“The team members were very tolerant”: social interactional ideologies and power in an intercultural context

1 Introduction

Every one of us entertains some expectations and ideals of what social interaction will look like when it is good. These ideals are reflected, for example, in the ways in which we explicitly instruct our children to behave when interacting with others – that is, how they should listen to what others are saying, learn to wait for their own turn to speak, keep calm and constructive and not use aggressive and offensive language. These ideals are also reflected in the ways in which people construct their accounts of past interactional experiences, highlighting their successful or less successful features.

The ideals of social interaction become particularly pronounced in contexts of intercultural communication, as the ideals are likely to differ across communities. In the field of interactional sociolinguistics, particularly in the work by John Gumperz, mismatches in intercultural communication have been examined with reference to speakers relying on contextualization conventions learned in their primary socialization (Berger and Lückmann 1991 [1966]). The notion of contextualization conventions refers to verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal cues leading the hearer to assign certain judgments of communicative intent to the speaker in the here and now of the encounter. However, as we will argue below, mismatches in intercultural communication can also occur on another level, as speakers account for their interactional experiences in retrospect and thereby implicitly distinguish ideal interactional behaviors from undesirable ones.

In this article, we examine asymmetries in speakers’ underlying ideals of social interaction. Concretely, we investigate the interpretative repertoires that German and Chinese students – home and exchange students, respectively – draw on when accounting for their experiences of participating in an intercultural game. These repertoires point to the existence of multiple parallel “social interactional ideologies” and reveal, we argue, a hierarchy that places the German students participating in the intercultural game in point into a more favorable position than the Chinese ones.

In what follows, we will review the literature on social and intercultural interaction, which will lead us to introduce our key notion of social interactional ideologies. Thereafter, we will describe our participants and our dataset, which consists of students’ written reflections on their interactional experiences in the virtual intercultural simulation game Megacities (Bolten 2015a), as well as our analytical approach, which is critical discursive psychology (Potter and Wetherell 1987). This is followed by our main findings showing the social interactional ideologies that underlie students’ orientations to ideal behaviors and ideal group features in encounters, as well as the students’ orientations to the relations between different ideals. Finally, we will suggest that these social interactional ideologies may exhibit hidden asymmetries which, in the specific context of the intercultural game in point, may promote certain perspectives while marginalizing others.

2 Social interactional ideologies

As we grow up as social beings, we experience different socialization trajectories and are exposed, on a daily basis, to normative expectations of what good and bad social interactional behaviors and encounters look like. Such ideals are further specified in various stocks of interactional knowledge (Peräkylä and Vehviläinen 2003) that professionals in various institutional contexts, such as medical, nursing, therapeutic, and counseling settings, seek to adhere to in their daily work. Most prevalently, however, the ideals of interaction are implicit in the interactional encounters themselves, in which any failure to satisfy the expectations of appropriate conduct runs the risk of becoming an accountable and sanctionable matter (Heritage 1984). Such ideals of social interaction are the air that we breathe – always there but difficult to grasp due to their invisibility. The invisibility of the ideals points to their ideological nature – something that we, in this article, seek to capture with the notion of social interactional ideologies.

While social interactional ideologies are likely to remain invisible in the course of the fleeting turn-by-turn exchanges of interaction, they can become more graspable and visible in the retrospective accounts of social events. This is the case specifically when the teller of the events has experienced them as somehow problematic. For example, a person may complain about a lunch conversation in which they have not been given the opportunity to say anything at all. In so doing, they invoke the notion of symmetrical participation as an ideal, which in this case has failed to be fulfilled. As famously demonstrated by Harold Garfinkel (1967) in his breaching experiments, when participants’ implicit expectations of appropriate interactional conduct are violated, they are effectively brought to the fore.

One key context in which actors may become heightenedly aware of the ideals of social interaction is intercultural communication. Intercultural situations have been characterized as involving unfamiliarity (Bolten 2015b [2007]). From a social constructionist perspective, individuals can be described as legitimate participants in groups ranging from activity-based gatherings – e.g., a book club – to imagined national communities – e.g., the Germans or the Chinese, with cultures of their own, i.e., conventionalized ways of thinking and acting that work as simple recipes for members’ social lives (Berger and Luckmann 1991 [1966]). Being in an intercultural situation means navigating all these contexts where the old recipe does not lead to the same results (Schütz 1944), since people in other cultures have their own recipes for navigating social life. Thus, through the analysis of interactions and interviews with key participants, Gumperz (1982, 1996) showed mismatches in so-called “inter-ethnic” communication and thereby revealed systematic power asymmetries which often go unnoticed by speakers themselves.

