genres across cultures: types of acceptability variation

Genres across cultures: types of acceptability variation

PHILIP SHAW*, PAUL GILLAERTS**, EVERETT JACOBS***, OFELIA

PALERMO****, MIDORI SHINOHARA***** and J. PIET VERCKENS******

ABSTRACT: One can ask four questions about genre validity across cultures. Does a certain form orconfiguration occur in the culture in question? Is it acceptable? If acceptable, is it in practice preferred? Isit recommended by prescriptive authorities? This paper reports the results of an attempt to answer thesequestions empirically by testing the responses to four different customer-complaint dialogues in English of100 students in each of six countries: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, England, Italy, and Japan. The result isthat most versions are seen by respondents as occurring in most cultures, that a ‘clear, brief, sincere’version seems most acceptable worldwide, that this version is also preferred in the four north-westernEuropean countries, but not necessarily in Italy or Japan, and that of the various prescribed versions someare never preferred and others are only preferred in one or two countries.

INTRODUCTION

In China and S.E. Asia the question ‘Have you eaten yet?’ is like ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ – it

often serves to maintain ‘phatic’ communication without any particular communicative

intent. In Europe and North America the question would be taken as an invitation to eat

together. Sociopragmatic conventions can vary across cultures at this quite simple level, orat a more complex one. Paragraph organisation in written texts seems, for example, to be

different in different cultures (Y. Kachru, 1997, Connor, 1999).

Within a culture, texts, spoken or written, can be grouped into sets with similar functions

and forms called genres. According to Bakhtin (1986), the basic genres are the primary ones

which are available to all members of the community and require no special training:

‘formal or informal discussion, political debate, small talk, quarrelling among friends,

etc.’ (Gunthner, 2000). Alongside these are very many secondary genres which have to be

learned formally and may only be available to specialists. Many of these are written:business letters, contracts, research articles, news articles, newspaper leaders, police reports,

and thousands of others. Cameron (2000) regards it as a feature of the present time that

many spoken interaction types that used to be treated as unspecialised derivatives of

primary genres have become codified secondary genres with prescriptions and control.

She gives several types of service encounter in business and retailing as examples.

According to Engberg (1998), following Bhatia (1993), texts that are members of the

same genre – at least the same secondary genre – are similar on three dimensions. They

have shared linguistic features, that is similar restrictions on the part of the total linguisticsystem that can be used. They are also produced by a particular social group of people

with specific skills and training. Thirdly, they have shared psychological features, being

* Department of English, Stockholms Universitet, S-106 91, Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]

** Lessius Hogeschool Antwerp, Belgium*** University of Sheffield, UK**** University of Calabria, Italy***** Tamagawa University, Japan****** Lessius Hogeschool Antwerp, Belgium

ª Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

World Englishes, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 385–401, 2004. 0883–2919

written so that they correspond to the value system and thought process of the field they

belong to. One could add that within a society the texts will of course differ from one

another not only according to their specific purpose and content, but also according to the

linguistic proficiency and preferences, the specific skills and training, and the particular

value systems and thought processes of the individual speaker or writer. One should not

see the text as entirely constructed by the social conventions of the genre, but as structu-

rated (Giddens, 1984) by the interaction of the individual’s aims, preferences, and needs,with those conventions.

Another way of defining the same sort of genre can be based on Swales (1990). Texts

that are members of the same genre, he says, have shared purposes, which can be

recognised by experts and which affect their structure, style and content. They thus

share features of structure, style, content and audience. A genre may well have a name

known to its users. Furthermore, one might add, a (secondary) genre can be formalised

and taught.

Many genres are common to all societies which have modern institutions like schools,businesses and mass media – textbooks, letters of application, and newspaper articles, for

example. But these societies also differ from one another in the linguistic resources and

varieties available to them, in the training and status of the producers of the texts, and

above all in the value systems of the field in question. Hence the typical realisations of the

same genre in different societies are often different, and these differences have been widely

researched (for example Zhu, 1997; Bhatia, 1993 on business communication; Aukrust

and Snow, 1998; Blum-Kulka, 1993 on primary genres; Melander et al., 1997; Salager-

Meyer et al., 2003 on academic writing).The examples just quoted approach the genres they analyse by observation of naturally-

occurring data: they take typical realisations of the genre in question and find out what

they have in common and on what parameters they vary. Other possible types of observa-

tion include ethnography, where the analyst would be immersed in one particular envir-

onment and try to understand it as a functioning system. An alternative to observation is

experiment, in which the texts are investigated in an artificial situation where parameters

can be systematically varied. Logically experiment follows observation – one cannot

experiment until one has formed hypotheses from observation. In cross-cultural studiesone common type of experiment has involved questionnaires in which subjects are asked

to produce an appropriate response in a variety of situations, on the model of the

CCSARP project (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984; Suszczynska, 1999). Alternatively

one can seek to elicit metalinguistic judgements along various parameters from subjects

(as in Spencer-Oatey et al., 2000).

