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r(1he ability to compete in an increasingly integrated 1 world economy is arguably the most pressing issue business must address as the current century draws to a close. Virtually no area of business has grown as rapidly as global trade.With this increase in global business activity, however, comes an equal challenge since business behavior and practices often differ radically from one culture to the next. As a result, the need to understand cross-cultural differences has become an important area of research interest in many business fields, ranging from marketing to personnel management to information systems. That cross-cultural study has grown to be a major area of interest in business communication is thus predictable.What has been less dear, by contrast, is how business communication researchers can best develop information useful to the practice of international business. This essay attempts to offer advice in that direction by suggesting that business communication scholars avoid the compilation of &dquo;how-to&dquo; guides and instead direct their efforts toward developing empirical and conceptual studies in international communication.&dquo;HOW-TO&dquo; GUIDES As interest in international business communication has increased, a plethora of &dquo;how-to&dquo; guides have been published. Together, these books (along with their accompanying articles and presentations) are interesting. Arguably, their numerous anecdotes may prove valuable, for example, to the professor trying to humanize the subject for undergraduate students. Still, the serious researcher should avoid such guides.The simplistic approach of these &dquo;how-to&dquo; guides poses a certain danger to the reader uninformed as to the complexity of intercultural communication. Lists of &dquo;do's&dquo; and &dquo;don'ts&dquo;, while amusing and even factual, nonetheless create more difficulties than they help overcome by oversimplifying cross-cultural communication. They tend to reduce significant behavior to the level of trivia. It is true, for example, that singing after dinner is popular in Korea. Yet to reduce Korean business culture to the need to brush up one's singing technique risks reducing Korean business culture to something quaint. Worse yet, to businesspeople who limit their perception of Korean business to the importance of after-dinner song, a misleading sense of understanding and false confidence can easily follow. Even if extended to three dozen &dquo;do's and don'ts;' no list could be comprehensive enough to ensure that, as a foreigner, one would understand enough of the culture to decipher one's own experiences. CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH NEEDSAlthough business communication needs no more &dquo;how-to&dquo; guides, it does need serious research. First, the practice of global business would benefit from the dissemination of well-balanced systemic approaches to international business communication. Second, the field as a whole lacks currently an adequate volume of significant empirical research.Because so many more variables are at pl...

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I felt deeply honored when Bertha Du-Babcock invited me to give the response to her well-deserved award address. I have known Dr. Du-Babcock for many years and have long admired the groundbreaking work she has done in the area of culture and communication.Bertha has indicated that we are going through a "transition" period in business communication. To this, I would say that I agree, and yet every period in the field has been a transition period. Indeed, that constant willingness to approach the field in a state of change has been the hallmark of the field in general and of the multidisciplinary nature of the Association for Business Communication in particular.That said, Bertha's observations of the nature of the current transition are accurate. She shared with us something of profound importance today when she called on us to stand up to the challenge of teaching to "suit the realities of an ever evolving and more complex, globalized, and multidisciplinary communication and teaching environment."In a globally integrated world economy, students need more than mere cultural awareness. Let me stop here for a moment to reflect that when, 20 years ago, I would discuss the need for "cultural awareness," I would never have thought to have prefaced the term with a word such as mere, and yet that is where the field of business communication is today, at least for many practitioners.Yet at the same time, the very concept of cross-cultural awareness as a pressing business need is still news to an important segment of the business world. For the person first exposed to dealing with another culture as a business necessity, the whole field becomes yet again new. This raises two simultaneous needs. The first is to teach students to be aware of how to interact in business with people from different cultures who are, for whatever reason, behaving in a cultural vacuum. The second is the equally important task of interacting with people who are themselves responding to your cultural difference from them. And then there is every stage of cultural awareness in between.