70 Module 3 Sociocultural Forces culture, and without understanding it, people find themselves locked out of all but a culture’s perimeter. In fact, nothing equals the spoken language for distinguishing one culture or subculture from another. Even though many global businesspeople speak English, they often want to conduct business in their own language. Therefore, the foreign seller who speaks the local language has a competitive edge. Figure 3.3 shows a map of the major languages of the world. Nonverbal communication, or the unspoken language, can often tell businesspeople something the spoken language does not if they can understand it. In cultures known as high context (HC), meaning is conveyed through the context rather than the words themselves. In these HC cultures, the unspoken language is used intensively to convey significant, intentional meaning. People in HC cultures often have developed an advanced ability to read unspoken language, such as body language and facial expressions. They can use contextual clues like eye contact, posture, and subtle facial expressions to communicate or receive meaning, perhaps without any special awareness that they are doing so. Middle Eastern and Asian cultures tend to be HC. Gestures vary from one region to another. Here is one simple example that persistently leads to misunderstandings: people from the United States and most Europeans understand the thumbs-up gesture to mean “all right,” but in southern Italy and Greece, this gesture transmits a vulgar message. Similarly, making the “OK” sign with the thumb and the forefinger is friendly in the United States, but it means “you’re worth nothing” in France and Belgium and is vulgar in Greece and Turkey. Unspoken language also includes spatial relationships, including those where we work. In the United States, an office door that is closed suggests a request for privacy; the normal position of the door is open. Germans regularly keep their doors closed. The anthropologist Edward Hall suggests this does not mean the person behind the door wants no visitors, but only that he or she considers open doors sloppy and disorderly.10 Office size and location can mean different things in different cultures, as well. In the United States, the higher the status of the executive, the larger and more secluded the office, but in the Arab world, the company president may be in a small, crowded office. In Japan, the senior person is likely to be closest to the center of the room, and the least valuable places on an office floor are by the windows. The French also locate important department heads in the center of activities, with their assistants on radii going out from this center. Conversational distance, the space between people in a conversation, also tends to vary across cultural borders. It tends to be much shorter in the Middle East than in Anglo cultures such as those of the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, and Canada. It’s not unusual to see two people with different expectations for conversational distance move, almost in a dance across a floor, as one tries to close the space and the other expands it. Neither may be aware of what is happening. Conversational distances vary by sex as well, and also by how well people know one another. Then there are performance issues of spoken language. How does sequencing work? Does one person talk, and then another? Or does everyone chime in at the same time? How do people interrupt one another, and how is that perceived? What are the unwritten rules of having a conversation? In some cultures, disagreement or argument is seen as a way of pulling people closer; in others, it pushes people away. As you can see, there is a lot to attend to when trying to understand another culture. Now you can begin to build your sense of the major language groups and their borders. SOCIETAL ORGANIZATION Every society structures its social relationships, and these patterned arrangements define an important aspect of culture, the way social groups are constructed. Sociologists define two kinds of social groups or institutions: kinship and free association.
Geringer_InternationalBusiness
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