There are other problems as well with studying intercultural communication, one of which many of us who specialize in this field have
experienced: You pick a situation to study as an intercultural situation and then you find that nothing at all seems to have gone wrong.
The social interaction proceeds smoothly and you come to feel that there is, after all, nothing to the idea that intercultural
communication causes problems of communication. Alternatively, you pick a situation to study and things do go wrong, but it is very
hard to argue that the problems arise out of cultural differences rather than other more basic differences such as that the participants
have different goals. For example, even when a Japanese businessperson fails to sell his product to an Indonesian customer, the
reasons are likely to have to do with product quality or suitability, with the pricing or delivery structure, or perhaps with the even more
basic problem that the customer did not really seek to buy the product in the first place, and the differences between “being Japanese
and “being Indonesian” have nothing to do with it.