Communicating with Diagrams: How Intuitive and Cross-cultural are Business Graphics? Results of Image Sorting Experiments with Strategy Students in the United Kingdom and China

This article reports on the results of an intercultural card sorting experiment with 104 students in Beijing and Cambridge to identify similarities and differences in the interpretation of visual business communication formats. 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 managers who employ business graphics for their communication 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.