Whether Do as Romans Do

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When in Rome, should we really do as Romans do? An analysis of successful cross-cultural communication and negotiation

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Abstract: It is widely accepted that today’s workplace is becoming huge rapidly and interconnected intensively for the reason that a number of companies are looking for foreign country markets to expand their business. In turn, understanding how to communication and negotiation effectively with another language speaking negotiator can be much more difficulty than before. Thus, cross-culture communication and negotiation are becoming more and more frequent and significant in daily international business. This paper focuses on the barriers of cross-culture communication and negotiation in business such as language, culture, non-verbal behaviors and styles of negotiator. Consider these barriers, we need to follow the proverb that “ do as Romans do when in Rome”. As some creative ideas and ethical principles discussed in the paper, we deem the complete obedience to other cultures as a kind of threat to our own and a restriction on the creativity. From such a perspective, “do as Romans do” is a bad thing. In addition, this paper proposes some suggestions for us that we can follow in cross-culture communication and negotiation.. Keywords: Culture; Cross-culture communication; Cross-culture negotiation

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Introduction
Through the ages, culture has being a quite hard term for human beings to define. In ancient times, Confucius(500 BC) defined culture like this “All people are the same. It’s only their habits that are so different.”, so in his opinion, culture differs in the ways people act and think reflected by the developed various habits. While Tylor(1870) defined that “Culture ... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”. According to Tylor, culture can be expressed through a complicate integration of beliefs,...