Introduction

Global e-economy has driven business activities into multi-cultural context. Inevitably, business communication faces with a challenge, i.e., how to understand culture, which offers a thinking framework for developing communicating strategies. There follows another challenge, i.e. the effective use of language as a communication tool to decode and encode messages sent or received from other culture background. Yet, language is much more than just a communication tool. It is a thinking instrument as well as a communication tool. Moreover, business communication activities are initiated to realize business strategic intentions of global business game players and are constrained with legal regulations from home and host countries, international laws and international agreements. Therefore, business communication researches require an overarching framework to organically link together all such elements as business strategies, culture, language, and well-defined international business functional areas. The subject of this book is of multidisciplinary nature and focuses on multidisciplinary linkage within an overarching paradigm for business communication purposes in diverse culture context.

The first part defines an overarching paradigm and framework for cross cultural business communication. The paradigm is one of the academic contributions of this book to the study of communication, which serves as a logical framework for the whole book. The paradigm defined is by far a breakthrough in the studies on business communication. It integrates organically business functional activities with such contextual elements as business and corporate strategies of organizations, national culture and organizational culture, relations between strategies and cultures, language and its relations to culture, and legal environmental requests. All these contextual elements are further linked with international business functional areas defined as marketing, advertising and negotiation. Seven chapters in this part contribute to the definition of a paradigm for cross cultural business communication, business strategies, cultures, organizational cultures, language and culture, language strategies, message coding models, and message coding strategies and formats respectively.

The second part contributes to cross cultural marketing and advertising communication. The two chapters in this part start with business and corporate strategies, marketing strategies, legal requirements, culture implications and language applications to coding messages to carry out marketing and advertising campaigns from the global perspective. The first chapter in this part is supposed to carry out an effective cross cultural communication strategy to realize the marketing mix in foreign countries and develop coding skills in writing effective marketing plans. The second chapter deals with cross cultural advertising theories, message coding and decoding skills to develop an effective advertising plan to realize the marketing strategies.

The third part studies how business and corporate strategies, culture and language are related to international business negotiation. The only chapter in this part deals with cross cultural negotiations including language strategies, message coding strategies for negotiation and the international business contract.

Each chapter addresses a frontier topic on cross cultural business communication and can serve as a further research subject for future researchers. Each discipline involved is furthered through introducing the latest academic achievements. The insights on the gap between each discipline in terms of business communication offer new directions and research fields to academic researchers. Moreover, the message encoding and decoding strategies are addressed in actual practice context of different business functional areas. These strategies go beyond the results of academic researches of the author in a two-decade period. They are the essence of the author's experience as the first Chinese Director of Confucius Institute for Business at the State University of New York, Assistant Professor in English at Nanjing University of Technology, Associate Professor in Human Resource Management at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, A Guest Professor in Global Marketing Concepts to Masters of International Marketing （MIM） in fall of 2008 at Saint Joseph's University, US., Guest Professor in Business Communication to MBAs at Nanjing University and Nanjing University of Science and Technology in addition to an English interpreter, a licensed customers clearer and a foreign sales clerk in a joint venture corporation, and an import and export corporation. In this sense, practitioners will benefit most from adopting communication strategies developed in the book in their communication practice because these strategies are applicable, feasible, and tactful. They are drawn from practice of the author and perfected with academic insights developed in the long period of teaching and research in business communication, language and linguistic study, management, global marketing and advertising, business strategies and cultures, and human resource management.

This book is designed for researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of business communication in global context. It is an academic guide for business English undergraduates to further their theoretical researches, for business graduates to carry further on with their studies on English for international business purposes. Moreover, business researchers and practitioners can find relevant guides for proper use of language to carry out their business strategies in different culture and legal context. Most parts of the book display theoretical and practical breakthroughs in cross cultural business communication. The in-depth discussion relating to each discipline involved offers a framework of practical and academic insights on effective cross cultural business communication rather than superficially mentioning relevant business terms and jargons.

The interdisciplinary approach of this book is unique and attractive. Readers can obtain an integrated view of all aspects of disciplines properly and effectively linked with each other within such an overall paradigm, which they cannot obtain from any other book currently in print.