International Business - Unit 2 - by Dang Chinh Thang

Columbia Southern University

International Business

Prepared by Dang Chinh Thang, Student ID 116488

HOM 10 - A1 CLASS

CITC - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

UNIT 2

Scholarly Activity 1:

Avoiding Cross-Cultural Miscommunication

The key elements that define a culture

In the current era of globalization, national boundaries are losing meaning and more and more companies now have their operations spread across various countries of the globe. The world trend is gradually changed from “fighting” to “conversation” based on the mutual understanding and benefit. Multi national companies now operate across different continents and it is typical of a company to have head quarters in one country but be present in multiple counties at the same time. This means that these multi national companies have to adapt to the culture of the company they are operating in. The culture factor is very important to international business. If a company wants to conduct international business successfully, it must understand the culture of the country where it plans to do business with.

According to Daniels Radebaugh Sullivan, culture is the specific learned norms of a society that reflect attitudes, values, and beliefs of people of groups which are taken in a certain period. The culture is formed by many major elements including language, religion, values and attitudes, laws, education, politics, technology and material culture, social stratification.

Language is a system that can be display in spoken and written formats then helps us to name of label the objectives in our life then we can communicate with.

Religion is the way of concept and perception about the nature which lead to the different explanation of the nature power. That explanation is the origins of shaping the idol, belief to adore. For example, in Vietnam, Buddhism and Christianity are majority while Islamic, Hinduism and some other religions are minority. Each of them is following different...