Cross-cultural business communications are becoming an important interdisciplinary subject field

Questions of intercultural interaction interest people of all ages and professions more and more. Today, everyone feels the need to learn foreign languages, but for successful communication, first of all, you need to know the language of other cultures. How to avoid intercultural misunderstanding, and why should one learn the language of culture? These and other questions were answered by Dean of the Faculty of Humanities Marina Tsvetkova and Academic Supervisor of the Master's Program "Media Text and Digital Communications" Nelli Boryshneva at the Major League Open Lecture Hall.

Lecture on the topic “Why “what is good for a Russian is death for a German”? In the labyrinths of Intercultural Communication” took place at the Corporate University of the Government of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. The meeting was meant for a wide range of listeners and brought together a very diverse audience: from students to representatives of business and the scientific community.

“Few people are aware that every culture has its own language. American anthropologist Edward Hall, the founder of intercultural communication, pointed it out in the 50s of the last century, and later presented his idea in the form of a coherent concept in a series of books, providing the theory with fascinating examples taken from his own practice, - said Marina Tsvetkova, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities.

Very quickly, his discoveries were picked up and “implemented” to such applied areas as management (it is impossible to manage people with different cultural backgrounds in the same way), marketing (it is necessary to sell to people whose tastes are shaped by different cultural traditions differently), teaching foreign languages (to master a language you need to think like a person who was born into it)

Nelli Boryshneva

Academic Supervisor of the Master's Program "Media Text and Digital Communications"

During the talk, we solved several cases of intercultural interaction, which show how diverse and important such a parameter as time management in different cultures is. After the lecture, there were many additional questions, we realized that the topic of intercultural interactions is of undoubted interest.

 In fact, cross-cultural business communications are now becoming a very important interdisciplinary subject field. For all those interested, in February 2022 a pilot advanced training program in intercultural communications is planned at the Faculty of Humanities of the National Research University Higher School of Economics - Nizhny Novgorod. This program will be based on the unique material of our expert teachers. And in September, a new bachelor's program "Foreign Languages and Intercultural Business Communication" is launched at the faculty.

The lecturers from the HSE - Nizhny Novgorod analyzed with their listeners real cases of intercultural misunderstanding.

“The most interesting was the question of our colleague Vladimir Kalmykov from Nizhny Novgorod Linguistic Dobrolyubov University. He began by questioning the correctness of  cultures classification proposed by Hall. Vladimir said, he often noticed how well neighbors in the United States (which scientists attribute to individualistic cultures) solve problems, for example, jointly deal with the effects of bad weather. However, the answer here is very simple. We look at the opposition of collectivism-individualism through the eyes of Russian culture, in which the word “collectivism” still has positive connotations, while individualism has negative ones and is treated as a kind of egoism or egocentrism. In the context of intercultural communication, a non-judgmental approach is used (like in anthropology, from which it has originated). It is true, that in collectivist cultures, people think in terms of "we", not "I", and collective interests dominate in them over personal ones. However, if a person is not a member of a group (family, group of friends, organization), his/her interests are of little concern to others. In individualistic cultures, where people from childhood think in the category of “I”, on the contrary, each individual constantly “keeps in sight” other individuals, trying not to infringe on their interests, since it guarantees that others will not interfere with his/her own interests. If in a collectivist culture a “feeling of the elbow” is valued, and it is expected from members of a group in which a person is usually included in a long-term format, then in an individualist culture the ability to cooperate, interaction, which is usually short-term and aimed at effective solving some joint problem, is valued”, said Marina Tsvetkova.

Ekaterina Pospelova

Director of the Center for Design Work of the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Management - a branch of the RANEPA

I would like to thank M.V. Tsvetkova and N.N. Boryshneva for interesting and well-structured lecture material, its relevance, for a productive dialogue with the audience and new knowledge in the field of intercultural communication. Sure, the study of the characteristics of other cultures enriches a person and sometimes changes the attitude towards the world and people. In my opinion, the lecture was convincing and memorable.

It became the starting point for a more detailed study of this topic and formed the need for analysis and evaluation of my own development in the field of intercultural communication.