1.8 Review and Discussion

This study first discusses elements and process of communication. Subsequently, it develops a model of communication and communication principles. Putting all these elements into global business context, this study defines core business functional activities which include international trade involving with import and export of commodities and manufactured goods, international investment of capital in manufacturing, marketing and advertising, and international payment and settlement （banking）. These activities happen at different stages of international business development, i.e., international business, foreign business, multinational company, global company, international company and transnational corporations. These activities happening at these six stages are driven by the following global market entry modes of international business such as: export mode, licensing mode, strategic alliances mode, acquisitions, and wholly owned subsidiary. Cross cultural business is thus defined as international trade involving with import and export, foreign investment, and cross cultural marketing and advertising, cross cultural negotiations, orders and their fulfillments, international settlement, international disputes and settlements. However, due to the limited time and the length of this book, this book includes three core business functions into the conceptual paradigm i.e., marketing, advertising and negotiation.

The introduction of business strategies, stages of business developments, and the latest development of global capitalism provides configuration of context information, business terms and jargons for business communicators to understand, encode and decode the messages.

The functional areas of international business and communication process are operated in three types of environments, i.e., domestic, foreign and international environment. Cross cultural business communication is influenced by indirect international environmental factors including political forces, economic and environmental forces, and technological forces. It is also affected by direct variable such as business strategies, social-cultural forces, language and legal forces.

Putting these three business activities into traditional communication model, the author structures a conceptual paradigm for business communication across cultures. The logical arrangements of the cross cultural communication study are introduced in the ending part. The two paradigms structured in this chapter are rarely found in current literature.

This book contributes to the literature with theoretical highlights for improving communicative practice between cultures and for improving the cross cultural communication competence of communicators. However, the latest research verifies the relationship between intercultural communication competence and the concepts of emotional intelligence, communication styles, and character traits. Cultural context partially explains intercultural competence, which clearly calls for differentiating training needs of people to become intercultural competent （Kaufmann, Englezou & García-Gallego, 2014）. Therefore, future study should focus on how to improve the intercultural communication competence. Moreover, the future study should develop quantitative methodology or adopt discourse analyses to further study the correlations among elements in the models and paradigms developed herein.