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Bridging the Culture Gap: A Practical Guide to International Business Communication, by Penny Carte and Chris Fox. London: Kogan Page, 2004, 180 pages.
Cultural Intelligence: A Guide to Working with People from Other Cultures, by Brooks Peterson. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 2004, 229 pages.
A fascinating exercise, I have found, is to examine books on cross-cultural or intercultural communication and to consider the role played by language in the authors' formulations and presentations of the concepts at hand. Granted, successful communication does not revolve entirely around issues related to the use of spoken and written language; but some authors seem to bypass or ignore these components of communication altogether, as if they are neither concerns nor sources of any problems or difficulties in cross-cultural or intercultural relationships. In publications aimed at a business-world readership, especially, many authors seem to accept wholly the existence of a linguafranca-a global English (in the singular) that renders language irrelevant to a somewhat nebulously denned concept of culture. This sense of "culture," in turn, encapsulates most differences and is typically targeted as the root of conflict and discord in cross-cultural or intercultural relationships. I remain unsettled by the idea that culture can be isolated from, and learned independently of, language-or that "fluency" in a particular culture can arise without at least basic conversational ability in the predominant indigenous language (or languages) used. Furthermore, as Anne Burns has suggested (2003, p. 19), being a "monolingual speaker of English" may not particularly be an "advantage at a time when the majority of [English] speakers are bilingual or multilingual."
Penny Carté and Chris Fox, in Bridging the Culture Gap, do not address the importance of learning any language other than English for business purposes. Instead, they take for granted that English is, and will remain, the primary mode of communication in the international business world. Not until halfway through their main text, in fact, do they offer that "English has become the lingua franca of international business" (p. 79); perhaps they found this point to be too obvious to make any earlier in the text. Similarly, readers must wait until the second chapter (p. 43) to find an overly simplistic definition of culture as a "way of looking at the world" or a...