The Value of Cultural Studies in the Training of Cross-Cultural Negotiators

Abstract

In the narrow sense of the word, 'communication' is by its very nature cross-cultural, insofar as every person at any time in his life has the whole of his individual and social biography behind him, as it were. This socio-biography could be called his 'ideoculture', his personal set of values, norms, assumptions about the world, as well as his interpretations of natural and social phenomena, etc. As the English poet William Blake said, in what is almost formula for subjectivism, a fool not the same tree that wise man sees (from Proverbs of Hell). According to this, the quality of the tree would be entirely in the eye of the beholder, and since we are all nothing but beholders, there would be exactly as many trees as there are individuals looking at the tree, but never the 'tree as such'. Communication would then be defined as the more or less successful attempt to make the other person see the same tree as you. This assumption takes us right into the heart of the philosophy of knowledge. All we can ever hope to achieve is to persuade another to share our image of the tree (or, to widen the perspective, of the world). This is also, in essence, the original meaning of the word 'comrnunication': you make something communis, common or, in other words, you let others participate, though whether and to what extent you are successful is difficult to determine: in most cases of everyday communication we do not wait to find out (nor could we, since we have to attend to our various affairs). Communication is almost totally subconscious, an everyday routine: hello, John, how are you? Fine, thanks, and how are you? This routine character of language use is by no means restricted to exchanges such as greetings, for we do not normally think consciously about language use or other channels of communication like gestures or facial expressions. In situations where there is no urgent necessity to establish and determine the degree of commonsense, we do not even notice that talking common language means inviting the other to share our world. The usual weather comment for example operates on two levels. You say, lovely day today, isn't it?, and at the same time you imply, follow the usual practice and accept the convention that weather comment is non-committal way of saying show you I want to be friendly or at least, don't want to be nasty. The 'referential' content of the message is relatively unimportant, since it can be assumed that the other is already sufficiently informed about the weather. But even in this area of linguistic formulae, there is an element of give and take, of negotiation. We do not say how things are, so much as how we see them and how we would like them to be seen. In our example the listener would, according to British conventions, be expected to agree at least basically to such statement: flat contradiction would sound strange if not rude. If