266 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

12
Using a Discourse Approach to
Intercultural Communication

This book is not primarily concerned with developing or with arguing a

theoretical framework for the study of intercultural communication. Our
goals have been the practical ones of developing the necessary vocabulary
and concepts for a fairly straightforward analysis of situations in which
people who are different from each other find themselves in communication
difficulty of some sort. As we have said, these situations are often ones of
communication across the lines of different discourse systems, not situ-
ations of cultural differences at all. In this final chapter which has been
prepared new for this second edition we have two purposes. In this first
section we will give an outline of the theoretical framework which we have
left implicit throughout most of the book. This will include a number of
developments in our work since the preparation of the first edition as well.
In the second section of this chapter we then turn to the question which
has most often arisen in discussions with readers of the book: How can we
effectively use the ideas in Intercultural Communication in our own research,
teaching, training, and consultation projects? Therefore, in the second sec-
tion we will pick up the question of ethnographic methodology which we
introduced in the first chapter and then, in passing, in the Grammar of
Context in chapter 2, and again in the Outline Guide to the Study of
Discourse Systems in chapter 8, and pull this together into a set of sugges-
tions for the use of this framework in developing new projects.

The Theoretical Framework

We can introduce the problem of a theoretical framework for the study of

intercultural communication with the practical problem we have all had to
face when we have had an interest in this type of research and study. You
pick a situation to study as an intercultural situation (or an interdiscourse
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 267

situation) and then you find that nothing at all seems to have gone wrong.
The social interaction proceeds smoothly and you come to feel that there is,
after all, nothing to the idea that interdiscourse communication causes
problems of communication. We could phrase this orientation as the “com-
munication breakdown” assumption. Alternatively, you pick a situation to
study and things do go wrong, but it is very hard to argue that the problems
arise out of cultural (or discursive differences) rather than other more basic
differences such as that the participants have different economic goals. For
example, even when a Japanese businessman fails to sell his product to an
Indonesian customer, the reasons are likely to have to do with product
quality or suitability, with the pricing or delivery structure, or perhaps with
the even more basic problem that the customer did not really seek to buy
the product in the first place, and the intercultural differences between
Japanese and Indonesians may really be much less important.
Even more fundamental than this problem is the problem of bias in the
research. How does a researcher isolate a situation to study in the first
place? If you start by picking a conversation between a woman and a man,
you have started by presupposing that women and men – and this particular
woman and this particular man – will be different from each other, that this
difference will be significant, and that this difference is the most important
and defining aspect of that social situation. In most cases, none of these can
be assumed to be true and yet if the researcher begins by making this
assumption and goes through the long, painstaking work of careful analysis,
human nature is likely to lead this researcher to find significant differences
and to attribute those differences to his or her a priori categories “women”
and “men” whether they really fit or not.
The theoretical framework we use is rooted in three principles along with
their corollaries as we outline them below. None of these originate with us
though perhaps this particular combination might not be found in any other
source. For readers interested in pursuing this theoretical framework, we
should say that we have been most strongly influenced by the thinking of
Edward Sapir, Gregory Bateson, Lev Vygotsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John
Gumperz, Dell Hymes, Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kitaroo Nishida,
and Pierre Bourdieu.

PRINCIPLE ONE: The principle of social action: intercultural

communication is best conceived as a matter of social actions,
not systems of representation or thought or values

Our theoretical framework is based on the idea that the most useful focus
for research as well as for education and training are the actions people take
in which differences produce sources of conflict in power or in understanding.
268 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

Our other principles derive from this focus on people-in-action. We do not

mean to deny or dismiss the importance of the broad meaning systems,
semiotic systems, or meaning potentials by which we take social action. We
simply mean to say that our focus is not on the analysis of those systems so
much as it is on the actions taken.

COROLLARY ONE: The ecological unit of analysis

Any theoretical position will have a natural unit of analysis. As we have
indicated earlier, much cross-cultural research takes as its unit of analysis the
cultural system of meaning, both linguistic and non-verbal. From our per-
spective, however, the unit of analysis for an action-based theory of intercultural
communication is people-in-action, that is, the unit of analysis is not just the
system of culture by itself and it is not just the individual person by herself
or himself. Our unit of analysis is the person in the moment of taking social
action. Normally, of course, social actions are taken in social interactions with
other people, and so we do not mean to focus only on single individuals.
Thus we prefer to focus on people-in-action in the plural rather than the
person-in-action, though we do leave open the idea that even when acting
alone a person’s actions are probably best conceived of as social actions
because of the strong role of cultural codes, values, ideologies and the social
practices which are the primary tools of all human actions.

