The need for successful communication in intercultural and international business settings: Analytic and comparative studies, new trends and methodologies

Abstract

Communicating is a need in today’s business world; if professionals are not able to express their ideas appropriately, it will be difficult for them to reach positive agreements while operating internationally. This special issue of Ibérica is devoted to the analysis of successful experiences aimed at communicating accurately in intercultural and international business settings. Needless to say, the traditional difference between domestic and foreign markets has basically disappeared nowadays, as trade barriers have been removed thanks to the increasing amount of commercial agreements among countries. This situation has forced professionals to learn languages in order to survive in international markets, where they will have to find their space against a larger number of competitors (Selmier II & Oh, 2012). As a result of this new international stage, learning other languages has become a must for most of those professionals, and English is often used as the business lingua franca in order to negotiate internationally (Ehrenreich, 2010; Evans, 2013). Nevertheless, this can present some challenges, as Rogerson-Revell (2007) pointed out, as in many situations these communicative interactions are carried out among speakers whose native language is not English (Kankaanranta & Lu, 2013; Nickerson & Crawford-Camiciottoli, 2013). Additionally, we should also consider that these challenges may not only be linguistic, but also cultural.