Expectations and personal cultural knowledge: Redefining Asian scholars' research efforts

This study critically analyzes race-related research with an Asian focus in selected major communication publications with the results showing that these lines of research suffer from four major problems. First, how Asians are portrayed must, for the most part, stay in line with a dominant White, dichotomous paradigm that serves to highlight the superiority of Western communication. Second, Asians tend to be studied more as a means to illustrate cultural collectivism than as members of distinct cultures. Third, Asian scholars must struggle between positioning their studies as about Asians or about specific cultural groups, and whether to avoid possible oppositional discourse. Fourth, Asian scholars writing about Asian patterns of communication must cope with the perception that they are opportunistic.