COROLLARY TWO: Practice: all social action is based in tacit, normally

non-conscious actions
Any study of communication must make unconscious practices explicit for
the purpose of analysis. This leads to a serious misrepresentation or at least
the potential for misrepresentation as the researcher or reader can come to
think that the processes described in such detail are actually conscious pro-
cesses which are subject to the participants’ analysis and conscious manipula-
tion. Our theoretical position is that, on the whole, communication arises out
of social practice. By that we mean that we do not really know consciously how
we act and communicate; we just do what “comes naturally” in the course
of social interactions.
This does not mean that we do not have many ways of talking about our
communicative practices, of course. What we would argue, nevertheless, is
that when we talk about communication that in itself is just another commun-
icative practice and should never be mistaken for the communication itself.
Korzybski (1948) said many years ago, “The map is not the territory,” and
we would rephrase that to say that the talk about communication is not the
communication itself.
We would go further than this to say that most often when unconscious
practice is made conscious, that is, when we begin to talk directly about
communication, that action is, in itself, a significant communicative act and
often felt to be a negative one. To give just one homey example, if we have
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 269

worked hard at learning how to say, “Please take me to Beijing University”

so that when we arrive at the airport we can board a taxi and get to our
destination without trouble, we are pleased if the taxi driver just takes us
there, but if he should launch into some commentary about how we have
pronounced it, even if it is entirely complimentary, we feel that the focus has
shifted ground unpleasantly. Chinese in North America like British in China
are equally put off when people quite enthusiastically say, “Oh you know
how to use a knife and fork,” or “Look, he can use chopsticks.” That is, it is
in the nature of practice for it to be and to remain out of conscious awareness.

COROLLARY THREE: Habitus: the basis of communicative action is the

habitus, an individual’s accumulated experience of society both within
and across group boundaries
Most of what we know and do, we know and do without knowing how. We
have just “picked up” how to walk like our parents, how to talk like them,
how to be a certain sort of person within a certain type of group or discourse.
The word habitus is simply the cover term to summarize the person’s entire
life history up to the present point. Our theoretical principle here is that our
communicative actions arise out of the habitus, they arise out of our past
experiences, and this habitus is absolutely unique to each person. Of course,
children growing up in the same family or the same community, members of
the same social class, members of the same gender groups and generations
and so forth, will have very similar experiences and so the habitus of these
people will have much in common.
The idea of the habitus is used to capture the idea of social practice. That
is to say, our theoretical position is that we do not largely act out of conscious
purpose and planning. We act as we do, not because we want to accomplish
X, Y, or Z, but because we are that sort of person who normally does that sort
of thing. Bourdieu (1990) makes a point of arguing that social practice origi-
nates outside the individual person and so this entirely “natural” sense of
doing things because we are that sort of person is a kind of “amnesia”. That
is, we normally have completely forgotten that at one time our mothers might
have said, “We put the fork on the left of the plate because mostly people use
the fork in the left hand.” Of course it is more likely that when, as children,
we were helping to set the table our mothers simply said, “Put it like this . . . no,
not like that, like this.” Now as adults when we set the table, if we put the
fork on the left, we do so simply because that’s how it’s done.

COROLLARY FOUR: Positioning (identity claims): all social actions make

implicit or explicit claims to the social groups and positions of all
participants – speakers, hearers, and those talked about or in front of
Because our habitus is formed largely unconsciously just in the course of day-
to-day activities within particular social groups, our actions which arise from
that habitus display for others that very particular history. We might focus
270 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

attention on this, for example, if a person put the fork on the right side of the
dinner plate. We can imagine someone saying, “Didn’t your mother raise you
right?” That is, this “failure” to act in a communicatively expected way
might be taken as producing an identity of a person as resistant to his or her
mother’s socialization. Alternatively, a person who sets the table in that way
because a guest is known to be left-handed may take this conscious reflection
on practice as evidence of his or her social sensitivity.
In a study of handbills being handed out in the streets of Hong Kong, we
found that even such a simple act as handing an announcement of a sale at a
nearby store could not be undertaken without the persons imputing or claim-
ing some kinds of identity. When the handbill was written in Chinese, for
example, the person handing them out was reluctant to hand one to Ron
Scollon when he or she saw him, apparently because as an expatriate it was
thought he would not be able to read Chinese. That is, a quick glance in a
very crowded thoroughfare included imputing an identity complete with
assumptions about language competence.

COROLLARY FIVE : Socialization: because all social actions position the

participants, all communications have the effect of socialization to
communities of practice
Studies of baby talk to very young infants show that rather than using the
simpler pronouns – I, you, we, they – people speak to infants with terms
which sketch out the relationships of all the participants. “Say, ‘Hi Auntie’,”
“There’s your Momma over there,” “Hold Gramma’s hand,” “Oh, there’s
Goong-goong [grandpa].” All of these were spoken to a two-day-old infant
instead of, “Say ‘Hi’ to me,” or “Hold my hand.” Similarly, Suzanne Scollon
in a current ethnographic study has found in becoming a member of a new
Taijiquan exercise group in Hong Kong that it was very important to the
members that she address them with the correct terms of address. Of course,
we all know that in taking up a new job, entering into a new school program,
or marrying into a new family it is extremely important to get the names of
people right and refer to them in the most appropriate way.
In the same way, Winnie Or found in her ethnographic research project
conducted in Hong Kong and China that some clients would doubt the
credentials of a potential consultant if that consultant seemed to be ambigu-
ous in her use of terms or if she appeared to be claiming too much expertise.
That is, potential clients evaluated the consultant’s membership and exper-
tise in a consultation company based on the language she used and how
confidently or even over-confidently she spoke of her own expertise.
The theoretical principle here is that whatever we say, we claim ourselves
to be members of one community rather than another and, to the extent
we succeed in making these claims, we actually move from more peripheral
levels of participation in those communities to more central levels of par-
ticipation. Perhaps everyone who has learned a second language knows of
the fear of using too much of that language, not because it might be used
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 271

incorrectly, but because it might be used too well and lead people to think
that one knows more than one really does and therefore raise unrealistic
expectations about our ability to perform as full members in that linguistic
community.

