Abstract:
This thesis focuses on an increasingly popular, but little studied organisational
communication practice, the deployment of corporate values messages as a
means of ‘framing’ reality, and of achieving ‘shared meaning’ in multicultural
workplaces, and asks if such practices, based on ethnocentric approaches to
business communication, are likely to be effective in culturally diverse
contexts. Using a business discourse perspective, and approaching culture as
dynamic systems of meaning, the study presents a rich case of values
communication in a European multinational, by exploring in detail the
meanings employees derive from the organisational values messages, and
the relationship between these meanings and the cultural context in which
they are constructed.
Findings point to two main conclusions: Firstly, that universal values
messages do generate multiple employee meanings, but these do not derive
from distinct cultural memberships, such as ethnicity or nationality, but rather
from the complex interaction between message texts, organisational cultural
frames and discourses and cultural identities constructed during interpretation
by message users. This finding offers support for a non-essentialist approach
to culture in intercultural business communication research, which locates
culture not in distinct external influences on communicative action, but in a
complex and holistic ‘interculturality’ - the process and outcomes of interacting
dynamic cultures, cultural texts, and the communicative action itself.Secondly, findings show that, if the message texts trigger shared cultural
frames, shared meanings will also emerge, despite apparent cultural diversity
among message readers. This finding challenges the view of much current
intercultural and cross-cultural communication scholarship, that the cultural
diversity of business audiences is likely to render universal communication
practices in multinational businesses ineffective. Instead, it suggests that
explicit universal values texts in multinational organisations may indeed
contribute to the generation of shared meaning, although this will be mediated
by existing, implicit, cultural ‘texts’.