Telephone complaint handling

International business is a key arena for cross-cultural communication, and one in

which communication increasingly takes place in some form of international English,

that is English used as a lingua franca which is the mother tongue of neither participant.

There has been enormous growth, in particular, in oral intercultural communication in

English as a result of customer services being centralised in call centres or customer

relations departments. There is also an increasing trend for the types of interactions

which such centres handle to be regulated by their managements in the way described

by Cameron:

386 Philip Shaw et al.

ª Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Call centre managers … determine exactly what sequence of interactional moves is needed to

accomplish a given transaction efficiently, and then institutionalize the preferred sequence in a

model or script which all workers are required to reproduce in every transaction of the same type.

(Cameron, 2000: 95)

One interaction which has often been discussed in both the business-communicationand the linguistic literature (Eccles and Durand, 1998; Garrett and Meyers, 1996; Hui and

Au, 2001; Trosborg, 1995; Trosborg and Shaw, 1998) is complaint handling, the well-

established interactive spoken genre in which a customer phones in to complain of a

product and the complaint handler must provide satisfaction at minimum cost to the

company. Cameron shows that efforts have been made to standardise this genre:

… the operating routines set out in manuals and training materials draw explicit attention to

interpersonal and politeness requirements, often … specifying their linguistic correlates in

detail … Even supposing [complaint handling] could be automated … automation would defeat

the customer’s purpose, which is to get someone – a human representative of the organization –

to acknowledge their dissatisfaction … The subject of ‘difficult’ calls generates a plethora of rules

and guidelines; training materials often include instruction in specific verbal techniques for

dealing with them. (Cameron, 2000: 97)

The interesting feature of these efforts from our point of view is that although we

know that politeness and appropriateness are culture-specific comments, the recom-

mendations of complaint-handling experts are to a large extent independent of culture,

but varied within cultures. One key difference among such recommendations, for example,

is the role of thanking. Our survey of recent sources from the US and Europe (Shaw et al.,2002) found, for example, an American formula which thanks ‘for the business’, a German

one which thanks both ‘for the information’ and ‘for the business’ (by implication) and a

French one which makes no mention of thanking. However these are not cultural

differences: each type of prescription is offered by one authority or another in each

country. Thus of four recent publications used in Belgium – Barlow and Møller (1996),

Barrett (1996), Goderis, Lagasse and Verhesen (1998) and Van den Bergh and van Rees

(1995) – two recommend starting the complaint-handling interaction by thanking for the

complaint, while one introduces thanks as a submove towards the end and one does notconsider the move at all.

A particular feature of many modern business texts is said to be ‘hybridisation’ – that

is the mixture of discourses with different functions. Job advertisements have become

more promotional (Fairclough, 1995), for example. Thus many of the prescribed dia-

logues appear to include a fair amount of promotional and ‘rapport-enhancing’ material

alongside the interaction strictly necessary for handling the complaint. Complaint

handling is seen as an opportunity for improving the company’s image and thus for

promotion.

AIM

There is thus a paradox, in that we know that generic preferences vary across cultures

and are presumably more uniform within cultures, but the prescriptions of well-paid

experts are consistent across cultures but vary within any given culture. In a series of

studies (reported in Shaw, 2001; Shaw et al., 2002; Shaw et al., forthcoming; and Akutsu

Genres across cultures: types of acceptability variation 387


and Shinohara, 2003) we investigated whether the experts were wrong, and they should be

recommending different scripts for complaint handling in different countries, or whether

in fact globalisation had reached the point where the optimum script was the same

throughout the world. In that case, of course, the question would be, which of the scripts

is the optimum one?

Our general questions were therefore the following:

. Do the same norms for customer complaint handling apply throughout the globalised business

world?

. In particular is the reaction to ‘hybridisation’ the same everywhere?

. How do the norms in the handbooks relate to those used?

But what do we mean by a reaction or a norm? There are three dimensions of responsewhich an individual can have to a text: acceptability, familiarity and preference. The text

can, first of all, seem acceptable as a member of the target genre or it can seem unac-

ceptably different. Whether it is acceptable or not, it can then seem familiar or unfamiliar.

An unfamiliar realisation of a genre may in principle seem acceptable. Thirdly, texts,

whether familiar or unfamiliar, that are acceptable may or may not seem to have the

preferable form. An acceptable but unfamiliar text, for example, could actually seem

better than the way one does it oneself.

The precise issue here is therefore how far the different prescriptions which seem to beapplied internationally are in fact valid internationally, and in what sense – are they

preferable everywhere, acceptable everywhere, or even possible everywhere, or are judge-

ments on any or all of these dimensions different across cultures?