COROLLARY SIX: Othering: because of the principle of socialization, all

communications have the simultaneous effect of producing “others” who
are identified as not being members of the relevant community of practice
This principle is the other side of the coin of the principle of socialization.
Whatever we say, we not only make claims about groups in which we are
identifying ourselves, we also make claims about who is outside of that group
as some kind of “other.” It has been argued by some that the identification of
“self ” is only done through the identification of some “other.” Many lan-
guages, such as Mandarin Chinese, make a distinction between the inclusive
and exclusive first person plural pronoun (“we” in English). In English the
one pronoun does not make this distinction, but in Mandarin one might say,
using the exclusive pronoun, “We’re going to dinner,” and mean “Your
mother and I (but not you) are going to dinner,” for example in explaining
to a child that she will be staying home with a sitter. Or one might use the
inclusive pronoun and mean, “You and I (and perhaps others) are going
to dinner.” In any event there is no way of producing some participants as
members of an inside group without at the same time, at least by implication,
producing others as an outside group.
While this is often only an implication, in many cases of intercultural
communication or interdiscourse communication this is, in fact, the primary
goal of the social interaction. We say we are “we” for the purpose of saying
they are “they.” In our experience, these last two principles are the main
occasions by which the idea of culture or discourse systems arises in ordinary
conversation. In a comparative study of business communication in Hong
Kong, Beijing, and Finland, one of the participants in a focus group held in
Beijing became rather animated in talking about comparative Chinese and
European practices for non-verbal communication. He said that “we” East
Asians are taught that we should remain quiet in our bodies and not make a
lot of gestures, whereas “we” all know that Europeans and Americans use a
lot of gestures all the time.
Three things were striking about this example: first, he used the occasion
of talking about non-verbal communication to bring up the idea of culture.
It was clear from the transcript that this person was trying to make a clear
distinction between “we Chinese” and “they,” the Europeans. We felt that it
was not that he was trying to make clear the cultural differences between
Chinese and Europeans. We had had much discussion of differences in busi-
ness and business presentation practices up to this point. On the contrary, it
seems to us that the main concern was, in fact, to set up one group, a “we,” as
the internal or ingroup reference, and to set up another group, a “they,” as an
external or outgroup reference.
272 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

This is somewhat supported because, secondly, this was the only time in a
large research project on business communication involving several focus
groups in three countries and much interviewing that anybody had brought
up the word culture. Prior to this, nobody had mentioned culture as an
analytical concept but was quite happy to refer to people as “the people in
this videotape” or “the person who made this résumé” or “the person giving
that presentation.” That is, normally they had referred to the people they
were considering quite specifically in terms of the actions they were under-
taking in specific cases, not in terms of their group or cultural membership.
Thirdly, we believe he was primarily concerned with setting up a broad
ingroup/outgroup cultural distinction because he was completely wrong in
fact. The videotape we had been watching was of a group of Finnish people
who were very still on the camera. In fact, even when playing the tape fast-
forward there was so little body movement that at points it looked as if the
camera had lapsed into freeze frame. These were the “Europeans” to which
this man was referring when he said that they used a lot of gestures all the
time. In contrast to this, this man made rather extreme and wide gestures all
the time he was making this comment and at other times as well.

PRINCIPLE TWO: The principle of communication

We take it as axiomatic that social actions are accomplished through various

codes of communication. That is, the very meaning of the term “social” in
the phrase “social action” implies some common and shared system of
meaning, in the first place, and of communication, in the second place. That
is, we believe that the only way in which social action can take place is
through the communication of that action from one person to another.

PRINCIPLE THREE: The principle of history, society, and culture

All communications are taken through semiotic codes which have a history,
by which we simply mean that they exist outside of and prior to any situated
use. The consequence of this is that any particular person is never free to
use them in any arbitrary way at all, but must use them within some range
of restricted or shared meanings. That is, the codes bring with them to any
social action a pre-established set of limitations. At the same time, these
codes are also altered through their use and thus no use of any semiotic (or
cultural or social) code is absolutely determining of the social action. Put
another way, communications bring into any social action a history and with
that history a set of contradictions and complications which are the sources
of both ambiguities and of novelty and creation.
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 273

