Caution and consensus in American business meetings

Brexit and the Future of <scp>UK</scp> Capitalism

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We are entering into a new phase in EU corporate governance. More than ever, our action plan must be focused and based on a solid assessment of actual needs of market players and investors. 1 As Ch...

At first glance, communicating a suspect's rights in police interviews appears to be a straightforward task. However, it is more complex than it appears. In particular, for suspects who come from different cultural backgrounds or legal systems and who rely on interpreters in police interviews, ensuring a thorough understanding of their rights and appropriately invoking these rights can be difficult. This paper examines police interviews in which Japanese native-speaker suspects are interviewed by English speaking police officers through interpreters and attempts to identify problems in the processes in which the suspects' rights are communicated through the interpreters. Three issues will be addressed: problematic turn construction; the treatment of a follow-up comprehension check question; and the interference of interpreters' understanding of the rights of suspects. Suggestions will then be given for improvement of caution delivery through interpreting in criminal investigation. The study concerns a number of areas -forensic linguistics, translating and interpreting studies, and conversation analysis- and demonstrates the significance of an interdisciplinary approach to addressing and understanding problems in interpreter-mediated discourse in legal settings.

The offshoring of information systems (IS) work has seen phenomenal growth in the past 5 or more years. This has resulted in IS professionals, interacting with workers from vastly different cultural backgrounds, in order to deliver IS project and support services. This cultural ‘barrier’ has been highlighted in the IS literature as a key challenge for offshoring; however, the attention given to research in the field has in the main been restricted to surveys or interviews, often reliant on reductionist national culture models. Within the fields of linguistics and anthropology, the ethnographic research technique of conversation analysis (CA) has been successfully applied to cross-cultural communications. However, there have been no concerted research efforts to apply CA to IS research in general and to IS offshoring in particular. Our research aims to address that gap by analysing naturally occurring recordings of telephone conferences between offshore vendor staff in India and UK/US employees of a major pharmaceutical company. The research has identified and analysed two important phenomena observed within these communications. Firstly, evidence of asymmetries of participation across cultural divides has been documented, and analysed for underlying causes, such as different attitudes to hierarchy and a lack of shared understanding of expected responses. Secondly, differences in the rhetorical organisation of conversation by participants have also been observed and clearly documented within transcribed specimens of these conversations. These phenomena led to seven findings that are aimed to stimulate further research. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this paper demonstrates how the methodological approach of CA can be applied to IS offshoring research, producing key insights into culturally loaded conversations with clear applications for practice. We hope that this evidence of the potential of CA in IS research will inspire IS researchers to use the approach in other domains as well as in further work in offshoring situations.

According to the perspective of comparative public administration, different states or polities have different patterns in formulating and implementing public policy due to differences in historical and cultural background, socio-economic structure, institutional design and organizational culture. In that context, how to joint and smooth the formulation and implementation of relevant policies by two polities with different characteristics, which are carrying out institutionalized exchange and cooperation, will be a crucial issue worth to probe. The situation of joint and interaction will definitely affect the possibility of attaining the expectative goals. This article tries to combine the perspective of comparative public administration with the arguments of the historical-structural approach and the developmental state in the study of political economy. The author will take the ”Bridging Project” proposed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs as an example and probe into the mechanism of the cross-straits exchange and cooperation in terms of a comparative study on the relevant policy-makings on the both sides of the Taiwan Strait. We hope to figure Out some findings and suggestions to enhance and smooth the exchange and cooperation through the comparative study.

In this paper, the author first records, transcribes, and then analyses a short extract from an English conversation among three graduate students with different cultural backgrounds. It aims to analyse several aspects of conversation analysis; turn-taking, topic change, preference organisation, listing, use of figurative language, face saving, breakdowns and repairs, and dysfluency. The data analysis shows that there is an interesting feature occurs concerning to overlapping during conversation. Moreover, dysfluency is also one of noticeable features which exist regularly during the conversation. However, the figurative language that is expected to emerge during talk among different cultural background cannot be figured out because the participants tend to avoid using such complex and idiomatic language structure.

384LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) Hyatt, Harry Middleton (ed.) 1970-78. Hoodoo—conjuration—witchcraft—rootwork. Beliefs accepted by many Negroes and white persons. These being orally recorded among blacks and whites. 5 vols. Hannibal, MO: Elgin Hyatt Foundation. Krapp, George Philip. 1924. The English of the Negro. American Mercury 2.190-95. Rawick, George P. 1972-79. The American slave: A comprehensive autobiography. 10 vols. 1972. Supplement , series 1, 12 vols., 1977. Supplement, series 2, 10 vols., 1979. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Schneider, Edgar. 1989. American earlierBlack English: Morphological and syntactic variables. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Viereck, Wolfgang. 1988. Invariant be in an unnoticed source of American Early Black English. American Speech 63.291-303. Department of English Duke University Box 90015 Durham, NC 27708-0015 [RonButters@aol.com] Dramatic discourse: Dialogue as interaction in plays. By Vimala Herman. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 331. $69.95. Reviewed by Agnes Weiyun He, State University ofNew York, Stony Brook This book focuses on 'modern discourse frameworks for the different kinds ofillumination they offer with respect to the workings ofdramatic speech in plays' (17). It contains an introduction and five substantive chapters, each of which reviews literature in some approach to discourse studies and subsequently applies it to language use in dramatic texts. Designed to be 'inter-disciplinary' (17), this book is meant to be appreciated by readers interested in theories and applications (especially applications in dramatic contexts) alike. The introduction chapter states the purpose of the book, discusses such notions as dialogue, discourse, interaction, conversation and utterance, and situates drama in the context of social life but with its own specificities. It provides a contextual view of speech in drama which emphasizes that while dramatic discourse transforms written language to speech, it is more than recitation of the written texts, as it recreates situations jointly achieved by the participants and as it involves nonverbal resources. The introduction names the approaches to discourse which the rest of the book will survey and apply—ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Gricean pragmatics, speech act theory, politeness theory, and gender studies —but does not explain what problems or phenomena in dramatic discourse motivate the use of these approaches. The strongest chapter is Ch. 1 ('The ethnography of speaking'). It details Dell Hymes' SPEAKING model and the concept of speech event and uses these notions as tools to delineate the context of drama. It raises interesting questions such as how deixis anchors the participants within the spatiotemporal coordinates of speech events; how space and time are verbalized in drama to serve as two grammatical coordinates that ground speech; how setting integrates with participant framework as some contexts define the participant roles that are appropriate to them; how agency, liability, and distribution of participant roles are managed in drama; how fictional time and audience time are grammaticalized in/through drama; and more generally, how discourse/interaction and performance/reception mutually embed each other: These various issues are richly illustrated with works by both classical and contemporary dramatists. The goal of Ch. 2 ('Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis') and Ch. 3 ('Turn sequencing ') appears to be to summarize the major findings ofconversation analysis (CA) and to examine how some of the conversational structural mechanisms work in drama. Ch. 2 reviews literature and focuses on turn-taking; Ch. 3 concentrates on various sequence organizations. Compared with other chapters, the survey of literature in these two chapters is sketchy. Key concepts such as turns, turn-taking, and turn-constructional-units are explained not through the original CA REVIEWS385 work (e.g. Sacks et al. 1974 is conspicuously missing in the references) but largely via Levinson 1983. The value of these chapters lies in their attempt to apply a discourse approach which has so far been used in examining naturally occurring spoken data to an investigation ofpre-scripted, tidied-up language use in plays. It is useful here to make a distinction between language use in the performance of plays characterized by actual, recordable, transcribable, analyzable, moment-by-moment interaction and language use in the original play scripts which contain imagined, yet-to-be-vocalized, written dialogues without specification ofdetailed conversational features such as breathing, stress, pitch...

Use of the mobile phone is an immensely significant social and cultural phenomenon. However, market hype and utopian dreams greatly exaggerate its importance. The fundamental issue for sociology is the process of change. Bound up with contemporary issues of change, the mobile phone is a prime object for sociological attention both at the macro and micro levels of analysis. This article considers the strengths and weaknesses of four methods for studying the sociality of the mobile phone (social demography; political economy; conversation, discourse and text analysis; and ethnography), the different kinds of knowledge they produce, and the interests they represent. Recent ethnographic research on the mobile phone, particularly motivated by issues around the uncertain transition from 2G to the 3G technology, has examined the actual experience of routine use. Interpretative research is now supplementing purely instrumental research, thereby giving a much more nuanced understanding of mobile communications. Critical research on the mobile phone, of which there is little, is beginning to ask skeptical questions that should be pursued further.

