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The languages of business. An international perspective
Book reviews / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 805-825
821
Ladd, D. Robert, 1996. Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lass, Norman J., ed., 1996. Principles of experimental phonetics. St. Louis, MO: Mosby. Laver, John, 1994. Principles of phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierrehumbert, Janet B. and Mary E. Beckman, 1988. Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Roach, Peter and Antii Iivonen, 1995. Descriptive phonetics. In: G. Bloothooft, V. Hazan, D. Huber and J. Llisterri, eds., European studies in phonetics and speech communication, 31-42. Utrecht: OTS Publications. Zsiga, Elizabeth C., 1997. Features, gestures, and Igbo vowel assimilation: An approach to the phonology/phonetics mapping. Language 73: 227-274.
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra H a r r i s , eds., The languages of business. An international perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. 257 pp. Reviewed by Flemming G. Andersen, Institute of Language and Communication, Odense University, Campusvej 55, DK 5230 Odense M., Denmark. According to the comments on the back cover, this book addresses the question "what do real people around the world actually say when they meet for business purposes?", and focuses on "how people in different parts of the world and speaking different languages accomplish business", i.e., this promises to be a study of task-oriented verbal interactions in an intercultural context. Books of this kind, not least solidly researched ones, are in great demand, in order to balance the large number of airport books, which appear to draw on anecdotal evidence only. So, as the editors rightly point out in their introduction, there is a growing interest in business language, and in particular in the international side of it from scholars and practitioners alike. The present volume, which is a collection of articles on different topics, written by scholars from different countries, using different approaches, is bound together by three sets of common assumptions: (a) a sense that cultural and linguistic differences can be identified in their business contexts, and that they matter; (b) a commitment to using real language data; (c) an attempt to bridge the gap between the academic and the professional. From this rather mixed bag of basic assumptions, the editors note that the concept of 'face' (Goffman, 1955; Brown and Levinson, 1987) and its companion phenomenon: 'politeness', 'indirection' (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) will be a recurrent theoretical construct - which, however, is true of only some of the contributions. Dealing with language use in an international perspective means that the notion of culture will also have to be discussed, and here the editors subscribe to the view that culture is the product of social interaction in concrete situations, rather than a static set of attributes, values, and norms. This is in line with the most recent view on cul-
822
Book reviews / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 805-825
tural studies - but nevertheless the editors refer to scholars such as Hofstede (1980) and Hall (1976), who imply that culture is something people 'have'. The volume is divided into three sections: Intercultural discourses, cross-cultural discourses and corporate discourses. This division naturally occasions the editors to comment on the terms 'intercultural' and 'cross-cultural', and they quite reasonably distinguish between intercultural research, which studies how people from different cultures interact, and cross-cultural research, which examines and contrasts subsets of generic types of discourse. (This distinction would seem to exclude the collocation 'cross-cultural discourse' in favour of cross-cultural study of intra-cultural discourses, but the editors are not quite clear on this point.) The editors rightly criticise many books on intercultural communication for providing simple answers to very complex problems, often offering sweeping statements in prescriptive textbooks on the basis of superficial examination. The contributors to the present volume take a much more cautious attitude towards their own topics, and are at pains to point out the wide array of aspects that need to be considered in analyses of intercultural encounters, and also in analyses of intra-cultural encounters with a comparative perspective. It is slightly odd, then, to see that most of the chapters in the book in fact contain a concluding section called 'practical tips', and odder still that the editors should point out that "readers with a more practical inclination, or less time to dedicate to the analysis proper, can rely on advice and remarks that emanate directly from the observation of 'language in use'" (p. 9). Reducing the often very detailed analyses to such prescriptive practical tips is doing little justice to the contributors (and is reminiscent of the anecdotal 'airport' approach). The individual chapters are thematically and methodologically very diverse: Grahame Bilbow (Chapter 2) discussing spoken discourse in the multicultural workplace in Hong Kong identifies two types of speech acts ('directing' and 'suggesting'), and describes their usage by Western expatriates and local Chinese staff in intercultural meetings. The results, presented in lucid tables, actually reveal a great deal of similarities between the two groups, and ascribe the various differences with regard to functional-grammatical, lexical and prosodic features, and 'impression-management' to differences in Western and Confucianist value systems between the two groups of speakers (as for instance discussed in the well-known studies by Hofstede, 1980; Smith and Bond, 1993); but the study also makes the point that other factors such as speaker-power, physical context may be as influential as ethnicity. In Chapter 3 Helen Mariott focuses on Australian-Japanese business interaction on the basis of recordings of naturally occurring data, followed by introspective interviews, concentrating on linguistic, sociolinguistic and sociocultural behaviour in 'contact situations'. She finds major differences in e.g. the decoding of back channelling responses and in information transmission. With its detailed accounts this chapter serves as a corrective to many simplistic analyses of cultural differences in communication (although her findings in general confirm points raised in the literature), and consequently her section on 'practical tips' does not offer specific advice on how to behave in intercultural encounters, but - more interestingly - advice on how to acquire such information.