COROLLARY ONE: Interdiscursivity: because of the principle of history,

all communication is positioned within multiple, overlapping, and even
conflicting discourses
A Finnish woman working in a diplomatic position in China is simultan-
eously in the position of representing her own country and its values and in
the position of needing to communicate effectively with not only her Chinese
counterparts but also people from the very large expatriate diplomatic and
business community now active in China. As a Finn she recognizes the cul-
tural value placed on verbal reticence. As a professional diplomat she recognizes
the expectation for verbal fluency in contacts with non-Finns. This woman,
in virtually every social encounter except those with Finns from the home
country, is faced with the dilemma of using (displaying) her culturally valued
Finnish reticence in speaking and being taken, perhaps, as uncommunicative
or of being quite outspoken so that she can accomplish her diplomatic goals.
Of course, if she takes this latter position, she runs the risk of signaling to
others that Finns do not (or at least she does not) place much value on the
Finnish social practice of verbal reticence.
This is the sort of dilemma which we often face when we are caught
between the values, norms, and practices of different discourse systems in
day-to-day communication. As a theoretical position we take this as the norm
for communication, not the exception. Whether we are in such rarefied
positions as diplomats in another country’s national capital or in ordin-
ary day-to-day circumstances, we would argue that all communications are
positioned within this sort of interdiscursivity. For example, one is simul-
taneously a woman, a professional, a mother, and a member of a charity’s
management board. Each of these discourses has an expected set of forms of
discourse, ideologies, face relations, and patterns for socialization and often
they are in conflict with each other. We argue that this is the fundamental
nature of communication.

COROLLARY TWO: Intertextuality: because of the principle of history, all

communications (particular utterances) borrow from other discourses and
texts and are, in turn, used in later discourses
An upper-level manager who is a Caucasian male from Chicago working in an
office supply products company will find that he speaks simultaneously as a
member of several discourse systems. As a man his speech is likely to differ
from that of the women who are his colleagues both in simple matters of
vocabulary and in matters of style, emphasis and perhaps even the degree of
affiliation with the Utilitarian Discourse System which tends to dominate in
business environments. As an upper-level manager it is likely that he speaks
from the point of view of a Baby Boom envelope of values and ideologies and
being from Chicago he is likely to embed in his discourse, quite apart from
274 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

the flat “a” [æ] in his pronunciation of the word “Chicago,” other values
having to do with particular basketball teams or other sports.
When this manager meets with a business partner in Hong Kong who was
born in Guangzhou (China), mostly likely during the Cultural Revolution,
the two of them will find some areas of overlapping interest (their business)
and some areas of complete unintelligibility. Some of these might actually be
surprising. If, by chance, the Hong Konger wears a Chicago Bulls T-shirt on
a social outing in the harbor, this apparently “common” point of reference
will be based in such radically different understandings of the term “Chicago
Bulls” as to be in different languages.
This only illustrates the intertextuality possible in virtually all situations of
communication. Our theoretical position is that we bring to any situation our
own histories of discourse which then infiltrate the ongoing situation with the
meanings of other times, places, and occasions. Only to some partial extent
can these intertextual borrowings be explained and clarified.

COROLLARY THREE: Dialogicality (or conversational or practical

inference): because of the principle of history, all communications
respond to prior communications and anticipate following
communications
In chapter 4 we have given examples of how in communication we derive the
meaning of what is being said at this moment by assuming that it is a response
to what has immediately preceded it and also by assuming that it is directed
to what will follow. Problems in intercultural or interdiscourse communication
most often arise in one of two ways: either some party is simply ignorant of
what has preceded or what is expected to follow some communication because
it lies outside of their cultural or social awareness, or the actual expected
sequencing is not understood because this can also differ from group to group.
To repeat an example of the first case, in chapter 1 we noted that it is
common in the UK and in North America, as well as elsewhere such as in
Brazil, to use the phrase, “Let’s have lunch,” not as a serious invitation to
have lunch but simply as a casual way of saying “goodbye.” The intention is
no more than to say something like, “I’ve enjoyed the conversation and
wouldn’t mind getting together again sometime.” The person who expects
this utterance to be followed by another communication setting up the actual
luncheon date will be frustrated by this apparently broken dialogicality.
We have also illustrated the second problem which arises through the
principle of dialogicality in discussing inductive and deductive strategies for
the introduction of topics in conversation in chapter 5. If a particular group
or person or situation practices a pattern of inductive topic introduction,
someone expecting the topic to appear at the beginning of a social interaction
will either assume the first introduced topic to be the main point of the social
interaction or will simply be puzzled by the apparent incoherence of the
overall interaction.
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 275

