school
Macau Periodical Index (澳門期刊論文索引)
- Author
- Eppler, Martin J; Ge, Jianxin
- Title
- Communicating with diagrams: how intuitive and cross-cultural are business graphics?
- Journal Name
- Euro Asia Journal of Management
- Pub. Info
- Jun. 2008, Vol.18, No.1, pp. 3-22
- Abstract
- Abstract : This article reports on the results of an intercultural card sorting experiment with 104 students in Beijing and Cambridge (UK) to identify similarities and differences in the interpretation of visual business communication formats by students. The results show that English and Chinese strategy students differ dramatically in terms of their similarity and grouping decisions of business diagrams. The results indicate that communicators who employ business graphics for their presentations should pay attention to their target groups and visual formats to avoid misinterpretation in different cultural regions. The article is a contribution to visual approaches to communication management and highlights their limitations and risks. Paragraph Headings: 1. Introduction: the relevance of business graphics 2. Methods: card sorting and cluster analysis 2.1. Demographics of the participants 2.2. Task description 3. Results 3.1. Results regarding outliers 3.2. Results regarding group labels 3.3. Results regarding emergent groups: an empirical classification of business diagrams 3.4. Differences among the Chinese and British groups: domains versus attributes 4. Discussion 5. Conclusion Tables: 1. A selection of 30 visualization-based methods (ordered by vertical column in figure 1) 2. Summary of most frequently used group labels by the 37 Cambridge students 3. Summary of most frequently used group labels by the CUFE students Figures: 1. Thumbnails of the 30 picture cards for the card sorting task 2. Differences among the participants and the resulting two outliers eliminated from the sample 3. Combined groups of the 102 English and Chinese students 4. NMDS rendering of the collective similarity judgements of all 102 students 5. Dendrogram of the aggregated classification of 67 students from the CUFE business school (China) 6. Dendrogram of the aggregated classification of 37 students of Cambridge University (UK)