METHOD

Materials

We adopted an experimental design which elicits judgements of acceptability, familiar-

ity and preference for four different constructed dialogues. We constructed the dialogues

on the basis of the recommendations of customer-service experts discussed above. Four

different dialogues were presented to all subjects in an ‘international’ format in which a

complainant from their country addressed a complaint to someone from a country with

which English would be a natural medium of communication. In practice this meant that

the fictional communication was from the students’ home country to either Denmark orBelgium/Flanders. Subjects in Italy and Belgium were also presented with ‘national’

versions in which the complaint was envisaged as being handled within the language

community. In the national versions the dialogues were translated into Italian and

Dutch respectively. The dialogues were written so that the complainer (Com) said exactly

the same in each case, as illustrated in the appendix – the variation was in the response

from the company representative (Rec).

Dialogue A was the ‘minimal’ one. It is the shortest dialogue because – amongst other

things – it contains no politeness features other than please and thank you.Dialogue C was intended to be ‘clear, brief, and sincere’ in the sense of Lanham (1983)

cited in Scollon and Scollon (1995); that is, a dialogue which would be perceived as doing

the business in hand as efficiently as possible, while maintaining the relationship. It is

twice as long as dialogue A. Politeness features have been added, which we will describe in



the spirit of the rapport-management model (Spencer-Oatey, 2000). They include attending

to the customer’s identity face as someone who has had a bad experience (‘non-commital

apology’), attending to his or her right to redress by promising replacement (‘replacement

offer’) and respecting his or her quality face by concealing the request for repetition.

Dialogues B and D, the ‘thanks’ ones, are twice as long as dialogue C, with D rather

longer than B. To the politeness features of C are added repeated promises of action,

further attention to identity face in the ‘thanks’ move which enhances positive aspects ofthe customer’s role and to personal face in the concealed second request for the name,

attention to equity rights in the justification of the request for details, and also consider-

able promotional work in the use of the company name and we. Dialogue B has the ‘thank

you for the complaint’ bit in move 1, while dialogue D has it at the end of move 3, so that

B starts with positive politeness (attention to identity face) but D includes it later.

Procedure

To eliminate order effects, the dialogues were presented in random order, that is, some

subjects received questionnaires with A first, some with B, first, etc.

After every dialogue the respondent had to tick boxes to evaluate the dialogue accord-

ing to three criteria:

1 This is how you might expect a complaint dialogue in [country] to go. [agree – disagree – not

sure] This question assessed the familiarity of the strategies used in the dialogue.

2 What do you think of the Rec’s responses in this dialogue? [too polite – OK – rather rude] This

question assessed the acceptability of the dialogue.

3 If you were making a complaint, what impression would you have of Rec and his [sic, unfortu-

nately] company? [seems insincere – seems OK – seems uninterested – seems artificial] This

question crudely assessed the reason for possible unacceptability, and provided a check on 2,

since OK in one should imply OK in the other.

Space was left after each question for subjects to write in explanations and comments.

After evaluating all four dialogues these subjects had to answer a general question,

which assessed preference:

4 Which dialogue is the best model for receiving a complaint in [country]?

All instructions and evaluative terms were in English, except of course that in the national

versions everything, including the dialogues, was translated into Italian and Dutch

respectively. Akutsu and Shinohara (2003) replicated the study with dialogues in Englishand all instructions and evaluative terms translated into Japanese; they obtained broadly

similar results to those for forms with these elements in English, confirming that distinct-

ively Japanese results were not the results of misunderstanding.

The responses in the ticked boxes were entered in an Excel spread sheet so that numbers

could be summed. We then constructed a contingency table and calculated w2 for each

criterion and each country across the four dialogues, to establish whether or not the

respondents in each country could be regarded as coming from the same population. Since

this procedure never identified significant differences among Flanders, Denmark andSweden for the ‘international’ dialogues, these respondents were merged as ‘NW Europe’,

and the other populations were compared with this entity. A similar process was used to

identify significant differences between responses to the ‘international’ and ‘intranational’

dialogues for Belgium and Italy.



Subjects

Students of business-related fields in six countries were presented, in writing, with the

four dialogues and asked to tick the boxes and to write in their own judgements (in their

own language).

The students were not selected, but were those who happened to be taking part in lectures,seminars, etc. We did not collect gender data but Table 1 gives our estimates, in case this

factor should be thought relevant. As the table shows, more than 90 per cent in each group

had L1 type proficiency in the national (regional) language. The judgements collected are thus

representative of the reality of the countries surveyed because they include (fairly small)

proportions of people with, for example, southwest Asian and north African cultural back-

ground. The class sampled in England included a fair number of ‘international’ (e.g.

Malaysian) students, and only the results for subjects based in the UK are reported here.

