ENGL 3130: Business Writing

Professor:If you've never met a professor you might wonder what we do. We do research, write grant applications, write articles and books, review colleagues' work, give public presentations, participate in university governance, and teach (distill hundreds of books and articles into syllabi, create quizzes and tests, assign papers, offer feedback, grade, write letters of recommendation, design new classes). Most of the professors you will meet care deeply about teaching. They just wish they had more time for it. Remember there's a difference between learning and being entertained. Remember also that you don't have to like someone to learn from them. Dr. George Pullman
Office address: 2424, 25 Park Place
Phone: 404 - 413 - 5458When you do call someone, have a voice message prepared in advance. No more than 10 seconds. Speak slowly. Just say who you are, what you want, how to reach you. Repeat your number at the end, s-l-o-w-l-y. If you need more than 10 seconds, use email or face-to-face. I never use the phone, so with me, go straight to email.
Office Hours: I am available via gpullman@gsu.eduWhen emailing a professor, the subject line should be class number: day, time. Like this, for example, ENGL 3130: TR, 8:00. That way you don't have to introduce or explain yourself. The proper salutation is, 'Professor Lastname.' Don't use txt spk. Use complete sentences and standard punctuation. Don't ask questions Google answers. Don't ask, 'What did I miss?' (unless you want to antagonize your professor). Sign off with Thank you, and your name. Don't expect an immediate response. Many professors answer email only during a set time, say between 4 and 5 pm. I'm compulsively responsive to email but tend to maintain radio silence between 10 pm and 5 am..
I am early to class and frequently stay late, if you want to speak face-to-faceDon't be anonymous. Go to your professors' office hours at least once; early on is best. (Think of a smart question first: why did you get interested in SUBJECT HERE? What do SUBJECT majors do when they graduate? Most people, not just profs., like to talk about themselves, especially indirectly). Generally speaking, if you behave as though you take your learning seriously, a prof. will take you seriously. Otherwise, you are just a face in a sea of ever-changing faces..
You may also make an appointment, office, Skype/FaceTime, coffee shop.

Intercultural Communication

When we think of communicating with people from other countries, we tend to think of language barriers because they are the loudest source of interference. But there are interpretive conventions that can lead people from different parts of the world who have a language in common to draw very different conclusions from the same observations. In some cultures, for example, the appropriate way to indicate that you don't understand is to smile and nod your head up and down. If you are an American or a Canadian or someone from any of the EU countries of Britain, that's counter-intuitive. If you don't understand, you knit your brow and ask for clarification. But doing that suggests the right to ask questions -- which isn't a universal human right or even a widespread privilege in some cultures. It also demonstrates confusion or disagreement, something also not allowed in some cultures. If you don't know how people from different cultures tend to see the world differently, you will create unnecessary problems, and if you think that how you and others of your culture see the world is how the world is correctly seen, then you are making a serious, potentially lethal mistake.

NOTE: I am not advocating for cultural relativism. You don't come to accept someone else's point of view just by coming to understand it. I am simply asserting that people from different cultures and places see the world differently and knowing those differences will help you communicate more effectively.

Much of the early research on this kind of intercultural communication is reported in Cultures and Organizations: Software of the mind, Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov. The authors created a questionnaire consisting of various scenarios and asking respondents what of the offered responses seemed most consistent with how they would respond. They gave this questionnaire to thousands of IBM executives from different parts of the world over the course of many years.

Have a look at their data. Here is an example, although it is a paraphrase from Building Cross-Cultural Competence, Hampden-Turner, Trompenaars.

You and a friend are drinking in a bar one night. At closing time, the friend drives you home. The streets are disserted. A few blocks from home the driver loses control of the car and crashes into a ditch. No one is hurt and only the car is damaged. You go home. Next day, your friend calls and asks you to tell the insurance adjuster alcohol wasn't involved. Do you comply with your friends request?

alcohol was involved alcohol was not involved

Where you place the slider could depend on how you interpret key features of how the story is told. Do you infer from the scenario that the driver was drunk or at least that the accident was caused by alcohol in the driver's blood stream? Would you answer differently if the narrative said, "you'd both been drinking heavily"? Or even more directly, "The driver was drunk." What if you'd spent the evening in question trying to talk your friend out of having another drink? What if someone was hurt?

This scenario is an example of the universalism (all rules should be applied equally without exception) and particularism (each law should be applied on a case by case bias) continuum. If you default towards particularism, you might comply with your friend's request simply because you are friends. If, on the other hand, you lean universalist but find yourself in this case inclined toward particularism, you might rationalize your choice by observing that no one was hurt and insurance companies have lots of money. Or you might reject all that and just say, "Hey, I can't tell a lie," assert your universalism.

