Twenty-First Century Engagement : A Socially Networked Cultural Quotient

The present paper is presents for interactive discussion and analysis the utility of a new calculus devised to address IQ measurements’ failings. That is, an internationally-conceived “cultural quotient”, or CQ, will be set forth that has been proposed to measure the “intercultural awareness” that apparently both inheres in general human intelligence as we understand it and that also counts as important in our increasingly common, if not obligatory, “socially-mediated” global dealings in business, politics, and society. What follows comprises a tri-partite discussion of the quintessential CQ and the four features usually said to characterize it, particularly as it is “socially mediated” online in the business arena where it has been most often exploited: First, a brief, research-based overview of social media use from societies around the world will be offered as a cultural backdrop, if not background, for intercultural interaction. Second, four features characterizing (inter)cultural intelligence and its measurement via CQ will be suggested that have been defined most succinctly by Livermore (2010): Drive, knowledge, strategy, and action. As they are presented, these features of CQ will be put to an “international communicability test” (Egros, 2013). And then and ultimately, discussion will demonstrate that Livermore and Egros’s findings and propositions from international business dealings can be locally recruited in electronic social networks to analyze and explain typical communication conundrums in the culturally mixed learning communities that illustrate today’s educational environment