Varying proportions (up to 25 per cent in Denmark and England) of our subjects had relevantexperience in customer-service roles, such as telemarketing, but of course all had been

customers. Use of non-professional informants may actually be an advantage as students’

judgements may well be closer to those of customers. Subjects with extensive experience could

have become more tolerant of ‘businesslike’ interactions/language and the demand for speed

and efficiency, and their criteria for judgement might be influenced accordingly. Average ages

varied as a result of differing university systems, from 18 in Japan to 23 in Denmark.

RESULTS

In discussing the results we shall use mnemonic labels for our report, as well as the A, B, C, D

labels presented to the subjects, calling A MINIMAL, B EARLY, C SIMPLE and D LATE.

Table 1. Basic data on subjects investigated

Subjects’ L1

(>90%)

Year

collected

Language of

dialogues

No. of

subjects

Subjects

studied

Gender

balance

estimate

Belgium

(Flanders)

Dutch 2001 English 101 Languages

for Business

80-20 F:M

Dutch 2002 Dutch 118 Business 50-50 F:M

Denmark Danish 2001 English 100 Business and

Languages for

Business

60-40 F:M

Italy (south) Italian 2002 English 100 Business and

Languages

for Business

60-40 F:M

Italian 2002 Italian 100 The same sample

as for English

Japan Japanese 2002 English 100 Business (beginners) 50-50, F:M

Sweden Swedish 2001 English 71 Business 50-50 F:M

UK(England) English 2002 English 80 Business 50-50 F:M

Japan (Akutsu

and Shinohara

2003):

Japanese 2003 English

(instructions

in Japanese)

50 Business (beginners) 50-50 F:M



Preference

Table 2 shows the results for the question ‘Which dialogue is the best model for your

country?’ – that is, it shows national preferences.

The British and Swedish-Danish-Belgian subjects were most likely to choose C SIMPLE

as the best model, with D LATE next and B EARLY clearly third (no significantdifference between Britain and ‘NW Europe’). Italy and Japan were significantly different

from Britain and NW Europe (both p-values <0.01) and from each other (p = 0.018).

Approximately equal proportions of Italians chose each of EARLY, SIMPLE and

LATE, while LATE clearly attracted the most respondents in Japan, EARLY second

and SIMPLE third. (In Akutsu and Shinohara’s replication LATE was as clearly ahead,

but SIMPLE attracted more votes than EARLY.) It is notable that no dialogue was

nominated as the best by as many as half of the respondents in any country; there is very

large variation among individuals within countries at this level, as well as large variationamong the three blocks: Britain and Belgium-Denmark-Sweden, Italy, and Japan.

Acceptability

Acceptability judgements, shown in Table 3, are very uniform worldwide. The only

significant difference was that between Italy and NW Europe (p = 0.012). Dialogue A

MINIMAL is only perceived as acceptable by a handful anywhere. C SIMPLE is regarded

as acceptable by the highest proportion of respondents – more than three-quarters in all

countries. In all countries except Italy D LATE was accepted by more than B EARLY.The direction of the unacceptability of the dialogues was also fairly uniform within

Europe. As Table 4 shows, A MINIMAL was judged ‘rude’ by between 80 and 90 per cent

in each country. None of the others was so evaluated by more than 5 per cent, except in

Japan, where over 10 per cent judged both B EARLY and C SIMPLE to be ‘rude’.

Generally only B EARLY and D LATE were considered too polite, with B attracting

disapproval from substantially more people than D except in Italy. The pattern for Italy was

significantly different from the others (NW Europe: Italy p = 0.001, Japan: Italy p = 0.051),

but there were no other significant differences. The main difference between B and D is inthe placement of the utterance I’d like to thank you for bringing it to our attention, so we can

Table 2. Dialogues chosen as the best model for the country in question (numbers indicate

respondents choosing this dialogue as a percentage of all respondents). All percentages to the nearest

whole number

% of respondents choosing this dialogue as ‘best’

A MINIMAL B EARLY C SIMPLE D LATE

Belgium (Flanders) 3 16 52 30

Denmark (Jutland) 4 6 51 40

Italy (South) 4 32 28 26

Japan (Tokyo) 2 28 20 49

Sweden (Stockholm) 3 15 45 28

UK (England) 10 21 38 31

Whereas later tables show judgements where subjects may have ticked two or more boxes and thus rows will addup to more than 100, here rows will add up to a maximum of 100 (or 101, due to rounding), if all subjects chose abest model. Most rows add up to less, because not all did choose.



make sure it never happens again, which comes earlier in B than in D; that is, positive

politeness (attending to the customer’s identity face) is more prominent in B than in D.

As Table 5 shows, similar very high proportions judged A MINIMAL ‘uninterested’ in

Europe, but Japanese figures were very different. Dialogue A was also judged ‘insincere’ by

some 28 per cent of Japanese respondents, whereas proportions from European countries

were under 5 per cent. Similarly A was the dialogue most often evaluated as ‘artificial’ inJapan, while very few European respondents ticked this box. (There were never any

significant differences between ‘artificial’ and ‘insincere’ as judgements – they appear to be

synonymous and nearly all subjects chose only one of the two if they chose either.)