From System to Action

To bring this theoretical section to a close we would like to suggest that it is

useful to rephrase our basic research question. We began the original pre-
face with the sentence, “This book is about professional communication
between people who are members of different groups.” We began chapter 1,
“In a business meeting between Hong Kong Chinese and Anglo-North
American businessmen. . . .” In both cases we have implied that somehow
it is possible to know in advance of undertaking the research that people are
members of different groups and of what different groups they are mem-
bers. This implies that the first step in analysis is knowing discourse sys-
tems and any particular person’s membership in those various systems.
We do not really want to change this perspective as that remains the
focus of our research and of the analysis given in this book. At the same
time we would now prefer to begin with a different set of questions that
would focus on people taking particular actions together quite irrespective
of any discourse systems and identities they might claim. So the basic
research question is: what is the action which these people are taking? From
that then follows the intercultural or interdiscourse question: how and
when and to what effect is the concept of culture or the concept of member-
ship in groups produced within this action?
That is, the focus we would prefer now and which we have taken in our
research and training projects in the past five years presupposes the three
principles and their corollaries given above; it presupposes that all situations
are multi- or poly-discursive and, therefore, it presupposes that any action
in the social world is interdiscursive. It is also intertextual and dialogic.
Further, any action is based in practice – the life of the social world(s)
within which one lives – and in habitus – one’s own history of experience.
Our theoretical position assumes that any act positions oneself and all other
participants and, through positioning them, produces socialization to some
groups as well as exclusion from some others.
The gist of intercultural or interdiscourse analysis, then, is not simply to
try to describe discourse systems and to theorize about what might happen
if members of two different systems came into contact. The gist is to focus
on people taking action in particular and concrete tasks and then to ask,
without presupposing, what is the role of culture and of discourse systems
in their taking these actions. How are these actions productive of “culture”
or of membership in particular discourses or communities of practice? How
are these actions significant in producing “others,” that is, out-group mem-
bers, through practices of inclusion and exclusion? In some cases we would
now refer to this approach as the “mediated discourse” approach.
276 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

Projects in Intercultural Communication

A major worldwide manufacturer of electronic equipment conducted train-

ing for their mid-level management with the goal of making their products
and services more responsive to regional market demands. As part of that
training these managers met in four sites around the world where the
company has a significant presence, including Hong Kong and South China.
One of the sessions within the training package was prepared and conducted
by the authors on the basis of the ideas presented here in Intercultural
Communication. Our purpose was to highlight two aspects of this company’s
presence in Hong Kong and South China: 1) to assist the company which
had very few Chinese employees in their relations with their Chinese coun-
terparts in Hong Kong and China and 2) to provide a kind of Cultural
Impact Statement of how their products have been received as a cultural
issue, not an economic issue and to assist them in anticipating the impact of
new products which were currently being designed.
Our goal in this concluding section of Intercultural Communication is to
outline a few of the ways in which the ideas presented here can be used in
providing teaching, training, research, and consultation services in business
and governmental sectors. While this must necessarily be just a sketch of
possibilities, we hope that on the basis of these ideas, readers will be able to
develop their own programs for delivery to relevant organizations and
groups.
The program we mentioned just above had two components. The first
could be called simply Intercultural Training as the focus is on company
personnel (largely European and North American) and on their relation-
ships with their counterparts (largely Cantonese-speaking Chinese) in
regional offices. The focus is on interpersonal social interactions in meet-
ings, on the shop floor, in regional service centers, and at the counter in
their retailing operations. The second type of component could be called a
Cultural Impact Statement. Here the focus is on the aspects of the regional
culture which would either have an impact on or be impacted by the prod-
uct itself or by the processes of manufacturing, warehousing, servicing, sales,
and use within the market. We would want to distinguish a Cultural Impact
Statement from a normal marketing plan or marketing study or from more
internal business plans in that the specific focus is on the cultural aspects of
the introduction or development of particular material goods and products
or of the institutionalization of the business organization within the local or
regional sphere.
Other types of intercultural training and service programs might be Lan-
guage Audits, Culture Audits, Pre-departure and In-country briefings and
training, Language and Culture Seminars, and so forth, including the broad
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 277

analysis of social issues of importance to governmental or organizational

groups. We will comment briefly on each of these in turn.
By a Language Audit, we mean simply to do an ethnographic analysis of
internal language needs and uses for an organization. In Hong Kong, for
example, it is common within the working world for all discussion to take
place in Cantonese but for the documents which are the result of these
discussions to be written in English. Going against the grain of this practical
day-to-day reality are training programs in both governmental and cor-
porate spheres which assume wrongly that if the documents are being dis-
seminated in English, all the preceding discussions, meetings, and other
preparations are also happening in English, and the result of this simple
failure to audit the actual circumstances is that training time is largely
wasted. The expatriate English-speaking trainers, of course, are wholly
unaware of both the prevailing language practice and of the fact that their
own training programs are not touching the day-to-day reality of the work-
place. In such a case a simple language audit can save hours of wasted training
time. The book The New Work Order by James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull,
and Colin Lankshear (1996) indicates that such practices are also widely
found in such places as the computer factories of California’s Silicon Valley,
where training in the antiquated English language book-and-classroom is
being conducted with workers who are predominantly speakers of East
Asian languages and who carry out their daily work in those languages.
A Culture Audit is very much the same sort of process as a language audit
and in most cases they are done together, though as we have indicated
throughout this book, in many cases the “cultural” differences of relevance
are between different discourse systems, not between different cultures in
the broad anthropological sense. A culture audit is an ethnographic analysis
of processes internal to the organization where people who position them-
selves in different discourses find that those differences are productive of
problems either in communication or in efficiency of operation or manage-
ment. The psychologist Layne Longfellow, as we have noted in chapter 9,
has observed that within North American corporate structure, perhaps the
largest single barrier to smooth management is the gap between the two
American generations, the Baby-Boom generation and the Depression/War
generation. As this gap moves upward now we see an equally problematical
gap opening up between the Baby-Boom managers who have now moved
into senior positions and the Infochild (or “Generation-X”) labor force, or,
as Gee, Hull, and Lankshear have pointed out, now between the Baby-
Boom managers and their East Asian or Hispanic workforce. Deborah Tannen
has pointed out in her book Talking from 9 to 5 (1994) that an equally
unproductive cultural gap exists between women and men in organiza-
tions. A culture audit simply analyzes these unproductive tensions within
an organization to highlight ways in which effective management can
278 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

