Cross- cultural Communication This page intentionally left blank

Territoriality (space)
We can talk about space and culture from two perspectives:
space around people, that is, territoriality in general; and
space between people – often called proxemics – our personal ‘space bub-
ble’.
This is a further area of cultural difference described by the Halls and 
is the name they give to those visible and invisible boundaries people 
place around themselves, at work and in their social life. This can, for 
example, be seen in the use of either private offices with closed doors 
(often preferred in Germany) or open- plan office layouts (as in Japan or 
China). In some cultures, senior personnel usually have their offices on 
the top floor.
Territoriality also concerns our own personal space, the ‘space bub-
ble’ that surrounds us, in which we feel most comfortable and which 
we claim as our own, almost as if it were an extension of our own body. 
Human beings are essentially territorial; they tend to define their space 
and protect it. For example, in the UK, our home and garden are often 
bounded by fences and we have our favourite chair or seat at a confer-
ence table. We put up signs such as ‘private, no trespassing’, ‘keep off the 
grass’ and ‘meeting in progress’. On a much larger scale, international 
examples have included the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the 
Berlin Wall.
As a result of their research, the Halls discovered the following points:
A high correlation between monochronic and low- context cultures, and 
polychronic and high- context cultures.
The higher the context of either the culture or the organization, the more 
difficult the interface.
The greater the cultural distance, the more difficult the interface.
The comparison can be further outlined as in Figure 2.3 below regarding 
how people think and behave.
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Key Thinkers in Cross- Cultural Communication (1) 29
Geert Hofstede
Geert Hofstede’s seminal research is the most commonly cited of all the 
cultural theorists in the field and has justifiably had the most influence on 
the understanding of the effects of culture on human activity. From 1967 
to 1973, he conducted research as an industrial psychologist into national 
cultures at the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation in Arnhem 
in the Netherlands. Using international employees from IBM, he collected 
data from a large sample (117,000) from 40 countries in which he compared 
the answers of the IBM employees to the same attitude survey research con-
ducted in different countries. In 1983 he collected supplementary data on a