Otherwise, the figures for ‘uninterested’, ‘artificial’ and ‘insincere’ confirm that the

Europeans find A MINIMAL rude because it appears uninterested, C SIMPLE (generally)

acceptable, and D LATE and especially B EARLY too polite because they appear artificial

or insincere. Since more Italians find LATE ‘too polite’ than EARLY, more find it artificial

and insincere, while the position is reversed for the other Europeans. More than a quarter ofItalians and Japanese had some tendency to find SIMPLE insincere or artificial.

The box-ticking results suggest that ‘artificiality’ ‘insincerity’ and ‘lack of interest’ are

associated with different behaviours in Japan and Europe, and this is one of many findings

that can be enriched by some consideration of the subjects’ write-in comments. Thus

23 Japanese subjects both marked A ‘insincere’ and wrote comments. There were ten

Table 3. Dialogues judged to be ‘OK’ for politeness (respondents making this judgement as a

percentage of all respondents). All percentages to the nearest whole number

% of respondents judging dialogue acceptable

A B C D

Belgium (Flanders) 10 47 87 63

Denmark (Jutland) 13 26 81 69

Italy (South) 0 58 82 50

Japan (Tokyo) 10 39 76 62

Sweden (Stockholm) 20 51 90 63

UK (England) 10 52 89 77

Table 4. Direction of unacceptability of dialogues (respondents making this judgement as a


Rude Too polite

A B C D A B C D

Belgium (Flanders) 87 1 7 2 2 52 5 33

Denmark (Jutland) 80 3 3 1 2 65 11 24

Italy (South) 82 1 6 1 18 39 11 50

Japan (Tokyo) 89 11 15 4 1 51 9 34

Sweden (Stockholm) 76 1 3 1 0 44 4 18

UK (England) 86 3 5 1 4 46 6 22

Clearly some respondents (particularly in Sweden!) judged no dialogue to be rude, while others (particularly inJapan!) judged two or more to be so.



comments that the complaint handler did not apologise or did not sound as if she or he

was sorry, six that she or he was not really listening, thirteen that she or he was too brief

or curt, and one that she or he ‘is not following the minimal requirement in such a job,

which could have been taught in the work training manual’. These are exactly thecriticisms made of dialogue A by the European subjects (although they much more

often described the handler as ‘unprofessional’), but for them they were associated with

the judgement ‘uninterested’. The judgement of unacceptability is thus actually being

made by the same criteria in Europe, but the semantics of the label are perceived

differently. Shinohara’s intuition is that to these subjects ‘insincerity is the higher-order

abstract concept that has a broad scope and to which “uninterestedness” or “rude

language” are subordinate.’ In Akutsu and Shinohara’s replication (2003), equal numbers

of respondents evaluated A MINIMAL as ‘uninterested’ and ‘insincere’ and their com-ments made it clear that the terms were synonymous for them.

The Japanese respondents’ comments on dialogue D are very revealing of their positive

valuation of positive politeness or attention to identity face. Thirty individuals made

positive comments, of whom 22 praised it for being ‘kind’, ‘gentle’, ‘earnest’, but above all

(11 individuals) ‘teinei’ (glossed as all of ‘polite’, ‘with care’, ‘detailed’, and ‘conscientious’). As

a contrast we can take the Belgian comments. There were some positive judgements: ‘His

responses seem OK. Perhaps a bit artificial, but I wouldn’t call it too polite. In my opinion a

company can never be too polite towards his clients’, but the majority showed irritation orscepticism towards ‘unbusinesslike’ positive politeness: ‘He talks too much, about nothing’,

‘The answers sound as if they were studied by heart’, ‘Not to the point enough.’

Familiarity

Chi-square gave significant p-values (<0.01) for NW Europe vs. both Britain and Japan,

and for Italy vs. Japan. Figure 1 shows that in all countries except Japan. ‘clear, brief,

sincere’ C SIMPLE was considered likely to appear by the largest number of respondents

(and Akutsu and Shinohara (2003) found that C was most familiar for their Japanese

sample as well). While most respondents evaluated more than one of the dialogues as

possible, there was relatively little agreement intranationally about which ones. Only

SIMPLE was normally so evaluated by at least half the respondents.

Table 5. Reasons for unacceptability of dialogues (respondents making the given judgement as a


Uninterested Insincere Artificial

A B C D A B C D A B C D

Belgium (Flanders) 89 3 8 1 7 14 4 7 3 32 7 24

Denmark (Jutland) 84 0 4 0 3 19 7 7 3 50 6 19

Italy (South) 88 1 10 3 3 14 15 22 8 26 15 31

Japan (Tokyo) 37 11 19 6 28 14 8 17 26 22 19 10

Sweden (Stockholm) 76 1 7 1 7 14 3 6 1 44 3 24

UK (England) 90 5 7 0 3 23 4 16 3 32 7 24

Chi-square gave significant p-values (<0.01) for NW Europe vs both Italy and Japan, and for Italy vs Japan.



