“That’s a reputation we have”: Interaction, and categorization in intercultural communication

Donald, S. (2023). “That’s a reputation we have”: Interaction, and categorization in intercultural communication. New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.59690/kw15368

This paper investigates how two interactants in a podcast about stand-up comedy employ social categories as a discursive resource to interpret and explain the behaviours of particular members of cultural groups as representative behaviour of the group as a whole. Adopting Membership Category Analysis (Sacks, 1992) to illuminate how social categories establish and perpetuate identities in and through talk, findings reveal that rather than being resisted, social categories are utilized in ongoing talk as a device for achieving and maintaining interculturality between interactants. This study adds to extant literature on interculturality by delineating how social categories are utilized in this process and how interculturality is discursively constructed when social categories are invoked and used to describe the actions of members of a cultural group.

Keywords: Cultural stereotypes, intercultural communication, Membership Category Analysis