week 10

This week we learned about the communication accommodation theory, which is a socio-psychological tradition. According to Griffin (2009, p.388) that accommodation is the "constant movement and toward or away from others by changing your communicative behaviour." Its a theory of intercultural communication that actually attends to communication.

Communication accommodation theory is when two people of different ethnic or cultural groups interact, they tend to accommodate each other in the way they speak in order to gain the others approval. This theory analyzes how a persons social interaction converges and diverges according to their forms or styles of speech. Under certain cases, speakers are driven to change their speech style in order to fulfill identity expectations. During intercultural interactions, people who see themselves as unique individuals, will change their speech style and content to mesh with others whose approval they seek. People who want to strengthen a strong group identification will interact with those outside the group in a way that focus attention on their difference.

There's two strategic forms of communication used to interact with diverse others, which is convergence and divergence. Griffin (2009, p.389) defined convergence as the "strategy of adapting your communication behavior in such a way as to become more similar to another person." It's where a person adapts there way of communicating to others by being more similar to them. Another way of converging, when communicating a person with a huge generation gap is by discourse management. Discourse management is the sensitive selection of topics to discuss. Convergence includes meeting the emotional needs of another and it is seen as expressing a desire for social integration. 

Then there's divergence, in which Griffin (2009, p.389) defined as " a communication strategy of accentuating the differences between yourself and another person." Divergence main aim is to promote the social distance. There's three types of divergence; Counter-accommodation, over-accommodation and under-accommodation. Counter-accommodation is the direct way of maximizing the difference between two speakers. Over-accommodation is "demeaning or patronizing talk; excessive concern paid tp vocal clarity or amplitude, message simplification or repetition." (Griffin, 2009, p.391). Lastly, Under-accommodation, also know as maintenance,  is where a person "sticks" to his or her original communication style, ignoring the other person communication style. 

There's different motivation for convergence and divergence. The main motivation of convergence is the desire for approval. Before the motivation of divergence is explained, the social identity theory has to be explained first. According to Trenholm and Jensen (1991, p.115), "when we conform to standard roles and rules, we are taking on a social identity defined by and borrowed from society." In other words we communicate not as an individuals but as representative of groups that define us. Divergences occurs as the result of when the communicator need for individuality. 

Initial orientation is the willingness of a person to focus on either their individual identity or group identity. There's five factor that impact on the understanding of a conversation as an intergroup encounter. First is the collective cultural context, where its the difference between collectivistic and individualistic culture. Then we have the distressing history of interaction.If the previous interactions was negative, both interactant will blame each other for the cause of negative interactions. If it were positive, they'll ascribe the results to themselves instead of others.

Next we have stereotyping, if one of the people has a bad image in a group, a divergent type of communication strategy to this person with bad image. Fourth is Norms or expectations for treatment, where        Griffin (2009, p.393) define norm as the "expectations about behavior that members of a community feel should (or should not)  occur in a particular situations." In other words, what a member of a group expects from a member from another group affects whether he/she should be seen as an individual or as one of "them". Finally is high group solidarity and high group dependance.

For this theory, I am going to use when Tarzan met Jane as an example. Tarzan is a man of the jungle and Janes is a women from the city, they come from different cultures. When Tarzan met Jane, Tarzan spoke in a way so that Jane could understand him. This is what you called convergence. When Jane speaks, Tarzan started to copy her. This shows that Tarzan is trying to adapt to Janes communication style, even though Tarzan is copying everything that Jane said.





Reference:

Griffin, E. (2009). A first look at communication theory. (7th ed.). Glencoe, IL: McGraw Hill.


Trenholm, S. and Jensen, A. (1991). Interpersonal Communication (2nd Ed.). California: Wadsworth Publishing Company.