In all countries except Britain, A MINIMAL was considered likely to appear by the smallestnumber, but by considerably larger numbers than thought it acceptable. It is thus more

familiar than it is appropriate and respondents were clearly making prescriptive judgements

above. One can recognise that a type occurs without regarding it as acceptable. Many people

who thought one could meet A MINIMAL and B EARLY did not think they were acceptable –

often saying that ‘unfortunately’ one could meet them, and describing A MINIMAL with the

terms ‘unprofessional’ or ‘ineffective’, i.e. showing ignorance of the correct forms.

Evaluations of national and international interactions

Although several Italian respondents commented that they expected behaviour to be very

different when Italians dealt with one another in Italian and when they dealt with foreigners

in English, there was in fact no significant difference between any of their evaluations of the

dialogues in Italian and their evaluations of the English versions of the same dialogues.Similarly, there were no significant differences between evaluation of English and Dutch

versions for the Belgian respondents. This result is rendered more striking by the fact that

the Italian subjects were the same for both tests, with a few weeks in between tests, while the

English version of the dialogues was offered to one group of Flemish students (‘Languages

for Business’, mainly women) one year and to another (‘Commercial Sciences’, equal gender

balance) in the next. The finding that evaluations are independent of language (and/or

national vs. international setting) is thus quite robust. It is also quite unexpected.

DISCUSSION

We summarise the substantive results of the survey and the answers to the research

questions in Shaw et al., forthcoming. Here we shall consider the general issues for generic

preferences in an international environment.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80A B C D

UK NW Europe Italy Japan

Figure 1. Responses to ‘This dialogue is possible in [my country]’



The results raise several interesting issues. First, they give remarkable support to the

world Englishes ideology that being a native speaker is not particularly important: Britain

is just another north-west European country for most purposes here.

Second, however, they show what a tricky medium lingua-franca English can be

semantically. For Europeans rudeness and insincerity are essentially independent con-

cepts, even opposed to one another (Cameron, 2000: 122), but for Japanese ‘insincerity is

the higher-order abstract concept that has a broad scope and to which “uninterestedness”or “rude language” are subordinate.’ What is unprofessional for Europeans is insincere for

Japanese.

Third, they raise an issue which is rather less often discussed than it might be in

accounts of cultural difference, that of absolute and relative difference. As Bond et al.

(2000) point out, cultures consist of individuals with differing values. Consequently two

cultures (often in practice operationalised as political states) may differ categorically or

relatively. Absolute difference would imply that virtually all members of a ‘cultural unit’

agree on a certain valuation and this often seems to be the case with primary genres likeour initial example of phatic communication. Nearly everyone in China will have one

understanding and evaluation of Have you eaten yet? and nearly everyone in Europe and

(North) America will have the other.

But these results are not like that. In every country there are individuals who give every

evaluation, and all that differs is the proportion of individuals giving each one. It is these

proportions that are characteristic of the country, and which constitute cultural difference.

Some Chinese, for example, might perceive business letters with US rhetoric as so

unbusinesslike (inhumane) as to be ineffective and therefore unacceptable. Others mightperceive them as acceptable and merely different. Still others might think that the American

style is actually preferable, as being for example more efficient or effective than their

Chinese equivalents. This gives us one possible resolution of the paradox of expert recom-

mendations varying across individuals but not cultures: there are people in any culture who

will respond best to any particular recommendation, and there are others who will react

badly to the same one, so the recommendations are products of the experts’ different

individual experiences.

Thus we have to think in terms of a number of types of difference in genre acceptability

. What (almost) no one in X does/thinks.

. What fewer/more people in X than in Y do/think.

. What most (many?) people in X do, and fewer in Y.

. What (almost) everyone in X does/thinks.

Fourth, it is important in discussing genre variants across cultures to distinguish the

four dimensions of preference, acceptability, occurrence and prescription. We found

that different individuals will prefer texts which realise different genre variants, but theywill accept some variants they do not prefer, and the most widely acceptable variant

may not be the one most often preferred. (An analogy would be that half the party

members want politician X as their leader and see Y as unacceptable, while the other

half want Y and see X as unacceptable – a state of affairs which is beneficial for Z, who

is acceptable to everyone and nobody’s first choice.) Thus although the more elaborate

‘hybridised’ handling routines B and D are most often preferred in Japan, they are also

unacceptable to a substantial proportion, and ‘clear, brief, sincere’ routine C might

work best.



