Culture And Culture: Discrimination Of Culture In Business Communication

1.11. DEFINITION OF CULTURE

The term culture is considered as a subject of heated debates for having no straightforward definition. Generally speaking, speacilaists (Hofstede,1994; Matsumoto 1996: Spencer-Oatey 2008), try to explain its meaning by using a nunber of aspects such ast the way of life, traditions and customs, knowldge ,way of thinking, attitudes, beliefs of each specific member of society. Similarly, Damen, L. (1987: 367) defines it as:

…learned and shared human patterns or models for living; day- to-day living patterns. These patterns and models pervade all aspects of human social interaction. Culture is mankind's primary adaptive mechanism From another layer of analysis, Jordon (1997) goes beyond the standard definition of the term culture, making a further distinction between academic and general culture. The former, according

CROSS CULTURAL COMMUNICATION in EBE

It is worth mentioning that engaging in both spoken and written business communication is believed to be a tool to learn, deal and communicate as members of target discourse community in a bilingual or multilingual world. What is more, culture of the target language is widely seen to play a significant function for more successful interaction on the international domain and these learners are generally labeled by Soler and Safont jordà’s (2007) words as ‘intercultural speakers. Moreover, using this language is widely considered as a ‘cultural act’ (Crozet and Liddicoat 2000:2)

It is quite clear that the most fundamental reason that leads to the failure of business activity as argued in CiLT (2005) is almost related to the lack of culture-based knowledge of the specific discourse environment. Thus, being aware of the target culture is generally assumed to be a key for:

• Making Business negotiation more successful;

• Enhancing the learners’ communicative competence, skills and knowledge of the target language;

• Knowing about both similarities and differences of both