Page 286 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

264 Peter Franklin

hits for ‘intercultural communication training’ as opposed to 125,000 for ‘inter-
cultural training’.)
Rather, training has generally sought support elsewhere. On the one hand,
for culture-specific training, it has drawn to a certain extent on explicitly com-
parative, scientific studies of two (or more) cultures, often originating in man-
agement science, such as Stewart et al. (1994) and Ebster-Groß and Pugh
(1996), or on more or less soundly based, implicitly comparative accounts of an
individual culture, such as Nees (2000), the implicit reference culture unsurpris-
ingly often being the U.S.A. On the other hand, both culture-specific and es-
pecially culture-general training has to an almost overwhelming extent de-
pended on the pioneering work of Hall (1959, 1966, 1976, 1983) on behavioural
orientations and communication styles across a range of national cultures and
on the contrastive, value-oriented work of Hofstede (2001) and Trompenaars
and Hampden-Turner (1997).
These scholars and writers dominate the intercultural (communication)
training scene in business and management in Europe and probably worldwide.
Berardo and Simons (2004), in their study conducted in collaboration with SIE-
TAR Europa (European branch of the Society for Intercultural Education, Train-
ing and Research) among 261 intercultural trainers, record that these four
writers together attracted 110 out of 170 responses from trainers when they were
requested to name culture models. No other single scientist or author even
reached double figures. Gudykunst was mentioned twice. All applied linguists
taken together achieved a very small handful of mentions.
The studies by Hofstede and Trompenaars are hologeistic, nomothetic,
quantitative investigations which supply insights about the values and varying
expressions of those values to be found in society generally, in the family, at
school and in the workplace in a large variety of national cultures. They concen-
trate on what Hofstede refers to as ‘dimensions of culture’, a dimension of a cul-
ture being “an aspect of a culture that can be measured relative to other cultures”
(Hofstede 1994: 14) and thus yield information about differences among cul-
tures.
Reference to such contrastive studies in culture-general training, such as is
used to help build international teams or prepare young managers for inter-
national careers, can create awareness and understanding of the culturally deter-
mined, different values and phenomena encountered in international business
and management situations. Given the lack of usable alternatives, in particular
of insights from interactionist studies, they are also used in culture-specific
training or in the training of bi-cultural groups, for example in post-merger in-
tegration training.
However, the differences which such etic studies highlight may not in them-
selves constitute all or any of the problems and unsatisfactory states in inter-
national business cooperation that have to be dealt with. They are relatively far