Cross- cultural Communication This page intentionally left blank

Dictionary (2005) 
64
4.3 Examples 
of 
Franglais 
67
4.4 
Examples of ‘faux amis’ 
67
4.5 Examples 
of 
Hinglish 
70
4.6 Examples 
of 
Strine 
71
4.7 
Examples of American English 
72
5.1
Non- verbal communication 
90
5.2 
The culture gap 
95

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6.1 Main interest groups involved in foreign assignments 
99
6.2 Development of cultural awareness 
101
6.3 Likely ‘stressors’ 
112
6.4 Full culture shock cycle 
122
7.1 Challenges facing twenty- first- century leaders 
126
7.2 Requirements of an international manager 
128
7.3 Primary leadership dimensions 
135
8.1 Summary descriptions of Belbin’s Team Roles 
144
8.2 Multicultural meetings – critical areas 
150
9.1 Cultural aspects affecting negotiating 
164
9.2 Assessment of cultural influences 
170
9.3 Fundamentals of negotiating 
172
9.4 Confucian loyalties 
184
10.1 Characteristics 
of 
ethnicity 
196
10.2 Problem areas facing immigrants 
198
11.1 Globalization: 
driving 
forces 
211
11.2 Top Fortune Global 500 2011 companies 
213
11.3 ‘Glocalization’ 
219
12.1 Instruments 
of 
cultural 
diplomacy 
228
12.2 Building 
national 
images 
230
13.1 Profile of the effective aid adviser 
245
13.2 Barriers to the transfer of skills and knowledge 
247
13.3 Model of effective transfer 
255
14.1 Types of cultural profiling 
261
14.2 Framework analysis: UK/USA example 
270
15.1 Learning 
outcomes 
284
15.2 British 
proverbs 
285
15.3 The ‘young lady/old lady’ 
291
List of Figures vii

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viii
Foreword
A leading article in the Financial Times on 25 August 2012 neatly sums up a 
major theme of this timely and well-researched book – the potential for mis-
understanding provoked by a failure to acknowledge subtle differences in 
interpretation in the way in which language is used as a mode of proficient 
communication across culture boundaries in business, politics and related 
fields. ‘I was only trying to help’ must be among the six words most feared 
in any language. The Japanese have a rather more refined phrase for unwel-
come favours: arigata meiwaku. This literally means ‘thank you for your 
trouble’, but carries nuances along the lines of: ‘I didn’t want you to do that 
for me, in fact I tried to avoid having you do it, but you were determined 
to do me a favour and went ahead anyway, and now it’s caused me a lot of 
trouble but social convention dictates that I express gratitude.’
This elementary but nonetheless revealing example is a product of ‘ culture 
shock’, which the authors define as: ‘When we enter a foreign culture and 
have difficulty in understanding or predicting why people in that culture 
behave in ways different from how we behave in our own culture, we feel 
cut off from familiar patterns of behaviour when all the nuances or shades 
of meaning are suddenly no longer there to give us support, the rules are 
unclear and we do not know what is appropriate or inappropriate.’
One of the many explanatory definitions of culture shock is: ‘Culture 
shock is what happens when a traveller finds himself in a place where “yes” 
may mean “no”, where a fixed price is negotiable, where to be kept waiting 
in an outer office is no cause of insult, where laughter may signify anger’ 
(Alvin Toffler). Similarly, Kalvero Oberg, who coined the phrase during his 
field work in Brazil in 1958, stated: ‘Culture shock is brought on by the 
anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social 
behaviour when living in a foreign country’ (Kalvero Oberg, ‘Culture Shock: 
Adjustment to New Cultural Environments’, 1960).
True, in the heyday of Western imperial penetration and economic domi-
nance, colonial officers, corporate representatives, diplomats, explorers and 
missionaries (all examples of professionals who engaged with the outside 
world) were expected to cope as best they could. Plunged into societies 
profoundly different from their own, they nevertheless had the confidence 
(at least in public), indeed the arrogance, to believe that their particular 
beliefs, administrative systems and religious convictions were superior to 
the local version and they had a mission (in some cases God-given) to 
promote Western values and ways of doing things.
Ideological commitment allegedly made up for any private misgivings 
or difficulties of adjustment to unfamiliar circumstances. Culture shock 

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there may well have been, but it was in many cases borne stoically. At least 
writers of the stature of E.M. Forster in A Passage to India and George Orwell 
in Burmese Days got it right by probing beneath the facade of ceremony, 
public duty and the ‘stiff upper lip’ to expose contradictions in the imperial 
mission. (Incidentally, Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant is, in my view, 
perhaps the best comment on the contradictions between private doubt and 
public duty in imperial rule.)
I do not wish to denigrate the lives, indeed the achievements, of those who 
served in various outposts in remote parts of the Empire. Often, for example, 
a District Officer in the Colonial Service was responsible for single- handedly 
administering a territory the size of Wales. All he had to rely on was his 
legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects (although that proved to be a wasting 
asset) and administering a justice according to a local version of the rule of 
law. He was often lonely, cut off from base for long periods, but the great
majority so placed coped with the ‘shock of the new’ with admirable forti-
tude. Some, such as those described so well in Philip Mason’s monumental 
study The Men Who Ruled India, became authorities on the local culture, 
making a significant contribution to our understanding of distant societies.
Yet the retreat from Empire in the 1940s and 1950s meant that countries 
like Britain had no alternative but to rely on trade and investment in dis-
tant parts. Businessmen and diplomats alike had to do business with their 
newly independent and confident opposite numbers, although it took some 
time before the incentives and constraints governing success in this context 
were recognized. It was all too easy in the immediate post- war period to 
believe that those sent out on economic or political missions to African and 
Asian states would adapt without too much difficulty to life in a different 
culture, the social and economic mores of which might well have been 
alien in tone and substance. Those interested may well consult Ralph Furse’s 
(aka Acuparius) account of his seemingly eccentric technique for picking 
likely candidates for the Colonial Service in the 1930s and 1940s.
In time, however, the impact of culture shock on those sent abroad 
on behalf of governments and major corporations was recognized, along 
with how best to cope with it, to manage its challenges and to create the 
appropriate responses to generate success rather than failure. To this end, 
how to survive, indeed how to prosper in an alien culture, had to rely less 
on an inherited tradition of behaviour or word of mouth, or – if they were 
fortunate – to sit, as some in the early post- war period did, at the feet of 
scholars such as Marjorie Perham at both Oxford and Cambridge where 
special courses were designed for
would- be colonial civil servants. This 
would never do today in the world of psychometric tests and the like, but 
it seemed to work well enough. Subsequently, an academic industry devel-
oped in the 1960s and 1970s and thereafter designed to help those who 
went to work abroad and whose adjustment to local circumstances would 
not be easy.
Foreword ix

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The business schools have been crucial in this context, producing a body 
of teachers and scholarly researchers who recognize that those sent abroad 
by their companies or governments have to have some prior understanding 
of what to expect, how to behave without giving offence and how to bring 
the enterprise to a satisfactory outcome that is mutually acceptable to all