Understanding intercultural relations with the tri-dimensional acculturation model for majority members

The world is facing a rapid increase in global immigration due to the globalization of business activities, internationalization of higher education and humanitarian crises, among other factors (United Nations 2020). In the context of a new society, it is worth noting that many migrants take on the status of minority group members due to their (perceived) ethnic, cultural and linguistic markers and, as such, experience lower power status in comparison to cultural majority group members (e.g. white English nationals in England; Giles et al. 1977). This power imbalance tends to give rise to increased pressure on minorities to adopt the majority culture rather than for majority members to accommodate towards minorities. Against such a background, research within the fields of cross-cultural psychology and intercultural communication has paid much attention to issues such as how minority members experience changes in their cultural identity, values and behaviours to better fit into the majority culture (e.g. Berry 1997; Luciak 2006). However, this focus has been rather one-sided, expecting cultural change to occur solely for minority group members (Spencer-Oatey and Dauber 2019). Moreover, approaches that claim to recognize the bidirectional process of cultural adoption between majority and minority members fail to actually do so (e.g. Deardorff 2006; Horenczyk et al. 2013). Yet, recent research suggests that bidirectional cultural adoption does indeed take place, with consequences for majority members’ well-being, everyday functioning and intergroup relations (i.e. globalization-based proximal-acculturation; Haugen and Kunst 2017; Lefringhausen and Marshall 2016). Thus, ignoring a two-way perspective of cultural adoption does limit our theoretical understanding not only of cultural exchange but also of pedagogical practices within intercultural education that are based on these theoretical paradigms....