Of the variants that occur, some will be preferred, some acceptable, and some unaccept-

able. That is to say, in any given culture, many real texts will be considered unacceptable:

the world is full of bad complaint handling and bad business letters. When examining

how a text realising a particular genre variant is viewed by its culture, we should not

assume that what we meet is what people prefer or even accept. That nearly half of the

British sample but very few of the Japanese thought the brusque handling routine A was

likely to occur tells us something, but not how British people think complaints should behandled.

Secondary genres are characterised by prescription. Experts tell us how to construct and

word them and they may be right or wrong, realistic or unrealistic. That is, prescribed

variants may or may not occur, may or may not be acceptable when they occur, and may

or may not be variants preferred by the users of the genre. In this case the advice to thank

customers for their complaints early in the handling dialogue, which is given by prescrip-

tive handbooks in Belgium and Denmark, appears from our data to lead complaint

handlers towards procedures which are preferred by a small proportion of the prospectiveusers and are unacceptable to a significant proportion. The prescriptions mostly originate

from the US, and it would be interesting to know if they are any better received there.

Fifth, we can speculate about the forces operating on the realisation of genres in an

international environment. There are presumably norms for complaining and apologising

as primary genres which derive from the national culture (non-professional) complaining/

apologising norms (like those described by House and Kasper, 1981), and national

secondary-genre norms for customer complaint handling. Then there are, or might be,

real international business norms, which might be close to or influenced by US businessnorms, and the prescriptions of local and international experts which may or may not be

realistic, but in many cases seem to be related to US norms. Finally there is language

proficiency: some participants may not be able to say what they would like to say.

The evidence we have is that evaluations based on national and international business

norms are rather similar: our Italian and Belgian respondents made essentially the same

judgements on dialogues set nationally in the local language and those set internationally

in English. It seems probable that business students at least have harmonized their

mother-tongue/home culture preferences with the international ones. This is perhaps atrend, with national differences becoming more symbolic than real.

Furthermore, the pattern we see in these data is that different countries or different

regions have different patterns of preference, but more congruent patterns of acceptabil-

ity. This is perhaps the result ‘glocalisation’ would lead us to expect, with local preferences

surviving against a background of international homogenisation.

Sixth, there is the problem of mismatch between prescription and variation. On the

surface, the variants recommended by consultants in north-west Europe (‘early thanks,

late thanks’) are not those preferred by north-west Europeans. In fact these recommendedvariants seem to go down better in Italy and Japan. But the European consultants have

copied their recommendations from US sources, and one would have thought that north-

west Europe, especially Britain, was culturally closer to the US than was Italy, and

certainly than Japan.

This could be a method problem, in that our procedure may not get true attitudes. It

could be a materials problem, in that we present written dialogues, so that subjects cannot

make use of phonetic information – suprasegmentals or tone of voice. It could be simply

a real problem, meaning that consultants actually have no empirical basis for their



recommendations except that they and their friends are among the large minority in north-

west Europe that does prefer these variants. Most intriguingly, it could be a real problem

due to the hegemony of US business discourse. Like jeans-wearing, hamburger-eating, cola-

swilling protestors against US dominance, our subjects may actually respond well to US

business discourse even though their conscious attitudes are opposed to it. But that would

assume that these prescriptions do in fact reflect US practice, which we do not know.

Seventh, there are issues of the differences in the range and power of cultures. Somecultures might have a wider range of acceptability of variants than others – we noted

above that fewer of the Swedish subjects seemed to judge anything rude than of the

Japanese ones. Furthermore if culture A is more powerful than culture B, then the

acceptable range in B might consist of anything inherently acceptable in B plus anything

acceptable in A; that is, people might think ‘that’s acceptable because they do it, even

though we don’t.’ This might explain why the Italian subjects perceived their national

norms as different from the international ones, yet actually made the same judgements in

both environments. It might be that they accept the US model alongside their own.We noted that the ‘clear, brief, sincere’ dialogue C seems to be the most acceptable over

the whole range of cultures examined, although it is not optimal in either Japan or Italy.

This might be taken to reflect cultural power difference, in which the north-west European

model (perhaps actually the North American one) is known and accepted more widely

than others. This suggestion is severely weakened, however, by the observation that the

dialogues which seem to go down better in Italy and Japan were actually written on the

basis of recommendations originating in the United States and encountered by us in

north-west Europe.Finally, this study is of course not without weaknesses. It was designed with a simple

structure to make it possible to administer eight parallel versions in six countries and to

compare the results. Consequently it can be criticised for a positivistic or psychometric

view of human value judgements. It makes use of model dialogues which are inevitably

not particularly realistic, and presents them in writing so that intonation, etc. cannot be

judged. Moreover because the dialogues are predetermined, they are probably not optimal

for any of the populations they were presented to. The boxes to be ticked by subjects were

probably not ideally labelled – insincere is too close to artificial (though not for Japanese).These limitations make it hard to say what form the most popular complaint-handling

dialogue would take in the countries investigated, but they do not invalidate the less

ambitious findings we have arrived at, particularly as to the nature of cross-cultural

difference in generic preference.

