Society and Culture - "Good intercultural skills are the hey to effective intercultural communication.

Interacting with different cultures on a day to day basis is such a normal event that very few really know how many different cultural rituals and traditions are active in today's society. Many people naively assume that people from different cultures accept and perceive things the same way as they do, when in actual fact westernised 'rituals' such as shaking hands is not considered polite in countries such as Japan. Intercultural skills are skills needed for the effective intercultural communication. Intercultural communication occurs when one culture interacts with another culture and is forced to contend with it. It can be defined as a representative, interpretive process in which people from different cultures share a common means. Intercultural communication can be linked to the concepts of authority; different cultures vary in the way they handle relationships between those with authority and those without. Power and how power is interpreted and disputed within different cultures...