Interestingly, in laying out the basis for Interactional Sociolinguistics, Gumperz (1999) engaged with Garfinkel’s ideas. Gumperz (1999: 456) acknowledged that Garfinkel’s work provides evidence of sociocultural background knowledge in everyday life connected to a “deeply internalized, and for the most part unverbalized, sense of social order” (Gumperz 1999: 456). Yet, according to Gumperz, “apart from advocating that analysts resort to historical methods to trace how specific understandings come about so as to recover what types of knowledge are at work, Garfinkel gives no specifics of how interpretive processes work in everyday talk” (Gumperz 1999: 456). Thus, empirically unveiling how such processes work in everyday speech events involving speakers from different backgrounds has become the hallmark of Interactional Sociolinguistics (see e.g., Gumperz 1982, 2001; Rampton 2021). However, as Gumperz (1999: 463) himself acknowledged, speakers also rely on “ideologically based and contextually specific presuppositions about mutual rights and obligations” and “assumptions about individuals’ personal characteristics.” While these broader inferencing processes, learned largely through socialization in speech communities and networks, are considered in interactional sociolinguistic investigations, they have not been granted systematic attention in the interactional sociolinguistic methodology. Even though they are expected to be unveiled from ethnographic work with the investigated group (e.g., by conducting interviews with key informants), there are no specific guidelines on how to derive culturally-based presuppositions – not immediately visible in the form of contextualization cues – from the collected data.^[1]

We want to argue that those culturally-based presuppositions that inform the production and interpretation of people’s interactional behaviors (and which we refer to as “social interactional ideologies”) can be best examined through a fine-grained qualitative analysis of speakers’ retrospective accounts of intercultural encounters. From this perspective, our work aligns with the research on language ideologies (Gal 2023) and ideologies of communication (Spitzmüller 2022). However, with our notion of “social interactional ideologies”, we want to highlight that our target of inquiry is not limited to “language” or “communication” but extends to a broader range of phenomena, including embodied and tacit aspects of social conduct.

We maintain that a detailed analysis of social interactional ideologies that underlie and are implicit in people’s ways of talking about intercultural social interaction can point to what otherwise remains in the shadows of interculturality – that is, power relations, hierarchies, and asymmetries – some of which embedded in the discourses of interculturality themselves. In general, power is deeply intertwined with ideals. Power is a consequence of social interactional ideals, as accountability demands are systematically directed at those who deviate from the ideals (Stevanovic 2023) and freedom from such demands is a defining feature of power (Lukes 1978: 639–640). Social interactional ideals are also an outcome of power, as it is social power that has shaped collective understandings of interactional ideals in long historical processes, prioritizing the interactional skills and strengths of some people and marginalizing those of others (Weiste et al. 2024). Such marginalization in turn leads to difficulties to make publicly sense of one’s social experiences (on “hermeneutical marginalization”, see Fricker 2007). Consideration of the social interactional ideologies that underlie intercultural communication thus becomes particularly relevant in this era, where many views about what constitutes “good” intercultural interaction have come to be treated as self-evident, and in which some problematic experiences can thus become unarticulable.

3 Methods

The intercultural game Megacities, created by the German interculturalist Jürgen Bolten (2015a), has been designed as an intercultural-training intervention to help players reflect upon and develop intercultural competencies. In the game, participants get together around the accomplishment of a joint project: the creation of a development plan for an abandoned area, called the Wasteland in the game. Upon the beginning of the game, each student is randomly allocated to a city surrounding the Wasteland. Each of the three surrounding cities are tasked with brainstorming ideas for the Wasteland and later negotiating with the remaining cities to try and come up with the best solutions for the Wasteland which will, in the long run, benefit all the three cities. Thus, the tasks in the game involve brainstorming, presenting ideas, negotiating, and making decisions.

