A Study Of English Websttes Of Sino-american Business School From Intercultual Perspective

Globalization has made international communication more and more frequent.With the help of internet, business activities extend much further places. Websiteshave become almost the dominant platform of communication for modern businesses.According to Edward Hall, culture and communication are inseparably linked; onecannot exist without the other. Culture gives meaning to communication and providesthe context for communication. Relying on the internet for disseminating informationover the world, an experienced website designer will undoubtedly take culturalparameters into account. However, facts have showed that many websites failed tohave a good design from intercultural perspective, which has greatly influenced theefficiency of the websites as they have expected. Therefore, in recent years, more andmore researchers have begun to give their attention to the website studies from thecultural views.However, there is little intercultural study about the business school websitesalthough international education is booming now, and business education almostbecomes the top choice for the international students. Meanwhile, when choosing thebusiness school, many students are apt to select the American ones, for the USpossesses the most outstanding business schools in the world. No matter where theyare, the applicants usually depend on the websites to submit their applications.Websites undoubtedly turn to be the essential means for business schools to show theirexcellence and the indispensable sources for the applicants to learn about theirprospective schools as well. Given this, the present thesis chose 15 business schoolwebsites from China and the other 15 ones from the US as the research subject. Thenbased on both Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory and Hall’s high-and low-contextculture theory, the thesis had a close inter-cultural examination of the Sino-Americanbusiness school websites. By the modified Callahan’s framework for interculturalanalysis on websites, the thesis conducted a cross-cultural analysis of the organizationand visual information of the business school homepages. The author put forward fivequestions and intended to find the answers through the research. The results show thatChinese Business School homepages tend to display more symmetrical patterns, inwhich pictures of buildings, leaders and officials, people in group, and people inofficial affairs are more frequently presented; in contrast, American business schoolhomepages have more tendency to show longer pages, website links and animations.Pictures of students, and students with their faculty, pictures of a single person, andpictures with people laughing and having classes can be more frequently seen on theweb pages. Based on these findings, the thesis proposed some suggestions foroptimizing the English versions of Chinese business school web pages, in the hopethat they can be of assistance for the website designers or practitioners to create amore attractive and efficient web page for people from different cultures.