minimize the conflicts and deploy the strengths of the different organiza-
tional members.
Pre-departure and In-country briefings and training are common practices
in both governmental and business organizations. The training program we
have mentioned above with the electronics manufacturer consisted of both
aspects. In the home country our colleagues there conducted pre-departure
training. This consisted of a general survey of such simple, but important,
matters as what kinds of food to expect, how the managers would be able to
get along linguistically – would they need translators or would they be able
to use their home language or English in airports, taxis, restaurants and
so forth? – and what would they expect the attitudes of “locals” to their
presence to be. They were prepared to make quite specific observations in
areas where it was clear there would be potential cultural surprises for them
and primed to respond positively to those differences. Such pre-departure
training is given against the background of the home country environment
and so must necessarily focus on a few, sometimes even stereotypical, atti-
tudes and ideas that employees will have about their foreign counterparts.
Perhaps the central goal could be said to highlight stereotypes and to pre-
pare the people being trained to not over-react to those aspects of behavior
when or if they actually encounter them.
The counterparts of these pre-departure sessions are In-country Briefings.
Now the people receiving the training are in the environment about which
the training is being delivered. Here the primary need is to respond to the
almost overwhelming complexity with which the visitors are being faced
and to help to forestall the common reactions which take people to one of
two extremes. There are those who come to blindly love everything about
the new country and will admit of no difficulties or complexities, and there
are those who come to hate everything. For effective functioning in busi-
ness, governmental, or personal environments, both of these extremes must
be mitigated and in-country briefings and training sessions must emphasize
general patterns on the one hand so as to reduce the feelings of complexity,
and to introduce diversity to forestall stereotyping and over-simplification
on the other.
A new book by Yuling Pan (2000), Politeness in Chinese Face-to-Face
Interaction, is particularly useful in the environment of South China, and
also more generally throughout the world because it shows how to develop
a very effective Golden Mean between the two extremes of complexity
and stereotyping. In this book Pan analyzes Chinese politeness in formal
meetings, in family settings, and in service encounters such as the sale of
stamps in the Post Office or the sale of clothing in a fashionable women’s
boutique. She accounts for the foreigner’s contradictory perception that the
Chinese are very polite on the one hand but also that Chinese can appear to
be very rude, on the other, as in when one tries to use official services. Based
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 279

on an extended ethnographic research project as well as her own personal

experience as a Chinese, she shows that in formal meetings it is official rank
which is the dominant consideration, not gender or generation. “Politeness”
in these circumstances translates to careful consideration of rank and position
within the organization.
In family settings it is the more traditional “Confucian” values which
control the situation, giving prior conversational rights to older over younger,
or to men over women. Thus, in family situations “politeness” means show-
ing “traditional Chinese” respect. This contrasts, again, with service encoun-
ters in which there is a division between state-run businesses and private
business. In the state-run businesses there is a kind of “rudeness” which is
so often seen by both Chinese and foreigners alike because such service
encounters are seen as egalitarian and purely pragmatic. In the new private
businesses such as the women’s clothing boutique she studied, for example,
salespeople use the language of kinship to try to establish very close and
familiar, almost family ties to customers as a “polite” way of encouraging
the obligation to buy. Such research can be used to very great effect in in-
country briefings to open up an understanding of the variety of ways in which
differences from situation to situation can be understood and interpreted.
Language and Culture Seminars are often the preliminary step in develop-
ing a consultation or training program. Most organizations in government
and business provide training programs for their employees and staff. Lan-
guage and cultural seminars are normally short two- or three-hour pro-
grams which cover the main issues which are known to be significant for the
organization or for the trainees. The authors, for example, conducted such
seminars for several major Korean corporations as part of their training
programs for managers who would be stationed in North America. There
the focus is given by the organization and the purpose is quite clear – to
provide an overview of the most important aspects of North American
language and culture for these employees who would be spending six months
to a year in the US. As an example of one small detail that rarely fails to
come as a surprise in Korea, we needed to point out the very large propor-
tion of the American population which is linguistically Hispanic. These
Koreans virtually always made visits to Los Angeles if they were not, in
fact, stationed there because of the very large Korean population of that
city. Over and over again, returning employees commented on how they
might have done better to have had a Spanish language program than an
English language program. Such fairly simple facts of language and culture
are the meat of these short seminars but can be extremely useful in orient-
ing people to important matters of language and culture that will not other-
wise arise in their training programs.
Traditional Technical Skills Training may seem entirely outside the pur-
view of the study of intercultural communication but, as we have argued in
280 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

