At an intercultural communication conference not long ago, I heard a speaker comment that globalization was rendering the concept of cultural difference invalid. Some weeks later, during a reunion with a friend who had just completed an 18-month trip around the world, I asked about this assertion. My friend commented that to find cultural difference you have to 'get off the internet and get on a bus'. He went on to argue that often the intercultural contact we have in our 'global village' doesn't amount to us having 'intercultural experiences'. While globalization may bring diversity into our living room, we usually aren't required to adapt to it in any significant way. Even meeting people from other countries can be a relatively shallow experience if we don't need to change much about ourselves in order to get along. Living or traveling abroad, however, implies that we are obliged to go through a process of learning to function better in our new environment.

The distinction my friend made – that intercultural contact is not the same as intercultural adaptation – is important for understanding the goals of this book. It will look at the process of cultural learning that sojourners go through as they learn to function in a new cultural environment. Currently, an ever wider range of people are facing this challenge; whether as an expatriate employee, a student studying abroad, a volunteer working for a non-profit organization, a round-the-world traveler, or even as a tourist in a resort hotel. This book will argue that despite the wide variety of intercultural experiences, those who enter into a new cultural environment go through a learning process that is fundamentally similar, sharing a common need to respond to the adaptive demands found in their new environment. In facing these demands sojourners learn not only about their new surroundings but they may learn deeper, at times even transformative, lessons as well. This book will introduce a theoretical model to make sense of this process.