Kulturspezifische Interaktionsstile oder Wenn schwedischsprachige und deutschsprachige Arbeitskollegen im Restaurant zu Mittag essen Eine Studie zur Einbettungskultur in kommunikativer Praxis

Sammanfattning: Interactions are formed and shaped differently from culture to culture. This thesis focuses on this phenomenon and in the first part deals with (from a theoretical view) the question, how the interplay between language-use and culture can be described. A cross-disciplinary approach within the scope of cross-cultural communication research is developed as is a semiotic concept, based on mainly linguistic, interactional and anthropological theories and methods. In order to describe different culture-specific interactional styles the semiotic field called embedding culture is outlined as an important resource for participants organizing talk-in-interactions.In the second part of this book the relevance of this approach is applied and tested. With the aid of various video recordings of ‘lunch-talks’ among colleagues at a restaurant in Sweden and Germany, this specific type of action and their cultural patterns are analyzed in order to describe cultural-specific styles in face-to-face-interaction. The methodological problem of recorded interaction is pointed out and the role of the camera highlighted. As the analyzed data is mainly based on interactions between men also gender-aspects are discussed. Furthermore, the scenario, time aspects and the customs and rituals of interactions at table are taken into account as relevant features of the embedding culture, all going into a culture-specific style of interaction.The results of the empirical study are, finally, correlated with other, not interaction-based analyses in the field of cross-cultural communication, and the specific national-cultural dimensions are critically discussed.