The changing nature of international business relationships and foreign language competence

Jonathan Swift and Yuelu Huang

International Journal of Management Practice, 2004, vol. 1, issue 1, 21-40

Abstract: This paper examines the role of Foreign Language Competence (FLC) in international business, at a time when business activity, in general, is becoming increasingly international, and when the focus of business relationships is changing from that of a short-term, task-orientated approach, to one of a longer-term relationship orientation. As a consequence of these changes, the authors suggest that FLC should become increasingly focused on the development/maintenance of long-term business relationships, rather than the traditional short-term "sales-orientation" which has been the case so far. The paper is a conceptual contribution, which will be empirically tested at a later date.

Keywords: foreign language competence; cross-cultural business relationship development; joint ventures; international business; culture; internationalisation; market entry; communications; business relationships. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=4868 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijmpra:v:1:y:2004:i:1:p:21-40

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Management Practice from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().