Business Culture And Intercultural Business Communication

Globalization has accelerated its pace in the21stcentury. Due to the relativelylow cost in resources, more and more investors start to set their foot on Chinese land,especially the costal areas. As a matter of fact, intercultural business communicationbecomes inevitable. Admittedly, intercultural business communication research isnew, but most of them focus on the cultural aspect, for instance, how culturaldifferences affect the business communication, and few attempt to look into thebusiness context or the corporate culture’s role in intercultural businesscommunication. This article uses an alternative method—discourse analysis—toobserve how business context and corporate culture affects the intercultural businesscommunication in the actual working place. It turns out that business and corporateculture, especially the business practices, minimize the negative influence of nationaldifference in intercultural business communication. The shared practices and sharedobjectives help the participants to get better communication results. Moreover, whenbusinesspeople from different cultures communicate, a transactional culture is alwayscreated to reduce cultural misunderstandings: the transactional culture could be a newculture, or the shared sessions or even the combination of the culture involved.