Book reviews / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 805-825
823
Based on authentic negotiation data from intercultural encounters, Chapter 4, in a more superficial manner, discusses the use of requests in German and Norwegian, with particular reference to how requests may affect interpersonal relationships. Working with a directness scale (four stages from direct to nonconventionally indirect) Neumann concludes that Norwegians (as non-native speakers) choose "more indirect linguistic strategies than native speakers of German", and that "Germans utter twice as many requests as do Norwegians" (p. 90). These findings are also related to Hofstede's analysis of cultural differences and are found to correlate with them. The author has little to offer in terms of direct advice to German and Norwegian managers other than stressing "the importance of both recognising and using linguistic and pragmatic strategies" and suggesting that "some sense of cultural awareness can be crucial in inter-cultural business encounters" (p. 92). (There are some irritating typos in the presentation of the data, which give the German 'B' as 'b', pp. 83, 86, 90.) Chapter 5 ('The Asian connection') also discusses the use of requests, in the more appropriate framework of face, advocating a balanced view on cultural differences (according to which cultural members occupy a place on a continuum, rather than belong to distinct categories). Moving from world-view to language use in Asian and Western cultures, Mulholland discusses various types of requests from a functional perspective, and warns against the use of the term itself as an ethnocentric category of speech act. Chapter 6 discusses the organisation of American and Japanese business meetings, and concludes that the preferred styles of communication in the two cultures may be related to "fundamental contrasts in early Western and Eastern thought" (p. 120). In her discussion, Haru Yamada emphasizes the practical impact of the cultural differences in terms of physical set-up of offices, etc., and focuses her practical tips on the two distinctive negotiation styles (one task-oriented, the other relationshipdriven) Like other contributors, the author of Chapter 7 (Laura Gavioli) takes as her point of departure the observation that "when different culture-specific inferences are applied to a given communicative situation, there is a risk that communication will be hindered" (p. 136). Her data is taken from bookshop service encounters in Britain and Italy, respectively, and using a Conversational Analytical approach she investigates differences in turn-taking and opening of sequences. With its emphasis on linguistic micro-analysis, this chapter produces valuable insights into the subtle differences in linguistic behaviour with regard to even this 'simple' interaction type, and in view of the theoretical scope of this paper the practical tips at the end of the chapter seem oddly misplaced. In a chapter on joking as a discourse strategy, Annette Grindsted takes her theoretical stance in the Brown-Levinson theory of face-work. On the basis of simulated data (and Grindsted offers a good account of the limitations of this kind of data), Danish and Spanish negotiation behaviours are analysed. This study is a follow-up study of other contrastive analyses of Danish and Spanish communicative styles, and the author can state that there are "substantial differences in the joking strategies employed by Spanish and Danish negotiators" (p. 180), confirming that generally
824
Book reviews / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 805-825
"Danes give a higher priority to their partners as either buyers or sellers than do the Spanish negotiators" (p. 178). The ratio between other-jokes and self-jokes varies considerably, and Spanish negotiators have far more other-jokes than Danes. Based on Maynard's (1980) notion of topicality production in conversation, Chapter 9 discusses how non-sequential topic is organised in business meetings, and the authors Collins and Scott demonstrate how lexical units collocate in groups, which in turn collocate in topical nets to produce a topical landscape, which will be unique for one particular meeting. The data, taken from Brazilian and British contexts, vary so much in terms of content, purpose, and number and role of participants, however, that it is difficult to assess which differences in topical landscaping can be ascribed to which factors; and - perhaps as a consequence of this - this chapter offers no practical tips for the student of cultural differences. As the authors observe, "the available corpora of business meeting transcripts do not yet permit speculation about this issue" (p. 205). The final section (and chapter) is an ethnographic excursion into the various discourses of one corporate context (i.e., this is in effect an intra-cultural study), with focus on organisation theory and how different types of managers produce different sets of managerial discourses (the term comprising ways of thinking, sets of attitudes, sets of organisational principles). As can be seen, the volume contains contributions dealing with a variety of topics from a variety of methodologies - which is fair enough if there were some overall thematic unity. That, however, is difficult to identify in the present case. The individual contributions are well-argued and well-presented, but the overall