ABSTRACT
The incident above, experienced by John Deacon, an American businessman who was relocated to the UK by his employer, is just one of many examples of cross-cultural differences in communication. The seemingly trivial task of introducing oneself is in fact culturally bound. In her ethnographic study of the ‘English’, Fox (2004) observed that while an American tends to open conversation with an assertive selfintroduction, the English follow a ‘no-name’ rule in social situations until a much greater degree of intimacy has been established. ‘In fact, the only correct way to introduce yourself in such settings is not to introduce yourself at all, but fi nd some other way of initiating a conversation – such as a remark about the weather’ (Fox, 2004, p. 39).
