How Language and Culture Distort The Business Context: A Comparison Between French and American Representations

International audienceLanguage and culture are inseparable. They feed and influence each other. Therefore depending on its historical evolution, a given word can be filled with several different meanings. Furthermore, being a way to communicate our perception, language is submitted to the 4 functions of consciousness: senses, thought, intuition, feeling. Therefore the fundamental relationship between language and culture is both rational and irrational. The aim of this article is to show through a series of examples that in a management context, beyond the use of a particular terminology, there is a variable preconception of the objects described by words that affect the perception of a given managerial cultural reality or representation. Therefore the words “management”, “organization”, “hierarchy” offer a wide variety of meanings and representations that vary from one culture to another. As Gérard Tiry (1994) puts it, the preconceptions that are in ourselves constantly put us in a comparative state of mind that distorts the situation by imposing a frame, a starting point, a direction and an evaluation