Given just this one example of the universalism/particularism continuum, the data wouldn't be very meaningful because the scenario is binary, you're asked would you or wouldn't you; yes or no, although the slider lets you indicate a level of commitment to either yes or no. To get a clear understanding of whether a group of people tended toward one pole or the other you would need many more scenarios, some of which wouldn't be yes or no. And you would need many respondents.

Here is an example of a scenario for a different continuum.

Should the boss get all the credit or should credit be shared with all employees? If your response is, "it depends," you would place the slider in the middle. Flesh out the scenario a bit for yourself. What additional facts would alter your inclination one way or the other?

Individualism and communalism are two ways of thinking about a person's place in the community. Are they an individual who has friends and acquaintances and colleagues or are they a representative of an ever expanding group of people whose identity is the group identity? Most people lean one way or the other based on the details of the scenario, and so again you would need many different scenarios and many respondents to get meaningful data, but Hosftede et al. did that and observed that America, Canada, and most of the EU skew individualism while China and South Korea and Japan skew communalism (not communism, in case you are skimming this. Japan and South Korea aren't communist countries. Communalism is not a form of communism).

In Building Cross-Cultural Competence, Hampden-Turner, Trompenaars, offer their own dimensions and argue that the best way to think about them is not as binaries (either ors) but rather as default mental models that can be transcended with effort and insight. In other words, while you may come from a country that measures high on individuality, like America, and therefore be inclined to think as an individual, you can learn to think communally, without giving up your identity, and thus better understand both people unlike you and how to behave in situations where individualism will fail, when "everyman for himself" will increase casualties while "one for all and all for one" will bring everyone home safe.

Below is a kind of short-hand representation of the work intercultural communication scholars have done. It's important to realize, as the authors will remind you if you read their work directly, that their cultural insights are statistical and therefore while you would see tendencies like those they observed if you interviewed enough members of a nation or corporation, any given individual might have an uncommon response. Now that travel is a frequent part of many working lives, people are more often exposed to different ways of living and thinking and so may be less nation-bound in their thinking. As most people will work for a great many different companies over the course of a working lifetime, becoming adept at identifying cultural norms is an important soft skill.

Were I interested in gathering your unguided perceptions about these dimensions, I would give you a scenario and ask you to indicate your level of agreement by placing the slider where you think it belongs without giving you the specific poles, since those words might skew your response. I would also need to have lots of scenarios. Since my goal here is to show you how the techniques work, I'm just giving you an explanation of the continuums and attaching the poles to the sliders. Where you place the slider isn't recorded and I'm not currently interested in getting a class reading, although we could do that if you are interested.

Focused and diffuse -- laser beam and search light. When you look at something, do you focus on the object and exclude the setting or do you typically include the setting in the frame? Are you detail oriented or big picture oriented? Do you prefer assessment of performance based on measurable outcomes or general impressions of adherence to values?

Focused Diffuse

Report and rapport -- would you rather issue a command or make a request? When you need to get a group of people to sign off on something, would you rather present an argument and then have a vote or would you prefer to circulate a document and incorporate lots of feedback and make modifications before requesting everyone sign off? Do you like to chat before you get to business or get straight to business? If many people are involved in a decision, do you think "consensus building" or "group think"?

Propositional Analogical

Do you prefer learning from statements held together by logic that you can affirm or deny or from narratives and images and scenarios from which you draw inferences.

Report Rapport

Achieve and ascribe -- do you think success should be based on what a person had done or on who a person is (their heritage, job title, credentials, ethnicity)?

Achieve Ascribe

Power distance -- are you allowed to contradict the boss publicly, in private, with permission in private, never?

Speak up shut up

Uncertainty avoidance -- when you get up in the morning do you prefer having a moment by moment plan for the day or would you rather let the day unfold? What about from month to month? Year to year?

Stick to the agenda Go with the flow

Temporal orientation -- are you thinking about the end of the month, five years out, retirement, your children's inheritance, your grandchildren's inheritance?

Short-term Long-term

Indulgence and abstinence -- borrow or save? partake of intoxicants or don't? Eat whatever you feel like eating, follow a dietary regimen?

Indulgence Abstinence

Remember: the more certain you are that you understand someone, especially someone you don't know and from a culture different from your own, the greater the potential for serious miscommunication. Don't ask someone, do you understand? They may just want to please you, or want you to go away, or they may fear appearing foolish, and they may mistakenly believe they understand. Ask them a question the answer to which proves or disproves to you their understanding. src