The game has been adapted for research purposes and has been played three times over the video-conferencing application Zoom as part of a course on intercultural communication. The first game took place in the summer term of 2021 while the second and third games happened in the winter term of 2021–2022. Each game comprised five sessions of 2 h each distributed over a period of five weeks. As a result of the game sessions, a database has been compiled containing more than 50 h of video-mediated interactions as well as reflection reports by 73 participants. Participants in the three games that comprise our corpus were enrolled in European higher education institutions. Out of the 73 participants, 25 were Germans and 25 were Chinese (the remaining ones were from Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Turkey, and the US). While the German participants were home students, the players from China were exchange students who were living in Germany at the time the game was implemented.

In general, the German participants were visibly more active than the Chinese students in the interactions in the game: they took the leadership within the groups, facilitated discussions, and negotiated ideas with the other groups. For this study, we focused on the reflections written by the German and the Chinese students, as those were the groups with the most representatives and also because participants themselves oriented to cross-cultural comparisons between these two imagined communities in several moments of the game (see e.g. Oliveira 2024) and in the reflection reports.^[2] The language of the oral exchanges and the reports was English as a lingua franca.

The guiding questions for the reflection reports were provided to participants after the five sessions of the game. Those were the questions: (1) How do you feel about your participation in the intercultural game?, (2) What moved/impressed you the most, personally and in the group?, (3) What situation/which moment broadened your knowledge/perspective?, (4) What do you personally take away from this experience (about yourself, about collaboration, about communication)? (5) Both your team and the whole group were very diverse: (5a) What differences and/or similarities did you observe?, and (5b) What are the advantages and disadvantages of differences and/or similarities for collaboration?, (6) What are the group’s take-aways (in learning experiences), in your opinion?, and (7) What else would you like to share as feedback?

The reports submitted by the participants had different formats, from relatively short ones – providing rather short and neutral answers to each of the questions – to longer ones – comprising reflections upon the game, culture, and interculturality as well as examples of how some experiences in the game impacted the player’s impressions of culture(s), and group dynamics among other topics. The reports were commonly written as texts, and not structured as separate answers to each of the questions. Mentions of national culture were frequently made, both in a positive and negative light; however, we deliberately chose not to include them in this article to avoid the risk of them being interpreted at face value.

Previous investigations using data from the Megacities game have leaned mostly on the analysis of the video-mediated interactions (e.g., Bolten and Berhault 2018; Oliveira 2024; Oliveira and Stevanovic 2024). While a few studies have been conducted that focused on the players’ perceptions of the game as displayed in their reflection reports, they were based on content and thematic analyses (e.g. Conti et al. 2022; Stang and Zhao 2020).

In this study, our analytical approach draws from critical discursive psychology (CDP; e.g., Edley 2001; Edley and Wetherell 1997, 2001; Reynolds and Wetherell 2003; Reynolds et al. 2007; Wetherell 1998). Critical discursive psychology is a form of discourse analysis that bridges micro-level discursive psychology and macro-level post-structuralist discourse studies (Wetherell 1998). It follows the ideas of micro-social constructionism in assuming that language use does not simply reflect reality as it is but, essentially, constructs versions of that reality (Burr 2015). In our study, we use the analytic toolkit of critical discursive psychology to look systematically into participants’ reflections on communicative situations to identify how language is used to construct the ideals of social interaction, as participants discuss their past experiences of interactions during the Megacities game. As the game is labeled as an “intercultural game” aimed at developing intercultural competencies, it is reasonable to assume that participants strive to present themselves as good students who are sensitive to cultural differences, demonstrating values associated with intercultural competence, such as openness, respect, and tolerance. At the same time, the players experienced challenges and problems which they might want to attribute to “cultural differences” circulating broadly in societal discourses. In our data set, both orientations – i.e., to “intercultural values” and “cultural differences” – were indeed observable across the dataset, pointing to a certain dilemma experienced by the players when writing about their experiences during the game: while the task prompted them to give an honest account of their interactions, which may or may not include negative reactions to “cultural difference”, the overall notion of interculturality called for a more restrained approach in this regard, based on respect and tolerance.

