A Study On The Communication Styles Based On English Business Emails From An Intercultural Perspective

With the rapid expansion of globalization and profound development of reformand opening-up policy, intercultural business communication as a subject is nowviewed as a new challenge in both Chinese foreign trade companies and multinationalcorporations. Email as one of the e-communication mediums has been recognized asthe most effective and widely used tool in intercultural business communication,between businesspersons who are not in the same countries or regions. However, onaccount of different cultural value orientations, the different use of communicationstyles is reflected in business emails directly, which may cause misunderstanding andunpleasant feeling that leading to work decrement and even damage of businessrelationship in the future. Thus, how to differentiate and analyze the communicationstyles in intercultural business emails from cultural value perspective, is becoming asignificant reference in intercultural business communication.The method of content analysis is applied in this thesis. All the30completebusiness emails are collected from a sales personnel who is working in a foreign tradecompany, and the business counterparts are from other countries or regions, includingAmerica, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Hong Kong and Arab countries.Each email consist of several correspondences adding up to341sub-emails. Thetheme of these emails is covering most aspects in the process of foreign trade, such asbuilding up relationship, counter offer, shipment, letter of credit, complaint, refundand compensation.A comparative study of business emails is conducted according to the fourdifferent communication types raised by Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey, in the light ofHall’s cultural context and Hofstede’s value dimensions theory by using contentanalysis method.It is concluded that Chinese businesspersons have identity with their counterpartin communication. Meanwhile, differences exist due to the influence of differentcultural value orientations. Three other cultural factors are observed as the influentialelements in business email: power and decision-making, guanxi, focus on harmony.