INTRODUCTION

The surge of interest in language-based research over the past fifteen years or so has underlined the increasing importance of language study to both the social sciences and the humanities. The ‘linguistic turn’ so evident in the 1970s and 1980s shows no sign of receding in the 1990s. A significant aspect of this interest has been the emergence of business discourse as an identifiable, if developing, field of study. Practitioners as well as academics have clearly begun to recognise that ‘talk’ in its broadest sense is central to the conduct of business at all levels and that there are in existence a number of definable sub-generic types of business discourse, e.g. negotiations, meetings, service encounters, some of which have been studied much more frequently and intensively than others (negotiations) and from different perspectives. Among the disciplines which have contributed methodological approaches and theoretical constructs to the analysis of discourse in work settings are, in particular, organisational communication, negotiation studies, conversational analysis, ethnography, discourse analysis, applied linguistics and pragmatics.

Coupled with the emergence of business discourse as a field of study has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of international business and the economic, social and political significance of multinationals and what is commonly referred to as globalisation, including the massive worldwide growth of the tourism and travel industries. Although cross- cultural business communication is hardly a new phenomenon, what is relatively recent is that both ‘scholars and practitioners are increasingly becoming sensitized to the fact that cultural factors heavily influence management practices’, as Limaye and Victor (1991: 281) point out in their review of the state of cross-cultural business communication research along with their ‘hypotheses’ for the 1990s.

This heightened sense of cultural awareness takes a number of different forms. On the highest level, it refers to national, or even pan-national, cultural perspectives, i.e., Western vs. Eastern ‘world-views’, North American vs. European, Southern European vs. Northern European, Japanese vs. Hong Kong. Hofstede's (1980) attempt to link the attributes and work- related attitudes of managers with national, international (or both) dimensions of cultural patterning and predispositions (masculinity, individualism, power/distance, uncertainty avoidance) has been enormously influential, though clearly the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede are not the only possibilities.