Therefore, we found the CDP concepts of interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas especially useful for analyzing the data. Interpretative repertoires refer to culturally shared and established ways of language use that construct a certain, generally recognizable version of some object (Gilbert and Mulkay 1984; Potter and Wetherell 1987; Wetherell 1998; Wetherell and Potter 1988, 1992). Interpretative repertoires involve “recognizable routines of connected arguments, explanations, evaluations and descriptions which often depend on familiar anecdotes, illustrations, tropes or clichés” (Wetherell 2006: 154). In other words, they are cultural resources for meaning making, and as such, part of a group’s cultural common sense (Edley 2001) or “lived ideology” (Billig et al. 1988). Interpretative repertoires are “relatively coherent ways of talking about objects and events in the world” (Edley 2001: 198), which are based on a range of linguistic resources that can be drawn upon in everyday social interactions. In addition to (spoken) everyday interactions, we maintain that interpretative repertoires can be likewise identified from (written) retrospective accounts, which in this case are about social interactional events and encounters. This is because all language use relies on cultural resources of meaning making and orientation to a need to make oneself intelligible through some conventionalized ways (e.g. Fairclough 1992).

These repertoires also invoke specific, and sometimes stigmatized, positions for the participants (e.g., Stevanovic et al. 2022), which highlights the ideological nature of repertoires: they are part of the existing social and moral order (Wetherell 2006, 2016). This lived ideology, in turn, has been argued to be dilemmatic by nature (Billig et al. 1988). Different ways of talking about things and events develop as opposing positions and may create ideological dilemmas that people reflect on and try to manage in their language use (Edley 2001). For instance, in a study focusing on interviews with Clubhouse members and staff in Finland, Mäntysaari et al. (2024) showed that participants’ opinions resort to 6 interpretative repertoires organized within 3 pairs of ideological dilemmas in relation to decision-making: participation versus efficiency; members’ passivity versus agency; and active resistance against power structures versus acceptance of power structures as partially necessary. Using CDP in an earlier study on young adults’ political participation in England, Condor and Gibson (2007) conducted conversational interviews and identified dilemmatic relations between active citizenship and liberal individualism.

Our analytic process started in a data-driven way guided by our goal of finding those interpretative repertoires on which the players draw when discussing their interactional experiences. We read the reports repeatedly, focusing on nuances and contradictions and searching for implicit patterns of language use that go beyond the mere content of the text. Our criterion for considering the possibility that a pattern constituted an interpretative repertoire was that it exhibited internal logic, coherence, and consistency. After our first extensive round of analysis, we had identified a total of 21 different repertoires. The number of repertoires used in each reflection report varied from two to nine, and we extracted the text segments related to each repertoire under a separate heading. In the next analytic rounds, we considered the repertoires critically as for their potential conceptual overlap, which led us to merge excerpts into fewer repertoire categories, and we finally grouped them into two sets: ideal behaviors, addressing social interactional ideologies around self and other, and ideal group, concerning the interactional dynamics in a group. At this point, we also further considered the inherent logic of each repertoire. As the repertoires were characterized by opposing content (such as the ideals of listening vs. being vocal), we structured them around pairs that reflected this contrast, which also allowed us to consider the possibility of dilemmatic relations between some of the repertoires. Finally, we went through the data extracts related to each repertoire, seeking to select those that represent the logic associated with each repertoire in a maximally condensed form. As some of the repertoires were more common among the Chinese students and others among the German students, we selected some of the data extracts to reflect these unequal distributions. In this article, we present the outcome of the analysis, organized with reference to the types of ideals associated with each repertoire pair.

In the following, we describe a set of interpretative repertoires, each of which rallying around a specific cultural ideal of social interaction. These ideals in turn are about how to behave in interaction and how the interactional dynamics of the group should be. As we will demonstrate in our analysis below, many of these ideals are contradictory in relation to each other, which raises the question about the existence of ideological dilemmas between them. As will be seen, we first take a more descriptive approach, and a full discussion of the possibility of hidden asymmetries in the German and Chinese students’ use of repertoires will be taken up later in the text (Section 5).

4 Findings

The table below shows the interpretative repertoires identified from our dataset, as clustered into two groups: ideal behavior (Section 4.1) and ideal group (Section 4.2).

In Figure 1, we show the distribution of interpretative repertoires per group (Chinese students vs. German students). The raw quantities were normalized to fit a common and comparable scale.^[3]

Figure 1:

Interpretative repertoires identified in reports written by participants.