theme is unfocussed and kaleidoscopic. This incongruity is implicitly acknowledged by the editors in their concluding subsection to the introduction: 'Cross- and intercultural business communication: A tentative guide for the future' (pp. 12-18), which lists future directions, focusing on organisational communication and organisational culture as the more promising areas (and with little reference to the topics covered in the present book). The editors appear to undermine their own efforts somewhat when they stress that "it would also be fair to assume that native speakers' verbal (and non-verbal) behaviour in intralinguistic situations is likely to be different, and possibly very different, from their behaviour in interlinguistic ones" (p. 8). Taken at face-value, this observation would invalidate the intra-cultural analyses undertaken in this study, at least with regard to the practical tips that can be offered on this analytical basis. This book falls between a number of stools, the two most conspicuous being the 'reader in intercultural studies' and 'the practical manual'. We still need a focussed description of what actually happens in interlanguage situations, a well-researched study that would account for the surprising fact that despite all imaginable hindrances people are indeed able to communicate successfully across cultures.
References Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper, eds., 1989. Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Book reviews / Journal of Pragrnatics 29 (1998) 805-825
825
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson, 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Erving, 1955. On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry 18(3): 213-231. Hall, Edward T., 1976. Beyond culture. New York: Doubleday. Hofstede, Geert, 1980. Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Maynard, Douglas, 1980. Placement of topic changes in conversation. Semiotica 30(3): 263-290. Smith, Peter B. and Michael H. Bond, 1993. Social psychology across cultures: Analysis and perspectives. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
821
Ladd, D. Robert, 1996. Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lass, Norman J., ed., 1996. Principles of experimental phonetics. St. Louis, MO: Mosby. Laver, John, 1994. Principles of phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierrehumbert, Janet B. and Mary E. Beckman, 1988. Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Roach, Peter and Antii Iivonen, 1995. Descriptive phonetics. In: G. Bloothooft, V. Hazan, D. Huber and J. Llisterri, eds., European studies in phonetics and speech communication, 31-42. Utrecht: OTS Publications. Zsiga, Elizabeth C., 1997. Features, gestures, and Igbo vowel assimilation: An approach to the phonology/phonetics mapping. Language 73: 227-274.
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra H a r r i s , eds., The languages of business. An international perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. 257 pp. Reviewed by Flemming G. Andersen, Institute of Language and Communication, Odense University, Campusvej 55, DK 5230 Odense M., Denmark. According to the comments on the back cover, this book addresses the question "what do real people around the world actually say when they meet for business purposes?", and focuses on "how people in different parts of the world and speaking different languages accomplish business", i.e., this promises to be a study of task-oriented verbal interactions in an intercultural context. Books of this kind, not least solidly researched ones, are in great demand, in order to balance the large number of airport books, which appear to draw on anecdotal evidence only. So, as the editors rightly point out in their introduction, there is a growing interest in business language, and in particular in the international side of it from scholars and practitioners alike. The present volume, which is a collection of articles on different topics, written by scholars from different countries, using different approaches, is bound together by three sets of common assumptions: (a) a sense that cultural and linguistic differences can be identified in their business contexts, and that they matter; (b) a commitment to using real language data; (c) an attempt to bridge the gap between the academic and the professional. From this rather mixed bag of basic assumptions, the editors note that the concept of 'face' (Goffman, 1955; Brown and Levinson, 1987) and its companion phenomenon: 'politeness', 'indirection' (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) will be a recurrent theoretical construct - which, however, is true of only some of the contributions. Dealing with language use in an international perspective means that the notion of culture will also have to be discussed, and here the editors subscribe to the view that culture is the product of social interaction in concrete situations, rather than a static set of attributes, values, and norms. This is in line with the most recent view on cul-
822
Book reviews / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 805-825
