain interactions between co-participants with different cultural backgrounds indicating misunderstandings. Supposing that these communicative failures are repetitive, the authors provide reasons for the misunderstandings, usually referring to the value systems of the countries in play. Doing so, these nations are provided with specific cultural generalizations. In this article, the process of generating general views on a specific culture – in this case Mexico – by the means of interactional descriptions will be retraced. The authors illustrate in a step-by-step procedure, how linguistic and interactional problems are not attributed to different linguistic conventions (called “pragmalinguistic avoidance chain”) but explained by differences in the value system. Using this kind of fundamental error of attribution, the outcomes of critical incidents become highly questionable and with it the benefits of critical incidents as a learning tool for acquiring intercultural competence.