Introduction

[Jan Heyneman]

Greetings Discoursers:

I'm Jan Heyneman, on the faculty of the Management Communication program at the
William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of
Rochester (NY, USA). How's that for a mouthful?

I'm an ESL person by training (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and experience
(nigh on to 20 years now), with my overseas experience having been in Japan. My
trade has expanded in recent years to management communication (40-80% of our MBA
students are international students). Putting those two together, along with a
20-year unfulfilled interest in pragmatics, I'm just starting to review the
literature on cross-cultural pragmatics in professional settings, with the goal of
doing research into cross-cultural professional job interviews. Grahame Bilbow's
work on what he calls "cross-cultural impression management" in Hong Kong is
related and interesting, along with a lot of the work done in Europe (seems to me
that we North Americans have been a bit slow on this) on multicultural
communication in organizations, organizational cultures, etc. Interesting stuff.

Looking forward to listing with you all.