tural studies - but nevertheless the editors refer to scholars such as Hofstede (1980) and Hall (1976), who imply that culture is something people 'have'. The volume is divided into three sections: Intercultural discourses, cross-cultural discourses and corporate discourses. This division naturally occasions the editors to comment on the terms 'intercultural' and 'cross-cultural', and they quite reasonably distinguish between intercultural research, which studies how people from different cultures interact, and cross-cultural research, which examines and contrasts subsets of generic types of discourse. (This distinction would seem to exclude the collocation 'cross-cultural discourse' in favour of cross-cultural study of intra-cultural discourses, but the editors are not quite clear on this point.) The editors rightly criticise many books on intercultural communication for providing simple answers to very complex problems, often offering sweeping statements in prescriptive textbooks on the basis of superficial examination. The contributors to the present volume take a much more cautious attitude towards their own topics, and are at pains to point out the wide array of aspects that need to be considered in analyses of intercultural encounters, and also in analyses of intra-cultural encounters with a comparative perspective. It is slightly odd, then, to see that most of the chapters in the book in fact contain a concluding section called 'practical tips', and odder still that the editors should point out that "readers with a more practical inclination, or less time to dedicate to the analysis proper, can rely on advice and remarks that emanate directly from the observation of 'language in use'" (p. 9). Reducing the often very detailed analyses to such prescriptive practical tips is doing little justice to the contributors (and is reminiscent of the anecdotal 'airport' approach). The individual chapters are thematically and methodologically very diverse: Grahame Bilbow (Chapter 2) discussing spoken discourse in the multicultural workplace in Hong Kong identifies two types of speech acts ('directing' and 'suggesting'), and describes their usage by Western expatriates and local Chinese staff in intercultural meetings. The results, presented in lucid tables, actually reveal a great deal of similarities between the two groups, and ascribe the various differences with regard to functional-grammatical, lexical and prosodic features, and 'impression-management' to differences in Western and Confucianist value systems between the two groups of speakers (as for instance discussed in the well-known studies by Hofstede, 1980; Smith and Bond, 1993); but the study also makes the point that other factors such as speaker-power, physical context may be as influential as ethnicity. In Chapter 3 Helen Mariott focuses on Australian-Japanese business interaction on the basis of recordings of naturally occurring data, followed by introspective interviews, concentrating on linguistic, sociolinguistic and sociocultural behaviour in 'contact situations'. She finds major differences in e.g. the decoding of back channelling responses and in information transmission. With its detailed accounts this chapter serves as a corrective to many simplistic analyses of cultural differences in communication (although her findings in general confirm points raised in the literature), and consequently her section on 'practical tips' does not offer specific advice on how to behave in intercultural encounters, but - more interestingly - advice on how to acquire such information.
Book reviews / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 805-825
823
Based on authentic negotiation data from intercultural encounters, Chapter 4, in a more superficial manner, discusses the use of requests in German and Norwegian, with particular reference to how requests may affect interpersonal relationships. Working with a directness scale (four stages from direct to nonconventionally indirect) Neumann concludes that Norwegians (as non-native speakers) choose "more indirect linguistic strategies than native speakers of German", and that "Germans utter twice as many requests as do Norwegians" (p. 90). These findings are also related to Hofstede's analysis of cultural differences and are found to correlate with them. The author has little to offer in terms of direct advice to German and Norwegian managers other than stressing "the importance of both recognising and using linguistic and pragmatic strategies" and suggesting that "some sense of cultural awareness can be crucial in inter-cultural business encounters" (p. 92). (There are some irritating typos in the presentation of the data, which give the German 'B' as 'b', pp. 83, 86, 90.) Chapter 5 ('The Asian connection') also discusses the use of requests, in the more appropriate framework of face, advocating a balanced view on cultural differences (according to which cultural members occupy a place on a continuum, rather than belong to distinct categories). Moving from world-view to language use in Asian and Western cultures, Mulholland discusses various types of requests from a functional perspective, and warns against the use of the term itself as an ethnocentric category of speech act. Chapter 6 discusses the organisation of American and Japanese business meetings, and concludes that the preferred styles of communication in the two cultures may be related to "fundamental contrasts in early Western and Eastern thought" (p. 120). In her discussion, Haru Yamada emphasizes the practical impact of the cultural differences in terms of physical set-up of offices, etc., and focuses her practical tips on the two distinctive negotiation styles (one task-oriented, the other relationshipdriven) Like other contributors, the author of Chapter 7 (Laura Gavioli) takes as her point of departure the observation that "when different culture-specific inferences are applied to a given communicative situation, there is a risk that communication will be hindered" (p. 136). Her data is taken from bookshop service encounters in Britain and Italy, respectively, and using a Conversational Analytical approach she investigates differences in turn-taking and opening of sequences. With its emphasis on linguistic micro-analysis, this chapter produces valuable insights into the subtle differences in linguistic behaviour with regard to even this 'simple' interaction type, and in view of the theoretical scope of this paper the practical tips at the end of the chapter seem oddly misplaced. In a chapter on joking as a discourse strategy, Annette Grindsted takes her theoretical stance in the Brown-Levinson theory of face-work. On the basis of simulated data (and Grindsted offers a good account of the limitations of this kind of data), Danish and Spanish negotiation behaviours are analysed. This study is a follow-up study of other contrastive analyses of Danish and Spanish communicative styles, and the author can state that there are "substantial differences in the joking strategies employed by Spanish and Danish negotiators" (p. 180), confirming that generally
824
Book reviews / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 805-825
"Danes give a higher priority to their partners as either buyers or sellers than do the Spanish negotiators" (p. 178). The ratio between other-jokes and self-jokes varies considerably, and Spanish negotiators have far more other-jokes than Danes. Based on Maynard's (1980) notion of topicality production in conversation, Chapter 9 discusses how non-sequential topic is organised in business meetings, and the authors Collins and Scott demonstrate how lexical units collocate in groups, which in turn collocate in topical nets to produce a topical landscape, which will be unique for one particular meeting. The data, taken from Brazilian and British contexts, vary so much in terms of content, purpose, and number and role of participants, however, that it is difficult to assess which differences in topical landscaping can be ascribed to which factors; and - perhaps as a consequence of this - this chapter offers no practical tips for the student of cultural differences. As the authors observe, "the available corpora of business meeting transcripts do not yet permit speculation about this issue" (p. 205). The final section (and chapter) is an ethnographic excursion into the various discourses of one corporate context (i.e., this is in effect an intra-cultural study), with focus on organisation theory and how different types of managers produce different sets of managerial discourses (the term comprising ways of thinking, sets of attitudes, sets of organisational principles). As can be seen, the volume contains contributions dealing with a variety of topics from a variety of methodologies - which is fair enough if there were some overall thematic unity. That, however, is difficult to identify in the present case. The individual contributions are well-argued and well-presented, but the overall theme is unfocussed and kaleidoscopic. This incongruity is implicitly acknowledged by the editors in their concluding subsection to the introduction: 'Cross- and intercultural business communication: A tentative guide for the future' (pp. 12-18), which lists future directions, focusing on organisational communication and organisational culture as the more promising areas (and with little reference to the topics covered in the present book). The editors appear to undermine their own efforts somewhat when they stress that "it would also be fair to assume that native speakers' verbal (and non-verbal) behaviour in intralinguistic situations is likely to be different, and possibly very different, from their behaviour in interlinguistic ones" (p. 8). Taken at face-value, this observation would invalidate the intra-cultural analyses undertaken in this study, at least with regard to the practical tips that can be offered on this analytical basis. This book falls between a number of stools, the two most conspicuous being the 'reader in intercultural studies' and 'the practical manual'. We still need a focussed description of what actually happens in interlanguage situations, a well-researched study that would account for the surprising fact that despite all imaginable hindrances people are indeed able to communicate successfully across cultures.
References Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper, eds., 1989. Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Book reviews / Journal of Pragrnatics 29 (1998) 805-825
825
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson, 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Erving, 1955. On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry 18(3): 213-231. Hall, Edward T., 1976. Beyond culture. New York: Doubleday. Hofstede, Geert, 1980. Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Maynard, Douglas, 1980. Placement of topic changes in conversation. Semiotica 30(3): 263-290. Smith, Peter B. and Michael H. Bond, 1993. Social psychology across cultures: Analysis and perspectives. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.