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Intercultural communication and communicative genres 135

meetings are “thought to be the appropriate place in which to persuade people or
try to change their minds” (Miller 1994: 224). They expect decision-making and
the resolution of conflict in the meeting. This contrasts sharply with the Japan-
ese understanding of business meetings. Consensus is achieved before the for-
mal meeting. The participants meet in bars, cafes, etc., where they argue and try
to iron out differences of opinion before the actual meeting. The formal meeting
itself is to bestow ritual approval to what went on before it. This kind of pre-
meeting activity called ‘nemawashi’ (‘spadework’) does not have negative con-
notations in Japan. As Miller (1994: 226) points out, “interactants often assume
that the problem relates to fundamental differences in national character. As a
case in point, we are constantly reminded of a difference between Japanese and
Americans which is uncritically accepted and habitually repeated: Japanese, we
are told, are always indirect and ambiguous, while Americans are presumably
unable to be anything but direct and pushy (…)”.
Cultural differences in genre related knowledge tend to have particularly
grave consequences when they occur in ‘gate-keeping’ situations of various in-
stitutions. Access to education, occupational career, and health are affected by
decisions in such situations (Gumperz 1982, 2001; Erickson and Schultz 1982,
Scherr, Roberts, and Eades in this volume). As Scollon and Scollon’s (1981:
180–182) study of courtroom interactions in Alaskan state courts demonstrates,
for certain classes of offences jail sentences were consistently longer for Alas-
kan Natives than for Whites. On examining pre-sentence reports, the authors
found that those for the Natives reported the absence of any plans for the future.
White Americans, in contrast, regularly stressed their intention of returning to
a job or to school and thus expressed their desire to improve themselves. This
culturally approved way of ‘putting your best foot forward’ seemed to have
influenced the White American legal professional assessment of the accused.

Elements located on these three levels (the internal, the interactional and the
external level) constitute the patterning of communicative genres. Thus, genres
cannot be reduced to specific textual patterning on the internal level, but they
are interactive accomplishments between speaker and recipient and are closely
tied to larger cultural, political and institutional issues in the construction of so-
cial reality.
Furthermore, as work on genre conventions in different cultural commu-
nities reveals, knowledge about communicative practices and genres in modern
societies regulates the access of individuals to various institutional and private
settings. According to Bourdieu (1990), linguistic knowledge is an important
part of ‘symbolic capital’, i.e. ways of speaking symbolize one’s belonging to a
particular social ‘field’. Those who have power, determine the ‘legitimate’ ways
of speaking. Knowledge about ‘how to speak’ is a powerful means for certain
groups to stay in power and also to keep other groups from having power. The