While the graph provides a glimpse of tendencies within the two groups, it is the qualitative analysis shown in the next sections that provides for an understanding of nuances identified in the dataset. The coming subsection revolves around players’ repertoires dealing with ideal social interactional behavior. After that, we will look into repertoires of ideal groups.

5 Discussion

In this article, we used critical discursive psychology to examine German and Chinese students’ written reflections of their interactional experiences playing the virtual intercultural simulation game Megacities. We identified a set of interpretative repertoires, each of which rallying around a specific ideal of social interaction. These ideals have to do with behaviors in encounters and group features, which were organized in pairs with a contrasting relation between the two repertoires within a pair. The repertoires of ideal behavior had to do with the type of behavior in the here and now (listening vs. being vocal), distribution of engagement in time (prepared contributions vs. spontaneous involvement), stakes and goals of interaction (task completion vs. affective participation), and sources of participation failure (individual constraints vs. group influence). The repertoires of ideal group dynamics were related to the distribution of labor within the group (complementary vs. equal participatory roles), the nature of direction within the group (leadership as a gift vs. dominance as an obstacle), group atmosphere (group harmony vs. freedom to disagree), and the kinds of takeaways that participants got from the game (learning from others vs. learning to deal with others). While most of these repertoires may be assumed to be known and recognizable to all the participants in our data, still, the extent to, and the ways in which different groups of participants actually draw on specific repertoires in their reflections were shown to differ. In our analysis, we could observe such variation to take three forms:

First, there were trending differences in the relative prevalence of certain repertoires between the Chinese and the German students. This was specifically the case for the repertoires having to do with the distribution of engagement in time, the distribution of labor within the group, the nature of direction within the group, and the sources of participation failure. The Chinese students emphasized the ideals of prepared contributions, complementary participatory roles, leadership as a gift, and individual constraints. These ideals serve to legitimize and embody an appeal for others, not only to tolerate silence and a lack of participation by some participants in interactional encounters but also to accept interactional asymmetries and heterogeneity as a natural part of (good) interaction. In contrast, the German students emphasized the ideals of spontaneous involvement, equal participatory roles, dominance as an obstacle, and group influence. These ideals invite people in intercultural contexts not only to participate more actively but also to participate in more symmetric and homogeneous ways.

Second, there were differences in the typical ways in which the German and the Chinese students positioned themselves with reference to the ideals of the repertoires.^[5] This was the case for the repertoires having to do with type of behavior in the here and now, and group atmosphere. While the Chinese students often oriented to the ideals of listening, and group harmony as default ones and the German students to the ideals of being vocal, and freedom to disagree, some of these Chinese students’ orientations were actually about refuting the ideals associated with their own cultural group (see, e.g., Extracts 4 and 29). The German students, in contrast, oriented to the ideal of freedom to disagree as a self-evident one – something that does not even need to be argued for, let alone refuted (see Extracts 28).

The same is the case for ideals around leadership and participatory roles in the nature of direction and the distribution of labor within the group: the ways in which the German students orient to some of the repertoires as obvious and undeniable – such as dominance as an obstacle (see Extract 25) – contrast strongly with how the Chinese students display their admiration of the capacities of leadership by the German players for example, by highlighting their tolerance (see Extract 12).

Considering the ideal of complementary participatory roles, however, the implication is that the Chinese students in the game could have other capacities which might be just as valuable for effective teamwork. However, in treating non-dominance and homogeneity in participation rates as pre-conditions for successful group interaction (see Extract 21), the German students refrain from acknowledging other roles, practices, and skills needed in a team. In presenting themselves as the ones who will need to curb themselves to allow the Chinese students to participate more (see Extract 25), the German students also position themselves as the powerful ones: they are the ones to take care of the weaker, instead of just accepting the fellow players as they are. Observations such as these point to an implicit hierarchy between the ideals emphasized by the Chinese and the German students – a situation in which the ideals held by the German players come across as superior to the ones favored by the Chinese students.