chapter 6, many of the skills of writing, for example, which it is taken for
granted are universal skills, are really ideological values of a particular dis-
course system. The businessman who told us that all you need is the 5 W’s
and 1 H said himself that this way of writing would not work for his
employer, a very wealthy oil producer who himself preferred an ornate style
which attended closely to developing proper social relationships with his
readers. It is not at all uncommon for an organization to hire training con-
sultants to “teach common writing skills” when, in fact, what they really want,
but do not know they want, is intercultural communication skills. Thus, much
intercultural training is actually carried out in the service of more basic com-
munication skills. We would argue that virtually any training program has
an intercultural or interdiscursive component and we have found ourselves
and our colleagues very often engaged in intercultural work flying under the
colors of much more mundane and traditional technical skills training.
Of course these few examples of the kind of projects people working in
intercultural communication do are only a few examples to illustrate some
of the variety. Intercultural communication specialists work in personnel
offices, in marketing departments, in management, in product development,
in diplomatic protocol offices, in translation and communication depart-
ments, in public relations departments, and in many other organizational
functions. As we have just said, intercultural communication or interdiscourse
communication is normally a part of almost any organizational or inter-
personal communication, and so the world in which these ideas might be
applied is a large world indeed. But rather than continue to illustrate where
this work might be applied, now we would like to turn to a discussion of
how one might go about developing projects in intercultural communica-
tion using the ideas and methodologies given in this book.

Methodology and Use

It would be impossible to present in just one portion of this final chapter a

full methodology for developing training or research projects in intercultural
or interdiscourse communication, of course, but in our own work we use the
following three general principles to develop ideas. Indeed, most of what
you have read up to this point has come out of these research and develop-
ment strategies over the years.

Focus on a task, action, or practice

Do not be distracted by trying to make a full or exhaustive description of
any entire discourse system or culture or social world or organization. This
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 281

is simply impossible, but worse than that, even if it were possible you would
still be left not being entirely sure how to apply your knowledge when you
were finished. Focus on a specific task, an action, or a practice. In the training
we provided for the international electronics manufacturer, for example, the
task upon which we focused was the filling of service orders. The company
had identified that as a particular bottleneck in overall company performance
and so it seemed a suitable place to begin and on which to focus our efforts.
Much work in intercultural communication has focused on such tasks as
job interviews, advancement or evaluation interviews, committee meetings,
writing a committee report, or making a sale with a client. Organizations
organize themselves through their tasks, the philosophies, values, and cor-
porate cultures all manifest themselves in tasks, and so this is the most
fruitful place to begin an analysis.
More specifically, it is best to focus on a single action – some moment in
the accomplishment of the task – which seems, at least at the outset, to be
crucial. If it is a meeting over a contract, perhaps the moment of getting the
signature onto the contract is the crucial moment. If it is a committee
report, perhaps the moment in which a superior marks in red ink (or black
fountain pen ink as it turns out in some cases) a stylistic correction that
must be fixed is crucial. All tasks are made up of chains of actions and it is
the study of concrete actions that helps you to sort out what is crucial to
your analysis and what is actually only interesting but really quite peripheral.
Whether the focus is on a task or on a specific, concrete action, you are
interested in asking how is this action positioned within what discourses or
communities of practice? What forms of discourse are called upon to accom-
plish the task or action? What face systems are invoked? What ideologies
are displayed?
Alternatively, you might want to focus on a practice. Perhaps it is the
practice to answer the telephone in a particular way. One might study a
large number of telephone calls, focusing upon just answering, to see what
variation in the practice there is, when the practice varies, and why. In this
case one is interested in who answers in different ways and why. Is it be-
cause of who is calling? And how do particular people come to be socialized
– learn to – answer in particular ways? In any event any training program is
ultimately focused on changing practice and so it is sometimes useful to
begin by focusing directly on practices.

Use the “Grammar of Context” as a preliminary

ethnographic audit

Organizational life, like all social life, is made up of a very large number of
tasks and actions and practices. You might begin studying anywhere, of
282 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

course, but there is often a problem that it is only after a considerable

amount of time that the researcher discovers that the task or action he or
she is studying is really of very minor importance in the overall life of the
organization or community of practice he or she is studying. And by the
same token, it is difficult to take at face value the analysis of members or
management of the organization. One case in which one of the authors
worked as a consultant is illustrative. The management of an organization
defined the problem for which he was called in to consult a simple problem
of poor trickle-down of information through the system. Management was
making decisions and promulgating the decisions, but somehow employees
were failing to pick up this information and act appropriately. Separate
consultations with the labor organization gave a radically different picture.
Their view was not that the information flow was bad – they knew exactly
what the decisions were and what was expected of them. What was bad in
their view were the decisions themselves. They had not been consulted,
they said, and they were the ones who held the most relevant information.
In their view, the management had simply and arbitrarily made poorly
informed decisions. They felt that the problem was that their ideas were not
percolating upward to the management level. We conclude that it is always
dangerous to take any internal definition of what are the important tasks at
face value. There are always alternative views and often enough the first
assessment is not only wrong, but strategically wrong – that is, it is designed,
unconsciously or consciously, to hide the real problems of the organization.
For this reason we feel that the first step that should be taken – whenever
this is actually possible – is to conduct an ethnographic audit of the organ-
ization or group one is seeking to help. The Grammar of Context we have
given in chapter 2 is the best way to open up such an audit. Key situations,
tasks, practices, or events need to be identified within the organizational
life. These then need to be sketched out at least roughly using the Grammar
of Context so that it becomes clear how these situations or tasks or practices
gear into the communicative life of the organization. From this it is gener-
ally possible to begin to set aside some events and to direct the focus more
closely on others.

