Intercultural business communication Basics

Before getting deeper into these issues, we need to understand the way students perceive the term “globalization”. This term is perceived in a number of ways: “the unity of capital”, “disappearing of borders between nations and increasing the international division of labor”, “the similarity of values among different cultures”, “everybody and everything together”. As it can be noticed from the results of our survey, which we held our academic group recently, the majority of students find globalization as the unity in economic, political and cultural aspects. Taking this into consideration, we can conclude that international communication plays a great role in the process of globalization.

And what is intercultural communication? “In its most general sense international communication occurs when a member of one culture produces a message for consumption by a member of another culture. More precisely, international communication is communication between people whose cultural perceptions and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communication event” (O. Kovbasyuk). In spite of the fact that this phenomenon is being researched by scholars from the whole world for many years, it still remains timely and causes controversies and discussions. Under the circumstances we would like to answer the list of questions: what is the role of intercultural communication in context of globalization? How will the process of globalization influence the humankind? Do we take into account cultural difference while we are joining the process of globalization, or do we globalize only for the sake of globalizing?

The first aspect of our attention is that societies and communities have no choice of either to participate in process of globalization or not, but the character of their participation is shaped by specific social, cultural, economic and political conditions. This complex multi-level process of mediation between the global and local issues, being an inherent character of communication, promises to change not only the context, but likely the nature of intercultural communication. Thus, the question about the place of intercultural communication is ambiguous.