CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter will enable you to:

GLOBALISATION AND INTERCULTURAL BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

In the context of globalisation, talk of intercultural communication has become ubiquitous in contemporary business communication and the importance of preparing business graduates for communication in the global village has become a truism; ‘intercultural communication’ and ‘globalisation’ are often mentioned in the same breath. However, ‘globalisation’ is no more clearly defined than ‘intercultural communication’ (see Chapter 1). To make this slippery concept in intercultural business communication amenable to a coherent account, I draw on a pithy staging put forward by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (2006) in his bestselling book about globalisation, The World is Flat. There, he distinguishes between three stages of globalisation: Globalisation 1.0, which he says was driven by countries internationalising; Globalisation 2.0, which was driven by companies internationalising; and Globalisation 3.0, which is driven by individuals internationalising themselves. I will therefore organise this chapter around three different phases in intercultural business communication, which coincide rather neatly with Friedman's phases of globalisation. As I demonstrated in Chapter 2, the emergence of the field of intercultural communication studies dates from the 1940s. Researchers were initially focused on comparing the communicative styles of nationals of different countries and, on the basis of those comparisons, making predictions about actual interactions. This phase could be called ‘Intercultural Business Communication 1.0’ and its most influential author is the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede, whose large-scale comparisons of a small set of five cultural values in different countries continue to inspire research in intercultural communication even today. In the 1980s a new focus started to emerge and researchers began to investigate communication in international corporations.