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Intercultural communication and communicative genres 137

culture; whereas job interviews in the West demand displays of one’s abilities
and prior experiences, East German institutional style encourages modesty and
concealment of one’s abilities. Whereas Western job interviews expect appli-
cants to show active contributions, East German communicative ideology de-
mands the avoidance of the agent-subject and requires indirectness and vague-
ness. Furthermore, job interviews in the West are based on a superficial ideology
of equality beneath which power relations are hidden, and a superficial atmos-
phere of informality is constructed; East German institutional styles expose and
underline power relations through formality and submission. Thus, in respond-
ing to the new communicative expectations and the demanded genre, East Ger-
man applicants tend to re-activate a formal, institutional ‘East German dis-
course style’, mixed with certain elements of what they guess or assume to be
adequate for this West German genre. 15
Besides revealing how participants react in situations in which they are con-
fronted with new genres, Birkner and Kern’s (2000), Kern’s (2000), Auer and
Kern’s (2001) as well as Birkner’s (2002) studies show that in modern societies
the borders between different repertoires of genres do not necessarily go hand
and hand with geographical or linguistic borders (such as Germany or the Ger-
man language).
Also, within the academic world, interactants may be confronted with genres
which are not part of their own academic rhetorical tradition (Clyne 1987;
Swales 1990; Paltridge 1997; Ehlich 1998; Swales et al. 1998). In German uni-
versities (as well as in many other European and North-American universities)
‘office hours’ are an institutionalized genre (Günthner 2001; Meer 2002). In their
socialization at university, students acquire the necessary knowledge about this
genre; e.g. knowledge about when to consult professors or lecturers on what kind
of problems, about interactive procedures in office hours, knowledge that these
consultations take place at scheduled times and fixed locations, etc. In various
academic cultures (e.g. Vietnam, China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc.),
however, office hours do not exist. Foreign students from these cultures often
tend to have problems with the communicative genre of office hours at German
universities. The following sequences, stemming from interviews with Chinese
students at German universities, illustrate some of these problems.
Fan, a Chinese student of German, states:

Such office hours, we don’t have them in China. In China students visit their profes-
sor at home. This means: you have a problem, so you want your teacher to help you.
Normally. When I came to Germany at first, I did not know what to do in these office
hours. I did not know this form ‘office hours’. And then I asked other Chinese
foreign students what one should talk about in these office hours. And they said: just
talk about your studies. One should tell the professors what one has already accom-
plished. You go there with an aim and you have to achieve this aim before you leave.
(own translation; S.G.)