Analyzing cultural contexts for communication

Abstract

Communication takes place within complex cultural contexts of competing understanding, values, interests and needs. Communication professionals take these contexts into account when making decisions about their documents and products, but they often make these complex analyses using tacit information, i.e. information that has not been explicitly elaborated either to themselves or to others. This paper elaborates some cultural analysis tools that are useful for understanding communication contexts, whether within an organization or an ethnic national group. These tools can include expressions of world knowledge and expectations, expressions of values, shared background information, concepts of time, expectations about personal information, and physical working conditions. By explicitly using some of these analysis tools, communication professionals can make more informed decisions when dealing with people in different countries, different companies, or even different divisions of a company.