Making Sense Of Intercultural Miscommunication : A case study on Project Clean Uluwatu

Abstract: This study looks into the field of intercultural miscommunication and misunderstandings on small multicultural Non Profit Organization (NPO) seen from the expats point of view. It is a study based on a qualitative method-design, including a micro-ethnographic study and qualitative interviews on a small NPO on Bali, Indonesia called Project Clean Uluwatu (PCU) that contain volunteers from all over the world. These misunderstandings and miscommunications that occurred on PCU was mostly between local people born on Bali and foreign people working on PCU, due to many reasons, starting with the rapid pace of globalization and that culture don’t evolve in the same speed. Plausible explanations for this, that are raised in this thesis, is that people make sense of events in different ways, especially if the individuals within a misunderstanding belong to both a high context culture and a low context culture and aby that communicate in different ways. This thesis also explain them through Karl Wieck’s sensemaking perspective by applying 7 properties that describes how individuals make sense out of miscommunication by perceiving the event in different ways due to individuals former knowledge, their intentions and own identity.