Chapter I Culture and Intercultural Communication The 21st century is upon us, with the globalization of the world economy, it is required that we should improve the ability to communicate across cultures to meet the needs of intercultural business communication. The current situation of the world economy: globalization Globalization means the worldwide share and interdependence of products and services, capital flows and diffusion of technology crosses nations. Here, intercultural knowledge and understanding plays an important role in the successfully doing business around the globe. Taking McDonald or KFC as a good example, they have made a big success in being accepted and impacted on local cultural traditions. I Culture (i) Definitions: The definitions of culture are numerous. From 1871 to now, researchers and scholars studied cultures from different points of view and defined culture in different ways. (P4, show the different definitions). With the link between culture and intercultural communication, the definition of culture we are going to be concerned is that:（与沟通有关的，并且基于跨文化交际概念上的文化概念，因此它涉及到信仰、价值观、行为准则和社会规则） Culture is a learned set of shared interpretations about beliefs, values, norms, and social practices, which affect the behaviors of a relatively large group of people. In order to understand the concept of culture, let’s have a further study of the characteristics of culture. (ii) Characteristics of culture: Culture is coherent 文化是连贯一致的 Culture is learned 文化是后天习得的 Culture is the view of a group of people 文化是社会共享的 Culture ranks what is important: it involves beliefs, values, norms, and social practices 它涉及到信仰、价值观、行为准则和社会规...
