A Schemata Model for Intercultural Encounters and Case Study: The Emperor and the Envoy

Abstract

A recognized condition for successful intercultural business communication is the more like one's own cultural, psychological, economic, educational, and occupational environment the other party's environment is, the greater the chance of successful communication (Samovar & Porter, 1991; Torbiorn, 1988; Kim, 1988, Triandis, 1959, 1960a, 1960b). It follows that if the culture of another person or organization is unlike one's own, or is so unfamiliar that similar meanings cannot be attributed, the more one finds out about the unlike/unknown culture, the better one's chance of success in communicating with it (Gudykunst, 1984). Anecdotal reports of failed intercultural communication episodes in business applications support the idea that ignorance of another culture's priorities is the basis for costly errors. Specifically, the assumption is that enough knowledge will eliminate outsider behavior that obstructs effective communication; some communication will go awry even among members of the same culture, of course, but these failures are the result of cultural insiders' behaviors. The difficulty is knowing one knows about another culture; more to the point, the difficulty is knowing one does not know (metacognition). How close is one's understanding of another culture to the reality experienced by insiders in that culture? Except for being a member of another culture, how completely can one know it? When one supposes one's knowledge is sufficient, will communication succeed? While space does not allow for the full exploration of these questions here, they are answered indirectly in the following discussion. The basis for this discussion is that knowing about another culture is crucial in order to communicate successfully with that culture. This comes down to an inquiry into meaning and cognitive processes. This paper is in four parts: the first discusses communication models and meaning; the second proposes a model for how intercultural communicators structure meaning concerning another culture, the third section is an extended analysis of a specific historical case of intercultural business communication using the model, and the fourth section summarizes seven hypotheses for further research into the model's usefulness for modern international business encounters. Communication Models and the Issue of Meaning The standard communication model, derived from the Shannon and Weaver transmission model of 1949, shows a process that begins with a sender who transmits a message having first encoded it, through a channel to a receiver, who decodes it and who responds. Subsequently, various researchers have suggested modifications for these models that take into account the cultural basis for the codes, and the inescapable complications when cultural codes are different (Beamer, 1992; Campbell & Level, 1985; Gudykunst, 1984; Haworth & Savage, 1989; Lewis, 1987; Samovar & Porter, 1991; Targowski & Bowman, 1988; Thayer, 1968). In other words, these models attempt to consider the semantic issues of communication: how is meaning understood among communicators? This leads to the corollary question that concerns us here: how is meaning understood among communicators whose cultures differ, given that meaning is culture-based? The disciplines of psychology and linguistics have sought answers to questions about how communication has meaning and why; philosophy has wanted to know what it is to have meaning. Meaning is linked to language; but communication is more than simple eqnivalencies between word and thing, as Ogden and Richards first showed in their triangle of reference in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) and as has been investigated more thoroughly since (Hardy, 1978). Ogden and Richards suggested that in communication, language (symbol) refers to a thing or referent, which triggers thought. Thought or reference is pre-existent, independent of the symbol or the referent. The word does not represent the thing, in a kind of word-magic as it was dismissively called by scholars in the 1920s and 1930s (Hardy, 1978). …