With the continuous development of the world's political economy, global communication and dialogue in the post-pandemic era have returned to normal, and the demand for diplomatic translation has also increased. The dialectical unity of precision and ambiguity is a common linguistic feature of diplomatic language usage in various countries. As the important official access to cross-cultural communication, if some expressions in diplomatic translation cannot be properly handled, they may lead to serious diplomatic accidents. Restricted by the influence of national psychological traits, historical and cultural backgrounds, and values, there is a significant linguistic and cultural distance between Chinese and Western languages, causing the different translation methods adopted in translation. With specific language registers and translation strategies, countries have developed different diplomatic images and sought communication and cooperation This article mainly compares the translation skills taken by China and the US in the diplomatic context and analyzes the underlying reasons, exploring the impact of political stances on diplomatic translation.

This study focuses on the far-reaching impact of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the global political economy, particularly the dynamic interaction of cross-cultural exchanges. The article analyzes the origins and development of the Belt and Road Initiative and its strategic significance in the international political economy through three core dimensions: global governance, regional economic integration, and cultural communication. By evaluating the specific practices of the initiative in promoting international monetary cooperation, infrastructure construction, and transnational investment, the paper highlights the key role of the Belt and Road Initiative in reshaping the global economic structure and geopolitical landscape. In particular, in the context of cross-cultural exchanges, the paper explores the communication barriers between different cultural backgrounds, proposes a strategic framework for promoting crosscultural understanding and cooperation, and analyzes how to build and disseminate cultural soft power under the “Belt and Road Initiative” framework. Through empirical analysis of several specific cooperation cases, the paper further discusses the challenges and coping mechanisms encountered during the initiative’s implementation. Finally, based on the study’s results, the article presents policy recommendations and discusses the future direction of research.

Various arguments have been put forward to account for socioeconomic development in East Asia's newly industrializing countries. A blend of state-centred arguments with a proposed ‘World Market for Social Order’ concept is suggested in this article. The varying degree of legitimacy of particular social orders is introduced as a key factor for explaining success and failure in late development. The proposed analytical framework allows to simultaneously address issues related to international political economy and comparative political economy. It accounts for divergent historical development trajectories as represented by the successful East Asian NICs on the one hand and the less successful Latin American ones on the other. Furthermore, the peculiar case of Malaysia, whose sociopolitical and cultural background rather clearly deviates from the East Asian ideal typical conditions for successful late development, can be much better understood. We also reflect the significance of the Asian financial crisis in 1997/98 for our analytical framework.

En este ensayo se propone un marco teórico para el estudio del influjo internacional sobre los procesos de reforma educativa en Centroamérica iniciados en los años noventa, a partir de las particularidades políticas y culturales de los contextos centroamericanos. Se hizo el ejercicio de poner en diálogo la corriente «internacional» y «cultural» de la economía política crítica de la educación para comprender la influencia de los organismos internacionales y sus agendas educativas en los procesos de reforma educativa, en función de las dinámicas históricas nacionales. En otras palabras, para entender por una parte, la interacción entre la globalización como capitalismo global, y los sistemas educativos nacionales centroamericanos como parte de los Estados-Nación; y por otra, las relaciones de poder entre los actores nacionales y su capacidad de agencia para hegemonizar ideológicamente a través del proceso de reforma educativa, una visión de sociedad y ciudadano en tanto clase, etnia, religión y género en un país.&#x0D; Palabras claveReformas educativas en Centroamérica, sociología de la educación, economía política, globalización, hegemonía ideológica&#x0D;

The present study is an attempt to describe how Arab learners of English produce culture-specific expressions that create potential miscommunication across cultures. Three related approaches - ethnography of communication, pragmatic failure and conversational Analysis - were reviewed so as to get insights into understanding such a phenomenon. The subjects of the study consist of 120 male Saudi and Yemeni learners of English. In order to elicit data for the study, the subjects were given a Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) which consists of six situations wherein they picture themselves to be in the real situation and choose a response from the ones provided. The findings of the study showed that the hypothesized responses, which are Arab culture –specific communicative patterns, received high number of frequency compared to the other responses. Such communicative patterns are likely to cause miscommunication in situations like the ones described in the study. The study concluded that Arab speakers of English should be made aware of the misuse of such communicative patterns in order to minimize miscommunication in their communicative interaction across cultures.

