Cultural communication style and international joint venture contract length

Abstract

Purpose: Culturally bound communication styles affect the length of verbal and written messages. Legal contracts are no exception. This paper aims to explore the relationship between cultural communication style and the level of written detail in international joint venture (IJV) contracts. Using a database of actual IJV contracts, we empirically test the relationship between the parties’ cultural communication styles, cultural distance, and the textual length of contracts. We apply Edward T. Hall’s high- and low-context communication construct and find that contracts are longer when made between parties of low- and high-context cultures and shorter when both parties come from high-context cultures relative to when both parties are low context. Additionally, we find that the higher the cultural distance in terms of individualism versus collectivism between partners, the shorter the text of the contracts. The results highlight the influence of culture on contract text length and, as such, on contract negotiation and design costs. This article contributes to the culture and strategic alliance literature by going beyond the assumption that low-context culture contracts are longer and high-context culture contracts shorter by testing it empirically.

A comparative study of self-praise on English and Chinese social media: strategies, themes, and motivations

“…Therefore, cultural differences may also explain why Twitter users preferred unmodified explicit self-praise more. Moreover, Western people, who usually come from low-context or individualistic cultures, tend to communicate directly, while Eastern people, who usually come from high-context or collectivistic cultures, tend to communicate indirectly (Velez-Calle et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021;Tabata and Vrij, 2023). We assume that this difference also affects the way Twitter and Weibo users employ self-praise.…”