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Intercultural business communication (IBC) is a complex disciplinary endeavour. The fundamental constructs of culture and communication involve an array of well-established and highly developed fields of enquiry, with their distinctive and sometimes overlapping approaches, theories and methodologies, and the added dimension of the business context clearly increases that complexity. This paper selectively reviews the disciplinary fields of relevance to research in IBC. It briefly outlines current debates, identifying key topics and their potential contribution to the exciting 'diversity' that exists within IBC, and it concludes with a brief introduction to the four papers that make up the remainder of this Special Issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to identify culturally distinct features that characterise management discourse in 20 meetings in two Australian banks, as compared with Hong Kong Chinese discourse in similar contexts. Australian managers were found to display a discourse pattern of leadership styles markedly different from the Hong Kong Chinese. For instance, the Australians exhibit a distinctive consultative mode. Instead of using genuine bipolar and multiple choice questions like the Hong Kong Chinese, the Australian managers often ask leading and loaded questions to enlist support from the subordinates. Unlike the Hong Kong Chinese managers who invite subordinates' participation in problem solving, the Australian managers tend to engage in perfunctory consensus-checking before making final decisions. While such features are attributable to cultural and organisational differences, they also indicate a configuration of Australian management styles rather different from that expostulated in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]