With the rise of Asian middle class and ease of long-haul travel, the act of travel has become more embodied, hybrid, performative, and culturally inclusive (Larsen, 2014; Perkins & Thorns, 2001). Travellers can visit exotic and remote destinations which differ markedly from their home environments. This is particularly evident in the Chinese market, where a rising interest in independent overseas travel has been observed. This steady increase in Chinese independent outbound tourists has led researchers and practitioners to question how these emerging markets interact with, and make sense of, landscapes and experiences that differ significantly from those found in China.Individuals perceive, understand, and react to a landscape in different ways depending on their social and cultural backgrounds. Chinese outbound visitors hold unique worldviews and ideologies and may therefore find it challenging to perceive and connect with foreign landscapes. Studies have identified several philosophical, cultural, and literary factors that influence how Chinese domestic tourists perceive landscapes in China. Yet, research into the way Chinese tourists interact with environments in non-Chinese settings is rare. Much of the existing landscape research and tourism interpretation literature are guided by hegemonic Eurocentric principles developed for Western tourists. This body of knowledge may not be suitable to explain the nuances of the Chinese market or other non-Western cultural phenomenon. This thesis addresses these issues by exploring how Chinese visitors construct meaning in a foreign and exotic tourist landscape – Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park in Australia.A qualitative ethnographic approach guided by the constructivism paradigm was employed. Multiple techniques were adopted, including visitor employed photography, accompanied walk, interviews and reflexive diaries. A purposive sample consisting of 53 first-time Chinese travellers in small groups of two to four people was recruited at Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park, Australia. The research process involved a recorded researcher accompanied leisure walk and an immediate semi-structured interview. Visitor photographs taken during the walk were collected in the interview, and researcher notes were taken to complement field observations. A research protocol was used in conducting fieldwork to ensure consistency.A thematic content analysis (TA), five lines of inquiry image analysis and conversational analysis (CA) were used in tandem to analyse both visual and textual data. Both manual coding and QSR-Nvivo 12 were used to manage the analysis. The analysis revealed five broad dimensions that characterise Chinese visitors’ landscape perception, namely, sensory interaction, spatial and temporal perception, affective engagement, symbolic imagination, and (inter)subjective and social construction. Grounded in social and cultural contexts, the findings indicate that Chinese perceive the world in a humanistic way through the lens of relationship and morality, with the goal of establishing personal relevance, via analogies, imaginations, unlearning and introspections. Fundamentally, Chinese visitors’ landscape perception is guided by a paradoxical “both-and” principle that accepts opposing views co-exist and strive for individual and collective balance.Analysis also illustrates that popular culture, hedonic consumerism, new interpretations of philosophical knowledge, meaningful storytelling, (digital) social capital, and the state-orchestrated historical memories influence Chinese tourists’ landscape meaning-making. Traditional philosophy and cultural influences are still present but are less obvious. The findings further reveal that the social and cultural contexts in China facilitate personal growth, and self- and social transformations. Based on these understandings, recommendations for tailoring on-site interpretation for Chinese tourists are provided.This thesis responds to the Euro-centric criticism in landscape research and proposes a multi-faceted visitor landscape perception framework. This framework synthesises and advances our fragmented knowledge of how outbound Chinese visitors perceive ‘foreign’ tourism landscapes. As one of the pioneering attempts to uncover landscape perception through the lived tourism encounters, this research unveils the unique and complex ways Chinese visitors ‘make sense of’ landscapes, and questions whether Eurocentric approaches to interpreting landscapes are likely to resonate with non-Western audiences. Practical recommendations on the design of meaningful site interpretation for Chinese tourists are provided. The limitations of this thesis and agenda for future research opportunities are discussed.