Milton J. Bennett

Intercultural Development Research Institute (USA & ITALY)

This white paper is a conceptual summary of a think tank discussion sponsored by The Forum on Education Abroad. Following the traditional use of “white paper” as a call to action in specific contexts, this paper defines the contexts of programming for education abroad and for domestic diversity education and argues for an incorporation of their dif...

In contrast to the epistemologies of scientific management or organizational systems, a newer constructivist paradigm treats organizations as a web of coordinating relationships. This chapter uses that meta-theoretical perspective to describe how organizations can develop the collective capacity to adapt to changing social conditions both internall...

In this chapter, I define cross-cultural contact and intercultural learning in relationship to the three major scientific paradigms. In their original physics forms, the paradigms are generally referred to as Newtonian, Einsteinian, and Quantum (Briggs & Peat, 1984; Kuhn, 1967). In their social science form, I refer to the paradigms as positivist,...

This article reflects on the criticism of intercultural communication as being more interactive than relational—a criticism justified, it argues, only for some of the conceptual diaspora of intercultural communication found in business schools and commercial intercultural training. In its original academic home of communication theory, intercultura...

This collection spotlights the impact of hate violence on individuals and communities as well as how people form biases and are indoctrinated into hate groups, why they participate in violent hate crimes, and how hate may become extreme. This book details the solicitation and indoctrination of members into extremist hate groups. Using theoretical,...

Current assessments of intercultural communication competence are mostly positivist measurements at an individual level of analysis. This article describes the development of a group-level assessment that uses constructivist methodology and “quantum measurement” to indicate Intercultural Viability—the probability that a group can adapt to unknown f...

Once upon a time, an international student started a 3-day work shadowing in a community setting. At the end of the first day, the community supervisor refused to work with the student stating that the student was uninterested, because she didn´t ask any questions! The student was shocked and said that she was really interested. She thought it was...

Classic statement of the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. An update of Towards Ethnorelativism

Changing national boundaries, migration and mobility, multinational residence, and the cross-border flow of refugees are challenging traditional views of citizenship. The term “intercultural citizenship” is coined to refer to a definition based more on affiliation with a cultural group than on legal ascription to a nation state. The implications of...

Intercultural communication training (ICT) is the primary application of intercultural communication theory, the study of cross‐cultural interaction at a group level of analysis. The tactical form of ICT uses culture‐general (etic) observational categories to contrast one's own to other worldviews and identify cultural differences that matter for c...

Constructivism is an epistemology in which knowledge and experience of the world is constructed, not discovered. When intercultural communication is understood in these terms, culture is a dynamic process of collective meaning‐making and intercultural communication is the conscious exercise of empathy with alternative worldviews. This is the constr...

The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) created by Milton J. Bennett is a grounded theory based on constructivist perception and communication theory. It assumes that the experience of reality is constructed through perception, and that more complex perceptual categories yield more complex (sophisticated) experience. Specificall...

This report is meant to summarize the discussion themes introduced in the Fellows Day session of the 9th Biennial Congress of the International Academy of Intercultural Research held in Bergen, Norway June 28, 2015. The report also attempts to summarize some of the participant comments made during the session. Because it is a report and not an orig...

Today, the importance of intercultural competence in both global and domestic contexts is well recognized. Bennett (1986, 1993b) posited a framework for conceptualizing dimensions of intercultural competence in his developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (DMIS). The DMIS constitutes a progression of worldview “orientations toward cultural...

The article by this title is unavailable and is supplanted by the uploaded one, Becoming Interculturally Competent....

The development of Intercultural sensitivity demands attention to the subjective experience of the learner. The key to such sensitivity and related skills in Intercultural communication is the way in which learners construe cultural difference. This article suggests a continuum of stages of persona! growth that allows trainers to diagnose the level...

The Golden Rule enjoins us to treat others as we would like to be treated. But inherent in the Rule is an assumption of similarity: that others are like ourselves and therefore want to be treated similarly. Essential similarity implies a single, absolute reality, and such thinking is the foundation of ethnocentrism. The Golden Rule leads us to a sy...

If you do not already think so, the articles in this volume will convince you that study abroad has changed. At the university level, it has transcended its history as a "grand tour" for the leisure class and the more plebian "junior year abroad." Now university study abroad encompasses massive mobility of students among European Union universities...

Se presenta un análisis de los patrones culturales norteamericanos introduciendo comparaciones transculturales y recurriendo a la investigación sobre sistemas de valores, en psicología de la percepción, antropología cultural y comunicación intercultural.

Thesis (M.A.)--San Francisco State College. Bibliography: leaves [126]-128.

Thesis--University of Minnesota. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-198).