Intercultural Conflicts In Business Communication Between China And America

Because of the economy globalization, more and more joint-ventures and foreign-owned corporations are set up. The business activities involved provide a platform for more intercultural communication. Intercultural conflicts in business communication are unavoidable. Unlike other kinds of conflicts, intercultural conflicts have their own characteristics. As they involve two cultures, the influence of them is more significant as well.By studying the cases, this thesis discusses the intercultural conflicts in business communication between the Chinese and American cultures in the aspect of intercultural pragmatics. First, the writer tries to describe the characteristics and significant influences of intercultural conflicts between the Chinese and American participants. In this part, the writer introduces the cultural dimensions offered by Geert Hofstede. Secondly, after finding that there is no systematic method to categorize the intercultural conflicts, the writer tries to offer a new and more comprehensive categorization, so that it can provide a more systematic method the study of intercultural conflicts. In order to achieve this goal, the writer borrows the idea of register from Halliday. The reason why register is needed is because register is determined by contexts, which play a crucial role in communication and somehow determines people's communication styles. Thirdly, on the basis of the new categorization, this thesis then studies the causes of the intercultural conflicts in business communication between the Chinese and American participants in several contexts as viewed from pragmatics. Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle are used to analyze intercultural communication because they are closely related to social contexts. This thesis tries to study the causes of the intercultural conflicts by analyzing these two principles and meanwhile considering the cultural dimensions, especially individualism and power distance.The case studies in Chapter 6 the thesis shows that the different expectations of cooperation and politeness in the Chinese and American cultures are the major causes of the intercultural conflicts and of the different conflict resolution styles. Based on the conclusion, the thesis finally tries to offer some suggestions for effective intercultural conflict management in business communication in Sino-American settings.