Chapter 3 The Fixed-Traits View of Culture：A Critical Analysis

.A cultural paradox in contemporary intercultural communication research.Foreign Languages in China，11（3）：85-90.]（in Chinese））

As mentioned in Chapter 2，the field of intercultural communication originating in the US began to lean toward the social scientific，objectivist functionalist research paradigm in the 1980s partly because of the need to establish disciplinary status in the broad field of communication studies.This scientific turn has had a profound influence on the development of the field to this day.Given the fact that functionalists see the social world as composed of“knowable empirical facts that exist separately from the researcher”and study human behavior using a natural science approach，culture is generally viewed as“a stable variable defined by group members（usually on a national level）”（Martin，Nakayama，&Carbaugh，2012：21）.This variable is characterized by pan-cultural traits distilled from cultures’static essences and orderly characteristics.Although this view generally falls on the structural-functional category as outlined in the previous chapter，I term it“fixed-traits view”to distinguish it from other structural and functional conceptions.In the following sections，we will examine the nature and paradoxical existence of this specific view of culture.