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...groups matched Du-Babcock's earlier findings, two groups did not and offered new reasons for such a result. The 8 replicating groups confirmed that different communication behaviors emerged in the domain of topic management for both Cantonese (first language) and English (second language) meetings, whereas the 2 nonreplicating group results indicated that second-language proficiency is likely a contributing factor that affects the topic management of Chinese bilinguals when participating in Cantonese and English meetings. This article discusses why the topic management patterns and turn-taking behaviors emerged as they did across these 10 additional groups. The article also suggests implications for international business communication practice and further research.
Keywords: topic management strategies; turn taking; business communication behavior; second language communication
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A large and rapidly growing segment of bilinguals speak English as a second or foreign language. This is because English has emerged as the world's prominent linking language (Crystal, 1997; Kameda, 1996) and as a genuinely global language (Gilsdorf, 2002, p. 366) in international business communication. Crystal (1997) notes that 75% of English-speaking individuals are second- or foreign-language users. Of these nonnative English speakers, Chinese bilinguals (including overseas Chinese around the world) make up the largest and the most rapidly growing segment of "the global English picture" (Crystal, 1997; Kachru, 1992). This phenomenon suggests that English-language speakers of varying competency have the potential to directly communicate with and relay messages to native- or nonnative-English speakers in international business contexts.
Given the uniqueness of the language environment in Hong Kong (e.g., Du-Babcock, 1999), Chinese bilinguals live in a collective culture (Hofstede, 1991) and speak Cantonese (a high-context language) in general and English (a low-context language) with native-English speakers and non-Cantonese speakers in business contexts. As Cantonese and English are spoken concurrently in the workplace, Hong Kong bilingual Chinese cannot help but monitor and unconsciously compare first- and second-language messages when they switch between these two codes. Given its prominence as an international financial center and its pattern of multiple and simultaneous language use, Hong Kong is an ideal research site for a comparison of the first- and second-language business communication practices of Chinese bilinguals.
In an earlier study of mine (Du-Babcock, 1999) that provided an in-depth analysis of how and whether Hong Kong bilinguals managed the topics of discussion differently in their first- and second-language decision-making meetings, the findings revealed that Hong Kong bilingual groups followed spiral or circular topic management strategies in first-language (Cantonese) decision-making meetings and linear topic management strategies in related second-language (English) ones. The analysis of this group explained why the communication behaviors of Hong Kong bilingual speakers differed when they interacted in comparable first- and second-language strategic formulation and decision-making meetings. However, the results suggested a need for further and broader investigation. Thus, in this study, the topic management strategies and turn-taking behavior of 10 additional groups have been analyzed using the same methodology in codifying the data. This extension of the earlier study not only explores a range of topic management strategies and issues applicable to the Hong Kong bilingual business environment but also examines factors that are likely to influence groups using strategies that deviated from the previous findings. The purposes of this study were to do the following: (a) to ascertain whether my earlier findings can be applied to all bilingual groups; (b) to explore factors that might have contributed to the differences in the different groups' turn-taking behaviors and topic management strategies; and (c) to provide plausible explanations for the different topic management strategies that the Cantonese bilinguals followed or did not follow in their first- and second-language decision-making meetings.
For the purposes of this study, turn-taking is defined as the ordering of moves that involve any organized interplay of speech acts operated by speakers "one at a time while speaker change occurs" (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974, p. 726). The allocation of turn-in-interaction can be self-selected or abided by the speaker's nomination of the next speaker. Unlike turn-taking in social interaction, such as a dinner party conversation (e.g., Erickson, 1982), each turn in a structured decision-making meeting has a relationship with the turns that precede and follow it. Topic management refers to the related topic subjects discussed by the speakers during the turn taking. In this study, the topic areas were the eight decision areas that each functional manager needed to address during the strategic management meetings.
LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
To investigate the impact of culture and second-language proficiency on the communication behavior of Chinese bilinguals, I first review the influence of culture on thought patterns resulting from topic management patterns. Second, I discuss how language proficiency of Hong Kong bilinguals affects their communication behavior (i.e., turn-taking, speaking time distribution, felt degree of influence, and felt degree of information exchange) in interconnected first- and second-language decision-making meetings.
Culture, Communication, and Thought Patterns
An extensive literature has examined theories and empirical studies that suggest that culture has a great impact on communication and thought patterns (e.g., Hall, 1976; Kaplan, 1987; Ma, 1993). My earlier study offered cultural explanations for topic management strategies that Cantonese bilinguals might follow in their firstand second-language decision-making meetings. Examining different topic management strategies, I drew on the notion that the language communicators choose to use can influence and change message content. The linguistic relativity principle (sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) addresses this issue by theorizing about the relationship between the language people speak and its thought pattern (see also Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). According to this principle, speakers of different languages necessarily construe the world differently and are locked into the worldview given to them by the languages they use. As a result, the languages that speakers know and use will structure their understanding of the world, and in many ways the language people speak is a guide to the language in which they think (e.g., Davies & Corbett, 1997; Davies, Sowden, Jerrett, Jerrett, & Corbett, 1998; Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). The linguistic relativity principle applies especially to bilinguals when they switch between languages and adjust their perceptual and thinking processes to fit the language they are using and to introduce different content into their first- and second-language messages (see also Kay & Kempton, 1984; Matsumoto, 1994). Matsumoto's (1994) study clearly demonstrated that culture can affect the language content used by bilingual individuals and that different ideas tend to be expressed in first- and second languages.
The linguistic relativity principle continues to generate as much controversy now (Davies et al., 1998) as it did when first formulated more than half a century ago. This is illustrated by the fact that although a number of experts from various disciplines have dismissed the principle completely (Davies et al., 1998; Lee, 1996, 1997), there are as yet no research studies on international business communication that either prove or disprove this principle. Because some current studies offer at least partial support for its validity, my argument is that the linguistic relativity principle offers a plausible, admittedly unproven, theoretical basis for implying that the language communicators choose to use does affect message content in international business communication.
Kaplan's (1966, 1987) spiral-linear thinking patterns and Ma's (1993) Taoist thinking pattern model are relevant to the linguistic relativity principle because they relate the language causation notion to Asian and Western cultures. This line of research suggests that Asians (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) think...
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