This address critically examines two paradigms that historically characterised inter-racial relations in South Africa. The (mis)application of intercultural communication concepts during apartheid to manage labour relations is contrasted with the contemporary use of ubuntu, a purportedly unique African concept that promotes the communitarian idea of human interconnectedness. Both concepts are critiqued as forms of inclusion/exclusion. Power, usually absent from discussion of either practice, is here injected into the analysis. Some thoughts on crime as a uniquely Western paradigm are offered. The argument shows how language and intercultural communication concepts can fail in the academy when they are used to promote essentialist agendas, including the claim that crime is a Western paradigm. The paper concludes with some thoughts on cultural studies, drawing on the above context, as manifested in the 2015 Intercultural Communication Studies Conference organised by IAICS and CAFIC.

“Intercultural new media studies” is said to be the next frontier in intercultural communication (Shuter, 2012). The present paper will first review the realm of intercultural new media studies that attend to the structures and patterns of new media usage and critique how well the methods and findings in the existing literature have attempted to achieve the aims of understanding new media communication across cultures. Afterwards, the paper will present two significant approaches in sociolinguistics, i.e., Variationist Sociolinguistics and Interactional Sociolinguistics, detailing the assumptions and methods of these two approaches, and discuss how they can be well utilized and integrated with the advances in the communication discipline so as to contribute to our further understanding of new media communication that takes place across cultures.

This study examined college students’ privacy concerns and impacts on their Twitter usage behaviors. By employing an online questionnaire, this empirical research tested the predictive power of privacy management variables on Twitter usage among college students from a large public university in the United States. This research developed its research hypotheses from Communication Privacy Management Theory (CPM). Regression analyses concluded that Control and Boundary Rules of Private Information on Twitter significantly predict daily minutes spent on Twitter accounts. However, the same CPM variables did not predict college students’ other Twitter usage behaviors (e.g., weekly inquiries and total months of using Twitter). The other two CPM variables, Permeability Rules and Linkage Rules of Private Information on Twitter, did not predict college students’ Twitter usage behaviors. Theoretical implications were discussed.

The present study has attempted to examine the construction of corporate identities on social media across differential ownership in China. Two Chinese banks, the Bank of China (BOC) as representing the state-owned bank and the China Merchants Bank (CMB) as representing the joint-equity bank, have been selected for the study as they are epitomes of the enormous corporations of diversified ownership currently engaged on social media. A dialogic framework of corporate identity formation has been developed with an integrated sociolinguistics approach which draws upon thematic analysis and conversation analysis to investigate the common and differential means the BOC and the CMB have attempted to construct their corporate identities and how the followers of the banks have co-constructed their corporate identities on Sina Weibo. The findings have indicated that despite similarities, there are significant variances in the proportion of the corporate identities projected and in the interaction patterns of the followers’ co-construction of the corporate identities between the two corporations with diverse economic ownership.

This paper employs an ideological analysis to explore the ideas, norms, and practices of motherhood as portrayed in two popular TV series: The Good Wife and Hot Mom!, produced in America and China, respectively. Hot Mom! situates Chinese mothers in the context of the ever-growing expectations assumed by China’s rising middle class. In contrast, American-style motherhood in The Good Wife speaks to the “having it all” fantasy of the “supermom” by acknowledging women’s personal success as well as their dedication to motherhood. By analyzing motherhood myths portrayed in the two series, the author finds that popular portrayals of the Chinese motherhood emphasize three aspects: 1) compromising efforts by young mothers in their families, 2) the increasingly higher standards for young mothers, and 3) less emphasis on a mother’s personal success. Despite cultural differences, however, both series place women in a position where they still have to be rescued by men, and their value is at least partially derived from the attention they receive from men.

This book aims to provide a systematic introduction and explanation of a Chinese paradigm of discourse studies (CNDS hereafter). It is composed of two main parts together with a preface, an introduction and an epilogue.