Follow the Experts: Intercultural Competence as Knowing-in-Practice

This chapter explores individual intercultural competence as an enacted capability developed through social interaction and experience with dominant local cultures and minority cultures. The authors employ a knowing-as-practice perspective, following Nicolini et al. (2003), and notions of tacit knowledge within particular domains (Sternberg et al., 1995), to suggest that the study of intercultural experts has potential to inform this area of knowledge. From this perspective, examining practice repertoires used by expert actors can provide a useful complement to cultural intelligence frameworks (Thomas & Inkson, 2004, Earley, 2002) for understanding individual intercultural competence. Drawing on emerging literature on biculturalism, this chapter introduces an approach to researching intercultural knowing-in-practice through a focus on one type of experts, in this case, a group of young, bicultural Canadians. The authors found emotionand behavioral-based themes that informed these experts’ responses to intercultural scenarios, their responses to proposed in-situ practice. From the findings, the chapter suggests that management can learn about intercultural competence from such experts’ approaches to navigating intercultural conflicts. Suzanne Gagnon McGill University, Canada Pamela Lirio EDHEC Business School, France