Cross- cultural Communication This page intentionally left blank

Fons Trompenaars
Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner were teachers at 
Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton Business School, where they developed 
a series of continua based on their observation of management practices 
around the world. By placing countries at different points along a con-
tinuum, they avoided the rigidity of a scale of 100. This allowed for greater 
flexibility of interpretation, which can be seen to fit better the notion of 
intercultural awareness as a perceptual art rather than as a strict discipline.
Trompenaars’ work was carried out over a
ten- year period and was in 
many ways a similar study to that conducted by Hofstede, surveying 1,500 
managers from 28 countries and drawing on key issues in organizational 
theory in his research methodology. After setting up his own consultancy, 
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Summary
This chapter examines the views of four more selected key researchers 
in cross- cultural communication, all of whom develop findings which 
complement much of the work covered by Hofstede and Hall and Hall 
in Chapter 2:
Fons Trompenaars
John Mole
Richard D. Lewis
Milton Bennett
The chapter surveys their key theories, the advantages and limitations of 
their research, and their application to the understanding of the effects 
of culture on communication.
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48 Cross-Cultural Communication
the Centre for International Business Studies, Trompenaars wrote a seminal 
book, Riding the Waves of Culture, in 1993 based on his 15 years of academic 
research. This was one of the first books to focus attention on managing 
cultural diversity and its aim was to dispel the notion that there is ‘one best 
way’ of managing and organizing. In it, Trompenaars shows how cultural 
differences affect business life and management, and emphasizes that we 
should be wary of the dangers of trying to force our own management style 
on other cultures. There are many examples of the problems that can result 
from doing this, particularly in the case of International Joint Ventures 
(IJVs) and Western involvement in developing nations.