Third, and finally, we may certainly assume that, in the context of an ‘intercultural game’ such as Megacities, participants are often oriented towards cultural differences (Conti et al. 2022), which may impact the interpretative repertoires that are used to account for the experiences of such encounters. However, the interpretative repertoires typically deployed by the Chinese and the German students could indeed take quite different positions toward such differences per se. This was apparent in the pair of interpretative repertoires having to do with stakes and goals of interaction. While the repertoires of task completion and affective participation were used by both the Chinese and the German students, in the German descriptions, task completion was presented as being potentially threatened by diversity. In other words, while for the Chinese players diversity is presented as key to effective group work, for the German participants, diversity gets in the way when practical goals need to be achieved. Such opposite orientations toward difference were most apparent in the interpretative repertoires of learnables, in which the Chinese students emphasize intercultural settings as a site for learning from others and the German students highlight the possibilities of learning to deal with others. In these repertoires, the role of the Cultural Other is a source of insight and a social-interactional challenge, respectively.

In this study, we attempted to shed light on social interactional ideologies which play a role in assessments Chinese and German students make of an intercultural intervention. At the same time, as we promote this argument, we are also acutely aware of the reflexive paradox of our study de facto contributing to maintaining the stereotypical East-West binary, as we have reiterated participants’ orientations to East-West stereotypes in our analysis. Our aim, however, was to contribute to interactional sociolinguistic studies by proposing a systematic approach for the investigation of social interactional ideologies in retrospective descriptions of intercultural encounters based on critical discursive psychology (e.g., Edley 2001; Edley and Wetherell 1997, 2001; Reynolds and Wetherell 2003; Reynolds et al. 2007; Wetherell 1998). Our focus was not on patterns of communication per se but various ideals of social interaction associated with distinct interpretative repertoires. Although the approach can point to trending differences in the relative prevalence of certain repertoires between different cultural groups, this is not the main point in the analysis. Instead, the main idea is that all cultures entail multiple co-existing repertoires, the relations between which can sometimes be ideologically dilemmatic (Billig et al. 1988; Edley 2001). The analysis of people’s orientations to such contrasting co-existing repertoires in turn sheds light not only on the ideals per se but on the hierarchies between them. This happens when people either explicitly emphasize the superiority of certain ideals over others or implicitly presuppose this superiority, for example, by acknowledging their own failure to live up to these ideals or by complaining about other people falling short with respect to them. Hierarchies emerge as a function of the positions that different repertoires offer for different groups of people in both long-standing discourses and situated practices. Thus, just like language ideologies, social interactional ideologies are shown to underlie politically positioned evaluations of practices (see Gal 2023).

Since the Chinese students in our dataset were exchange students in Germany at the time of data collection, the social interactional ideologies identified are embedded not only in the historically evolved discourses and stereotypes around national cultures but also in the power asymmetries deriving from home versus exchange student relations. The Chinese students were confronted with the reality of having to adapt to the host society, not only in relation to educational practices but also to various administrative, social, and political structures. Additionally, the game was developed by a German intercultural studies scholar and follows Western pedagogical principles and trends, which may have implicitly placed the German players in our dataset in a more favorable position.

Thus, we argue that social interactional ideologies may be embedded in both historical and local power dynamics, which simultaneously shape group practices. In our dataset, this interplay of the historical and the local was manifested in the pressure of accountability that fell more strongly on the Chinese exchange students than on the home students from Germany. In the students’ accounts, national cultural categories were blended with morally loaded descriptions of individual and group interactional behavior, with the opposing interpretative repertoires and their underlying social interactional ideologies placing accountability demands systematically on those who deviated from the existing ideals (Stevanovic 2023). Thus, based on our analysis, we argue that even interventions aimed at promoting intercultural competencies are not resistant to such implicit workings of power. Instead, it will be important to examine the discourses of interculturality embedded in such intercultural interventions to gain a more precise understanding of how their underlying social interactional ideologies position different groups of individuals.

In this article, we have applied critical discursive psychology to the study of intercultural mismatches, which has been a traditional target of studies in interactional sociolinguistics. By invoking the notion of social interactional ideologies, we have sought to shed light on how talk about past social events may reflect hidden asymmetries and power relations, which can marginalize certain ways of making sense of social life, while prioritizing others. In the context of this study, such asymmetries have been suggested to be an inherent part of contemporary discourses of interculturality (but see Monceri 2022; R’boul 2021 for critical reflections on interculturality). From this perspective, we also hope that our study can pave the way for future critical studies on language use – specifically in contexts in which our cultural understandings of what constitutes good and bad behavior tend to appear self-evident.