1.7 A Conceptual Paradigm for Business Communication across Cultures

1.7.1 Disciplines Involved

A detailed research on paradigms for cross cultural business communication and international business communication reveals that there is only one study which puts forward a paradigm from the perspective of business English training and study in Japan（Kameda, 2005）.The model just roughly indicates that international business communication is a study involving with business activities including transaction and management, linguistics study in semiotic, general semantics and applied linguistics, and human science in cultural anthropology, psychology and information science. However, it is disappointed that the study does not discuss in detail how these disciplines are related to the communication process in diverse cultural context. It just points out that international business communication is a multidisciplinary study which involves the above mentioned disciplines.

1.7.2 Variables selected

The initiator of intercultural business communication is the business strategy that an international corporation adopts. Of course, such business strategies should never violate the legal regulations of both home and host countries. Driven by the international development strategy the sender of the message may think about how to encode the strategy into messages using the mindset defined by his/her native or domestic culture. Such consideration involves in with strategic intention and culture implications to produce a clearly defined messages.

Yet if this message can be correctly understood by the business partner in other cultures, it is necessary to choose language prudently to encode the message in the clear and understandable form so that the business partner can understand the message as expected even he or she is thinking in other culture context and using a different language. Therefore, the sender should be very wary of the language chosen and have a reasonable control of the culture implications which the language used embodies.

Inevitably, the sender of the message should well command the relations between the culture and language. When receiving the message his or her partner decodes the message by destructuralizing the language used, reads the culture implications using the thinking framework offered by his or her own native culture, and finally reads the strategic intention of the sender's company.

There appears naturally the misunderstanding due to the difference culture mindsets and languages barriers. Conflicts in cultures and barriers in languages application are all the noise and obstacles a cross cultural business communicator should overcome. Overcoming these conflicts and barriers is the first step to understand the strategic intention of the sender's company. If the strategic intention has been understood perfectly as the sender expects, the communication is effective and efficient. The receiver of the message can therefore undertake researches on the strategic intention and make relevant responses. Based on these researches the receiver may encode these responses into messages using the thinking framework offered by his or her native culture with his or her native language. Then he or she may send them to the sender. When received by the counterpart of the business partner, and correctly understood by the sender of the source message, the first round of communication process has been finished, and the problems in question may be solved or need further discussing .

In sum, the variables that should be included in the paradigm are business strategies, national culture, language and legal regulations. These variable work together to perform effective marketing, advertising and negotiation in multicultural context.

1.7.3 Constructing a Conceptual Paradigm for Business Communication across Cultures

By incorporating all these direct environmental factors together with communication elements into the process of communication, the author structures a conceptual paradigm for business communication across cultures as is indicated in Figure 1.2. This model serves as a framework for the whole book and thus defines the theoretical borders of business communication across cultures.

Following the conceptual paradigm developed herein, the study on business communication across cultures is theoretically consisting of the subsequent components. The first part of this book deals with basic theories on contextual elements of cross cultural business communication. This part is composed of seven chapters. Chapter one develops a conceptual framework of cross cultural business communication through reviewing the literature, develops a conceptual paradigm for cross cultural business communication and arranges different divisions of this book. Chapter two deals with strategies of organizations. Chapter three deals with culture, organizational culture and communication strategies. Chapter four covers languages, cultures, and intercultural communication strategies. Chapter five develops a language strategies for business communication across cultures. Chapter six constructs a paradigm for encoding and decoding messages in business communication across cultures. Chapter seven discuses discourse structuring strategies for cross cultural business communication.

The second part of this books discusses the application of these theories developed in the first part to carry out two business functional activities, i.e., marketing and advertising communicating strategies in the paradigm. It consists of two chapters, i.e., Chapter eight focuses on cross cultural marketing communication. Chapter nine concentrates on cross cultural advertising communication. Cross cultural marketing and adverting communication is the preliminary steps to undertake market entry strategies to export products into global, regional, and foreign countries markets. The third part consists of only one chapter, i.e. Chapter ten, which discusses cross cultural negotiation communication, a special kind of communication leading to encoding the international business agreement. See Fig. 1.2.

Fig. 1.2 A Conceptual Paradigm for Business Communication across Cultures