Synergy

5

Authors: Maria Liana LĂCĂTUŞ

The Games Theory is focused on strategy issues that imply interdependences between participants’ decisions and actions. In particular, this theory deals with situations in which one’s gains depend on another’s decisions and actions, so that each person involved has to identify the best reaction to possible actions of all the others. The Games Theory has been applied to understand and explain the behavior of an oligopoly firm. One of the most well known activities is the Prisoner dilemma. Two prisoners are asked to recognize the crimes they committed in a specific period of time. The prisoners are separated and cannot communicate with eachother. Each of them has to make a decision by himself, but the decision he will make depends on the other’s decision that affects him a lot. The prisoner dilemma model is used to explain the decisions that two competitive firms have to make regarding their spending for advertising.

6

Authors: Monica CONDRUZ-BĂCESCU

The main idea of this article is the concept of global culture as it is perceived nowadays due to the spreading of the American life style, goods and values worldwide. The idea of a global culture wasn’t possible only during the global modernity time. The cultural writings can overcome the political and linguistic borders on condition that they are translated in the languages of the interested cultural communities. For centuries this process was hindered by the geographical distances and the technical difficulties. With the mondialisation development facilitated by mass-media and the contemporary means of transport, the writings’ circulation becomes wider.

7

Authors: Adriana CHIRIACESCU

During the past decades the study of intercultural communication has received much more interest and attention than ever before, although it is as old as civilization; the ease of travel, the development of international trade as well as of multinational organizations – in other words globalization – have made people aware of the fact that they must communicate and cooperate with other people different from themselves in order to succeed and, sometimes, even to survive. Effective communication in a different context is felt as being important especially in business, because of the competition existing among companies all over the world; at the same time, intercultural communication is very complex, because of the existence of intermingling distinguishing characteristics. That is why well trained professionals, able to function correctly in different environments are required in practically every field of activity; having to face international competition no company can concentrate only on domestic activities / markets. In business of any kind, cultural incompetence can jeopardize lots of money through wasted negotiations, lost purchases / sales or contracts and poor customer relations. It is said that “cultural risk is just as real as political risk in international business arena”. Nowadays, even if a person does not leave his / her own home country to work abroad, it is almost sure that he / she will meet or work with men / women coming from other countries; even the students may share classes with colleagues from different nations and some intercultural training, as well as the experience they will get learning to communicate internationally will be beneficial to them.

9

Authors: Elena TĂLMĂCIAN

The present article focuses on the use of critical thinking skills and techniques during a Business English class on the topic of problem-solving. I included four activities to which students were asked to apply critical thinking skills such as: analysis, interpretation, inference, explanation and evaluation. Students’ positive feedback to the practice of critical thinking principles, as well as their active participation in that lesson, add to the other advantages of such a practical approach: a better understanding of the problem solving concept and an increased ability to solve business problems.

12

Authors: Ştefan COLIBABA

This article examines the problematic relationship of the self to patterns of all kind as reflected in post-World War 2 American short fiction and highlights specific ways in which language is used to organise the character’s ‘reality’. We point out how the minimalist orientation in the American short fiction of the late 70s and early 80s, through reductive and allusive techniques, explores the contemporary loss of a sense of history and the moral authority of marginality. Characters in minimalist short fiction are shown to have a static view of life in which things felt but left unstated have value.

20

Authors: Martina TEMMERMAN, Dave SINARDET

This article analyzes political television interviews in the two languages (French and Dutch) of federal Belgium. Clayman and Heritage (2002) have listed the communicative characteristics of news interviews and have set forth a framework for analysing them. We have applied their findings to the corpus we have collected from the two public broadcasting stations in Belgium. The focus of this paper is on the specific characteristics of interviews with politicians interviewed both in their native and their non-native tongue. We have especially focused on the interviewer’s role in communication. It turns out that the interviewing styles on both channels analyzed are equally adversarial, but that the ways in which this adversarialness is achieved, differ