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Differences and difficulties in intercultural management interaction 265

removed from the daily communication situations and interactions of such co-
operation and thus offer little help to international managers in the area of com-
munication itself – in assisting managers actually to interact across cultures.
Hofstede devotes only just over one page of 466 to the principles of intercultural
communication and cooperation (2001: 423–425) and less than a page to lan-
guage and discourse (2001: 425). Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997:
74–76) deal with the topic in something under three brief pages.
More communication-oriented assistance is conventionally sought in the
work of Hall (1959, 1966, 1976, 1983). As well as contributing insights on be-
havioural orientations which have found widespread acceptance in the intercul-
tural trainers’ repertoire of knowledge, Hall again offers a usefully contrastive,
if under-researched, distinction in communication styles in different cultures.
However, this work only serves to raise awareness and provide explanations in a
single area of distinctiveness and does not claim to equip those taking part in
training with techniques to promote effective communication across cultural
borders.
These contrastive studies may make general behaviour patterns more under-
standable and predictable and therefore to some extent more manageable, but
they are rather blunt instruments when it comes to preparing people for actually
communicating in intercultural encounters in business. In particular, they can-
not yield detailed insights into particular bi-cultural constellations. More criti-
cally, they do not move beyond creating awareness and understanding. They do
not describe what kind of behaviour is successful in mastering intercultural
management interaction and neither do they provide strategies and techniques
for communicating and interacting across cultures, yet for the trainer these are
perhaps the most crucial issues, given the trainees’ understandable and frequent
demand for solutions after being confronted with so many differences and dif-
ficulties!
Hofstede (1994: 138) memorably entitled a chapter on uncertainty avoid-
ance What is different is dangerous. A similar belief underlies the approach of
many trainers to such training; namely that, not unreasonably, what is different
is not necessarily dangerous but at least potentially difficult and should there-
fore be highlighted and prepared for in intercultural training.
This unsatisfactory and almost exclusive reliance on Hofstede’s and Trom-
penaars’ contrastive, value-oriented approaches and on Hall’s behavioural
orientations and communication styles also in culture-specific, intercultural – or
perhaps better in this case cross-cultural – training for business is the result,
firstly, of a comparative lack of authentic interactionist data and, secondly, when
the data is available, of a focus on other aspects of the communication.
It is the case that a limited amount of authentic data from business life has in
fact been gathered, such as Spencer-Oatey and Xing (2000), Birkner and Kern
(2000) and the investigations collected in Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris (1997)