Business-Related Stereotypes

Neil Payne, a culture specialist, stated (Quest & Lakhani 2004), ‘You could say that business is business in the West, and business is personal everywhere else.’ Through her simplification and stereotyping, the complex issue of business culture seems to be easily tackled down. However, the oversimplified generalization between the East and the West ignores the great influence of times progress, regional variations and diversified corporate cultures on the intercultural business communication. Without practical relevance, her argument is clearly untenable.

To start with, against the backdrop of growing economic globalization, the business in the East and the West has changed drastically with the times. Intercultural studies asserted that people from Western and Asian cultures are likely to misunderstand each other (Samovar & Porter, 1997). The East-West stereotype is more or less influenced by Payne’s static cultural worldviews (Said, 1978). In effect, the all-pervasive cultural fusion caused by globalization has narrowed down the differences between the Eastern and the Western business cultures. According to Hall’s notions of low-context versus high-context (1959), Shenxin Import & Export Co., a Chinese local company, was a high-context communicator since it used to establish close, personal relations with its business partners before they actually made the deal. However, after the introduction of cost-saving accesses to foreign suppliers and buyers, like web meeting and conference call, the time-consuming face-to-face communication is abandoned quickly while effectiveness and efficiency are deeply appreciated by the management. The new way of business communication adopted by Shenxin demonstrates the significant feature of a ...

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...an and American companies also faced significant culture clash. A lesson from this case is that if a company, no matter in the East or in the West, expects to set up close relations with other corporations, it must be cognizant of the cultural backgrounds of its counterparts.

To conclude, the generalization, ‘Business is business in the West, and business is personal everywhere else’, may facilitate the rudimentary understanding of the complex intercultural business communication, but it cannot hold true under all circumstances. Taking business-related stereotypes for granted is dangerous since there are always individual exceptions. Therefore, experienced businessmen should be able to employ measured intercultural generalizations at first and then move on to construct a more nuanced picture in the cross-cultural communication when dealing with business affairs.