Furthermore, like most such studies, this one assumes that nationality, rather than

class, gender, or age, for example, is the crucial parameter in cultural difference. This is

likely to be more valid for some states than others and perhaps more valid for secondary

genres influenced by national school systems than for primary ones. The importance ofpaying attention to subnational region is underlined by comments from Italian subjects

that ‘it depends whether this is northern or southern Italy’, and by our references to

Flanders and England rather than Belgium and the UK. But the point is that this is a

matter of the delicacy of one’s instruments. That is, there are levels of delicacy which can

distinguish ‘Flemish’ culture from ‘Danish’ and levels at which both appear to be part of

‘north-west European’, or ‘European/Western’.

What it has been able to show is that an inner-circle community has exactly the same

pattern of preferences in English-language genre variants as neighbouring expanding-circle



ones, and that an expanding-circle community can impose its own semantic structure on

what appear straightforward English words. It has shown that preference patterns in

secondary or professional genres are likely to be relative rather than absolute, and hence

that we should beware of treating them as absolute differences. It has shown that occur-

rence, acceptability, preference, and prescription are different things, and that we should not

take the occurrence of a variant as undeniable evidence of its acceptability, or a prescription

as evidence of a real preference. We have seen that there are striking national differences,but probably also evidence of national norms converging on something which might be

an emerging international lowest common denominator – the ‘clear, brief, sincere’ style. We

have seen that prescriptions do not seem to fit well with the cultures they are intended for,

and finally we have seen that the lowest common denominator might be the practice –

rather than the prescription – of the strongest actor in the globalisation process.

NOTE

1. Thanks to Tom Lavelle and Anna Trosborg, who provided the Swedish and Danish data respectively.

APPENDIX

DIALOGUE A (MINIMAL)

Rec Hullo, DanHear Sales.

Com This is Peter, from Vision Express in London. I’m calling to er make a complaint

about some of your products.

Rec Yes.

Com Em we’ve had two customers complaining about the poor sound quality in er the

aids supplied.

Rec Yes.

Com And er one of our assistants noticed that er a third was not up to standard before itwas sold. What do you suggest we do about it?

Rec Well, er What was the name again, please?

Com Yes this is Peter Nelson, from Vision Express in London.

Rec Thank you very much and the address please?

Com It’s 53, Kingsway,

Rec yes,

Com London W16 3NJ.

Rec Thank you very much.Now, what was the problem again please?

DIALOGUE C (SIMPLE)




Rec I’m very sorry to hear that, Can you give me the details?




aids supplied.

Rec That’s very worrying.

Com And er one of our assistants noticed that er a third was not up to standard before it

was sold. What do you suggest we do about it?

Rec Well, I’ll see that it’s sorted out immediately. We usually replace things uncondi-

tionally. What was the name again, please?Com Yes this is Peter Nelson, from Vision Express in London.

Rec Thank you very much and the address please?


Rec yes,

Com London W16 3NJ.

Rec Thank you very much.

Could you give me details of the consignment number and the faults, please?

DIALOGUE D (LATE)


Com This is Peter, from Vision Express in London. I’m calling to er make a complaintabout some of your products.

Rec I’m very sorry to hear that. DanHear always aims at the highest quality. Can you

give me the details?


aids supplied.

Rec That’s very worrying, was there anything else wrong?

Com And er one of our assistants noticed that er a third was not up to standard before it

was sold. What do you suggest we do about it?Rec Well, clearly Dan-Hear needs to sort it out. I’d like to thank you for bringing it to our

attention, so we can make sure it never happens again. We at DanHear normally offer

an unconditional replacement service. I personally can arrange replacements, and our

engineers will investigate. So I’ll need to make a detailed report. You’re calling from

London?


Rec Thank you very much and let me just check that we have the right address, please?

Com It’s 53, Kingsway,Rec yes,

Com London W16 3NJ.


To respond properly we’ll need the consignment number and as much detail on the

problem as you can give.

DIALOGUE B (EARLY)






Rec I’m very sorry to hear that, but I’d like to thank you for bringing it to our

attention, so we can make sure it never happens again.


aids supplied.

Rec That’s very worrying. Our success at DanHear is based on our reputation among

our customers.

Com And er one of our assistants noticed that er a third was not up to standard before itwas sold. What do you suggest we do about it?

Rec Well, we at DanHear normally offer an unconditional replacement service for all

consignments that might seem to be defective in any way. So I’ll need to make a

detailed report. You’re calling from London?


Rec Thank you very much and let me just check that we have the right address, please?


Rec yes,Com London W16 3NJ.


To respond properly we’ll need the consignment number and as much detail on the

problem as you can give.

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(Received 10 December 2003.)



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