IDRInstitute Directors

He is now an adjunct professor of intercultural studies in the Department of Sociology of the University of Milano Bicocca in Italy and has also taught in the graduate programs of the University of Switzerland in Lugano, Peking University Summer School in Beijing, China, and Carinthia University of Applied Sciences in Villach, Austria.

Dr. Bennett is the author of Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication: Paradigms, Principles, & Practices (Intercultural Press USA, 2013; Peking University Press China, 2012; Franco Angeli Press Italy, 2014), co-editor and contributor to the third edition of The Handbook of Intercultural Training (Sage, 2004), co-author (with Edward Stewart) of the revised edition of American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Intercultural Press, 1991), a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations and a reviewer for several other professional journals. In addition, he is the author of over 75 other articles and chapters on intercultural competence and global leadership for American and European publications.

He is well-known for his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, which is used internationally to guide intercultural training design and to assess intercultural competence. In 2006 he founded the Intercultural Development Research Institute (IDRI), whose mission is to sponsor new theory and research in intercultural development, to formalize a developmental approach to intercultural adaptation, and to inform public discourse with scientific study of intercultural relations. IDRI operates in the USA and in Italy. http://www.idrinstitute.org

Through Bennett Intercultural Development, LLC, Dr. Bennett creates and conducts programs in domestic and international diversity for corporations, universities, and other organizations. He addresses high-potential managers and executives of global corporations and university faculty in the U.S., Asia, and Europe on topics of global leadership and the development of intercultural competence for themselves and their organizations. He has been on the teaching faculties of the Tuck School of Business of Dartmouth University, the Smith College School of Business, the Boeing Leadership Center, Motorola University, Telenor Corporate University, and the Stockholm School of Economics. He currently is an associate in the Global Leadership Program (USA & India), which conducts an innovative personal development subscription series.

Dr. Bennett is a founder of The Intercultural Communication Institute (ICI), a non-profit educational foundation that has operated in Portland, Oregon USA since 1986. During his directorship at ICI (1986-2013), he was instrumental in developing ICI’s master’s degree in intercultural relations (in conjunction with the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California) and the annual Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC), the field’s longest-lived professional development program. He is also a founding fellow of the International Academy of Intercultural Research.

Dr. Castiglioni graduated summa cum laude with a laurea (4 yrs) in Political Science from the University of Milano and holds a Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). In addition to her work at the university, Dr. Castiglioni is a therapist with a Masters Degree in Somatic Psychology and a Certificate in Clinical Counseling. She is an adjunct faculty member of the Institute of Somatic Psychology in Milano (IPSO).

In her intercultural consulting work, Dr. Castiglioni conducts programs for both corporations and public institutions. She has worked with corporations in Europe, Africa, the Russian Federation, NIS, and the United States, and she has been involved in several European Union projects, including the design and facilitation of intercultural training sessions for the Manager’s Training Programme (MTP 1 and 2), the largest internship program ever sponsored by the European Union, which has brought almost 2000 managers from Russia, NIS countries, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Mongolia to seven European countries. She has conducted a large research and training project in the development and assessment of intercultural competence for social services and healthcare, sponsored by the Province of Milano.

Dr. Castiglioni has served on the Board of Directors of Sietar Europa (The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) and Sietar Italia. She is a fellow of the International Academy for Intercultural Relations (IAIR). She currently is a founding director of the Intercultural Development Research Institute (IDRI), whose mission is to sponsor new theory and research in intercultural development, to formalize a developmental approach to intercultural adaptation, and to inform public discourse with scientific study of intercultural relations. IDRI operates in the USA and in Italy.

Her most recent book is Constructing intercultural competence in Italian social service and healthcare organization (University of Jyväskylä Press, 2013). Dr. Castiglioni is known for the best seller: La comunicazione interculturale. Competenze e pratiche (Carocci Editore, Roma, 2005), and she has written La differenza c’è Gestire la d:iversità nell’organizzazione dei servizi (Franco Angeli, Milano, 2009). She is also the Italian editor of the translated version of Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication (M.Bennett, (ed)., FrancoAngeli Press, 2002 and its revised edition, Paradigms, Principles, & Practices, 2014) and the author of several articles on intercultural topics in Italian and in English.

Dr. Yamamoto majored in English at Kansai Gaidai University, and in her junior year, she studied abroad for one year at Pennsylvania State University. After graduation, she went to Portland State University, where she studied with Dr. Milton Bennett and received the master’s degree for her research through a DMIS lens on Japanese students’ intercultural experiences in the U.S. Dr. Yamamoto received her doctorate from Sophia University with a dissertation on how Japanese members in Japanese majority organizations perceive their interaction with non-Japanese coworkers.

Her current research interests are centered on intercultural sensitivity and the development of intercultural training methods. Her research specifically focuses on DMIS, using both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine how Japanese people perceive, interpret, and express their experiences of difference. Based on the results of previous studies, recent research includes the development of a Japanese psychological scale for DMIS. She has also developed a training method to use the items of this scale qualitatively: a co-construction between the learner and the theory that re-organizes past intercultural experiences to create a new narrative, utilizing the items that project each stage of the DMIS.

Dr. Yamamoto’s is the lead author (with T. Ishiguro, M. Bennett, & D. Okabe) of a new book to be published in 2022 with the English title Experiencing Intercultural Communication: Growing Up With “Difference”. The book (in Japanese from Sanshusha Press) is intended for Japanese high school and undergraduate university students to explore their own intercultural experiences from a constructivist, developmental perspective.