The future of intercultural business communication

Practitioners and trainers alike should approach intercultural business communication from a new perspective, the BELF one, which would make the specific aspects related to the use of English in intercultural business encounters explicit.

First, the BELF perspective would emphasize the fact that BELF is used for doing business among people who are members of the global business community. In other words, all BELF users share the ‘B’, i.e. the context and culture of business. Because business is a highly goal-oriented activity, communication skills become crucial in order to achieve the goal.

Second, it would emphasize the fact that BELF is nobody’s mother tongue. This feature will naturally emphasize not only the need for appreciating different types of English, accents and pronunciation in particular, but also the need for appreciating different discourse practices.

Third, it would emphasize the need to learn and appreciate basic pragmatic phenomena, such as the use of politeness, and rhetorical appeals.

In particular, emotional appeals (pathos) and attempts to make the other party feel good can effectively bridge the gap between speakers coming from different cultural backgrounds. Plus, closely related to the previous point, the BELF perspective would also emphasize the need for cultural sensitivity: understanding one’s own cultural identity is a prerequisite for understanding that of others.

Inspired by the two research projects, we have modified our courses aimed at all B.Sc. (Econ.) students at the Helsinki School of Economics to meet the challenges of the globalizing business world more efficiently. Over the past ten years, we have changed our focus from ‘Business English’ to ‘English business communication’ with BELF as a natural starting point. In all our courses we aim to enhance our students’ communication skills in an intercultural environment, which naturally calls for a strong emphasis on communication strategy including, in particular, the in-depth analysis of the audience (see Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen 2007).

In 2005, the European university degree reform resulting from the Bologna process gave us an exceptional opportunity to start a new Master’s program in International Business Communication (see http://hse.fi/ibc/msc). The two-year Master’s Program focuses on the strategic role of communication in the global operations of multinational corporations. Among other things, we aim to train communication professionals with an understanding of the role of BELF in corporate strategy implementation in intercultural environments.

As we all know, communication is challenging. It is challenging for people who have worked together for years and who share the same national, organizational and professional culture. It is bound to be even more so between people who, for example, become colleagues overnight because of a cross-border merger. Assuming the BELF perspective in such situations, and in other international encounters, it should pave the way for successful intercultural business communication.

Instruction: While writing an effective abstract of Anne Kankaanranta’s article you will: use one or more well-developed paragraphs: these are unified, coherent, concise, and able to stand alone; use an introduction/body/conclusion structure which presents the article's purpose, results, conclusions, and recommendations in that order; follow strictly the organization and chronology of the article; provide logical connections (or transitions) between the information included; add no new information, but simply summarize the article; make it understandable to a wide audience; use passive verbs to downplay the author and emphasize the information.