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A selected section of a TED Speech about the living challenges an Italian faced in Norway. [By Pellegrino Riccardi]

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Kirilova, M., & Angouri, J. (2018). You Are Now One of Us – Negotiating ‘Fitting in’ in the Workplace. A. Creese & A. Blackledge (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity (pp. 345–360). Routledge.

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Our group chose a text from Pellegrino's TED speech on cross-cultural communication (14:43–18:10), where an Italian in Norway is fined for parking too close to a crosswalk. Influenced by his Italian background, he expected to negotiate the fine, but the Norwegian police strictly enforced the rules. This highlights cultural differences in rule-following and communication between Italy and Norway. We will explore how context, identity, power relations, belonging, politeness strategies, and stereotypes shape this interaction event.

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Narrative inquiry is a method to analyze individuals' experiences through their narratives (Clandinin, 2006).

William Labov's narrative model contributed to revealing how the contexts in which the narrators were situated affected their experiences (Johnstone, 2016). Additionally, Labov's framework helped to understand the identities narrators tried to construct through narratives, especially in the speaking narratives (Labov, 2013). Therefore narrative inquiry can help researchers  comprehensively understand the personal experiences under the transcultural communication contexts.

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Summary: (No)

Context:Pellegrino is an Italian with living experiences in Norway, and engages in addressing a parking violation with Norwegian traffic police.

Complicating action: The Narrator used persuasion skills to negotiate the rule with the police for avoiding the fine resulting from parking violation. The Police used humor to reject his appeal.

Evaluation: Pellegrino uses humor to acknowledge Norwegians’ strict adherence to the rules which have no possibilities to be negotiated.

Result of resolution: Pellegrino failed to persuade and received the fine.

Coda: Pellegrino recognized that people from different cultural backgrounds tended to perceive and address the same events differently.

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Power relations & “Fitting in or Belong"

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Power relations & “Fitting in or Belong"

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Pellegrino’s story shows the interaction of rights in different cultural contexts. His past experience as an Italian tells him that he was able to escape the penalty of a ticket from the Norwegian traffic police by negotiating. This reflects a more flexible, relational value of power in his subconscious. However, the Norwegian traffic policeman strictly followed the “roles in society emerge because of institutional conventions.” (Bowe & Martin, 2019, p. 118) This asymmetry of rights due to cultural differences illustrates precisely “the acceptance or challenge of power asymmetries differs across these latter cultures.” (Bowe & Martin, 2019, p. 124)

Because Pellegrino was lived in Italy, preferring to negotiate his way out of parking problems as he used to, as he belonged to the past rather than ‘fitting in’ and moving forward. So, he got the parking ticket due to irregularities in Norway, which is a new and unknown country for him. This shows that “the stronger the drive to ‘belong’, the more invested the processes of fitting in in a new field and a transformation in one’s way of being.” (Kirilova & Angouri, 2018, p. 355)

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The power relationship and institutional role reflect a hierarchical face system in this situation, which affects the politeness strategy used in communication. The key factors that influence politeness strategies in interactions are power (P), social distance (D), and the weight of imposition (W) (Scollon, Scollon & Jones 2012).

In this scenario, the Oslo Traffic Police hold more power (+P) , while keeping social distance (+D) is crucial to maintain the formal structure of the administrative interaction. Pellegrino adopted an independent face strategy to negotiate with the police, as the lower-status participant applied polite language, making his request in a non-imposing manner.

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Stereotypes are defined as beliefs about a group of people (Kanahara, 2006), and in modern society, stereotypes are often seen as a negative social phenomenon (McFarlane, 2014). However, this text presents and explores the positive aspects of stereotypes in dealing with interpersonal relationships and communication.

In this text, when Pellegrino, an Italian, negotiated with the Norwegian traffic police after being fined, the Norwegian traffic police judged that the person he was talking to was an Italian by virtue of his name and accent. Based on the stereotype of the Italian culture, that is, Italians love football culture, are good at talking, and are humorous, the Norwegian traffic police chose to communicate with the same humorous tone and text descriptions related to football crossing the line. Both the choice of content and ways of the conversation, the Norwegian traffic officer's feedback impressed Pellegrino, and he was happy to share them with the audience.

Therefore, this scene shows that using positive stereotypes in communication scenarios of different cultural backgrounds allows both parties to communicate information efficiently, enhance understanding and interact harmoniously, even if they're not in the process of understanding each other more fully (McFarlane, 2014).

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1.How does the power difference between the narrator and the police impact the narrative style? Would the ending change if they had equal power?

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Please kindly provide your comments and feedback.

Thank you!

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Interplay between the context, identity and experience

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Interplay between the context, identity and experience

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Ineffectiveness of Pellegrino’s behaviors to persuade the Oslo Traffic Police and the police's incapacity to respond to his question can be explained by different and incompatible expectations around social rights and obligations between Italians and Norwegians. The social right and obligation were social conventions which involved the appropriateness driven from particular cultures (Nguyen, 2023).

The behavior of using speech's power to persuade the police reflects Pellegrino’s Italian identity. Moreover, speaking English and actively reporting parking issues to the police as a way Norwegians typically did reflected Pellegrino’s attempts in identity negotiation. It was aligned to the context that he was influenced by multiple nations' cultures. It revealed identity’s  fluid and dynamic natures (Canagarajah, 2010).

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2.Based on your experience, how do language choice and politeness strategies affect the effectiveness of trans-cultural communication?