Use the “Outline Guide” to pin down the relevant

discourse systems

Once you have established the task, action, or practice upon which you want
to focus your analysis you can then use the Outline Guide (chapter 8) to the
Study of Discourse Systems to structure your analysis. There are four basic
questions which need to be asked:
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 283

1 What are the preferred forms of discourse or communication through

which this task, action, or practice is performed?
2 What ideologies (beliefs, values) or historical realities are embedded in
this task?
3 What social relationships, face systems, identities are claimed, imputed,
or negotiated in this task?
4 How are members socialized into their ability to perform?

We realize that those apparently simple questions are far from simple, but
the attempt to come up with some answer to them is always productive
in coming to understand the intercultural or interdiscursive nature of any
particular task, action, or practice. Naturally, in each case certain aspects
will come to be more central than others and ultimately you will likely focus
on just a few of the many overall communicative means.

Change in Action or in Interpretation?

It is never easy to bring about communicative change. This is because our

communicative styles, our ideological positions, our face relationships and
the most common forms of discourse we use feel very much part of our
entire identity as social persons. Our habitus has been acquired over all the
years of our life and, as adults, one’s habitus comes to feel unalterable even
though we continue to undergo slow changes with each day.
That is from the point of view of the individual, of course. From the
point of view of the organization, change is also very difficult to induce
because institutions, like individuals, are very slow to change. Their com-
municative patterns are built into each little task, social practice, the design
of the buildings they inhabit, the layout of the floor plan, and the history of
social relationships among employees.
We have found it most productive to focus on internal development
rather than externally provided stimuli. That is, we are very skeptical about
the ability of an external consultant or trainer to make any really significant
change in an organization’s internal communicative operations. This is sim-
ply because of the relatively small impact, almost momentary impact, the
external consultant or researcher has by comparison to the constant, daily
momentum of organizational practice. For this reason we have focused our
efforts on providing organizations with assistance in developing their own
internal programs for communicative change.
Recently, for example, we have completed a project under the title
Professional Communication Across Cultures (Pan, Scollon and Scollon to
appear). In this project we designed a program by which people in business
284 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication

organizations or governmental agencies could exchange professional com-

munication portfolios across different regional and cultural offices. In our
case we worked between Hong Kong, Beijing, and Finland. In each site we
asked people to develop these portfolios of their own best professional
communications – résumés, videos of presentations, business cards, and the
like – which they then sent to the other two sites. In each site we led focus
groups to look at and respond to not only their own portfolios but also to
the portfolios of those from the other sites. Furthermore, in a second round
we asked them to respond to the responses from the other sites. Through
this triangulation we were able to let members of these groups 1) provide
their own best communicative products, 2) discover how those communicat-
ive products were interpreted by others, 3) discover how their own percep-
tions of difference were interpreted by others, and finally, 4) to reflect on
how they might change their own communicative practices to account for
these differences in perception and interpretation.
There are two aspects to this project of Professional Communication Across
Cultures which are important to note here. In the first place, as we have
noted earlier, even though the word “culture” was in the project name,
participants almost never used the word nor did they call upon cultural
analysis to account for differences in most cases. Thus we feel we are
justified in saying that in many cases, perhaps in most cases, from the point
of view of ordinary people culture is not a relevant conscious dimension of
interpretation and so as analysts we should use great caution in introducing
it in our work.
The second aspect which we think is important to note is that simple
self-conscious reflection on practice is never sufficient to bring about com-
municative change. That is, we would be naive to think that because the
people in this project had seen how others observe their communication
portfolios that they will automatically set about changing their actions. As
we noted above, one man directly contradicted himself in saying that “we
Chinese” never use gestures as he gesticulated wildly. Often enough, unfor-
tunately, “self-reflection” is self-serving rationalization that is quite wide of
the mark. Such training programs cannot be used naively without careful
guidance of trained leaders.
This leads us to realize that one of the central problems of intercultural
and interdiscourse communication is that we speak or communicate the way
we do largely for the purpose of expressing particular identities with which
we are very deeply connected, even if we are not always comfortable with
them. We change our identities very slowly and we would argue that any
communicative change is a change in identity. From this point of view, then,
the goal of training and consultation in intercultural communication is
overly ambitious if we think of it as changing behavior. How then much
more remote would be a goal of changing society? No, here we propose a
 Using a Discourse Approach to Intercultural Communication 285

much less ambitious goal, but one which we have seen again and again is
achievable. This goal is to change the interpretations people make in inter-
cultural and interdiscursive communication. If this book helps to reduce
stereotyping and to provide alternative understandings of how and why
people are saying what they are saying, if it helps to reduce feelings of irrita-
tion and annoyance when people behave differently from our expectations,
if it helps us to find ways to work together even when we know the other
does not fully understand or appreciate our point of view or our values,
then it will have achieved our goal.