Professional Communication in International Settings
- written by Yuling Pan, Suzanne Wong Scollon, Ron Scollon
PREFACE
The globalization of activities in business, government, marketing and even entertainment has made us aware of how interconnected our world now is. But globalization has also made us aware of how fundamentally different we are in different nations, cultures, and even organizations. This book has been written to help individuals and organizations deal with professional communication when communication takes place across the frontiers of international, organizational, and even interpersonal relationships.
While the international world of communication is based on uses of common technologies of communication, we are all still participants in very different cultures, societies, and organizations. A technology such as the mobile phone, for example, is used very differently in Finland and in Hong Kong. Other books which address cross-cultural communication or, as we prefer to call it, intercultural communication, focus on how communication works when two or more people from different groups are in communication with each other. In our own books we take this approach. For example, in Scollon and Scollon’s Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach (Blackwell 2001, revised edition), which is addressed to both researchers and students in the field who are primarily interested in the analysis of intercultural communication, we lay out the theoretical groundwork for understanding how communication across cultural and social boundaries works. Pan’s Politeness in Chinese Face-to-Face Interaction (Ablex 2000) focuses more specifically on how different situations within a single cultural group, Mainland Southern Chinese, are very different from each other and how, therefore, we must not make broad analytical categories such as ‘the Chinese’ or ‘North Americans’ in doing intercultural analysis.
Our focus in Professional Communication in International Settings is more practical. Here we are writing for the individual or organization that wants to begin to learn directly how to be a better communicator when engaged in professional work in international settings. This book grows out of research projects which were undertaken by the authors together with several other
