Advancing Research in International Business Communication

The ability to compete in an increasingly integrated world economy is arguably the most pressing issue business must address as the current century draws to a close. Virtually no area of business has grown as rapidly as global trade. With this increase in global business activity, however, comes an equal challenge since business behavior and practices often differ radically from one culture to the next. As a result, the need to understand cross-cultural differences has become an important area of research interest in many business fields, ranging from marketing to personnel management to information systems. That cross-cultural study has grown to be a major area of interest in business communication is thus predictable. What has been less clear, by contrast, is how business communication researchers can best develop information useful to the practice of international business. This essay attempts to offer advice in that direction by suggesting that business communication scholars avoid the compilation of "how-to" guides and instead direct their efforts toward developing empirical and conceptual studies in international communication. "HOW-TO" GUIDES As interest in international business communication has increased, a plethora of "how-to" guides have been published. Together, these books (along with their accompanying articles and presentations) are interesting. Arguably, their numerous anecdotes may prove valuable, for example, to the professor trying to humanize the subject for undergraduate students. Still, the serious researcher should avoid such guides. The simplistic approach of these "how-to!" guides poses a certain danger to the reader uninformed as to the complexity of intercultural cominunication. Lists of "do's" and "don'ts", while amusing and even factual, nonetheless create more difficulties than they help overcome by oversimplifying cross-cultural communication. They tend to reduce significant behavior to the level of trivia. It is true, for example, that singing after dinner is popular in Korea. Yet to reduce Korean business culture to the need to brush up one's singing technique risks reducing Korean business culture to something quaint. Worse yet to businesspeople who limit their perception of Korean business to the importance of after-dinner song, a misleading sense of understanding and false confidence can easily foflow. Even if extended to three dozen "do's and don'ts," no list could be comprehensive enough to ensure that, as a foreigner, one would understand enough of the culture to decipher one's own experiences. CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH NEEDS Although business communication needs no more "how-to" guides, it does need serious research. First, the practice of global business would benefit from the dissemination of well-balanced systemic approaches to international business communication. Second, the field as a whole lacks currently an adequate volume of significant empirical research. Because so many more variables are at play in international business communication than in domestic business communication, new paradigms are needed to provide the conceptual framework needed for researchers and practitioners alike to ask the right questions in the first place. As indicated in the existing literature (Limaye & Victor, 1991), the prevailing linear paradigms for communication models in Europe and North America are culturally limited. The best of those models which allow for greater variables (Bowman & Targowski, 1987; Korzybski, 1958) do not specifica!ly address cultural variables. Haworth and Savage (1989) devised a channel-ratio model especially for intercultural communication but limited their approach to a single variable. The ground-breaking conceptuahmtion efforts of Edward T. Hall (1959; 19176; 1983) did much to bring the area of intercultural communication into its own as a field of research. Yet Hall, while the first to recognize and define the key cultural differences of contexting and temporal conception in intercultural communication, does not attempt to create a comprehensive cross-cultural communication model and does not specifically deal with business communication. …