Purpose: Culturally bound communication styles affect the length of verbal and written messages. Legal contracts are no exception. This paper aims to explore the relationship between cultural communication style and the level of written detail in international joint venture (IJV) contracts. Using a database of actual IJV contracts, we empirically test the relationship between the parties’ cultural communication styles, cultural distance, and the textual length of contracts. We apply Edward T. Hall’s high- and low-context communication construct and find that contracts are longer when made between parties of low- and high-context cultures and shorter when both parties come from high-context cultures relative to when both parties are low context. Additionally, we find that the higher the cultural distance in terms of individualism versus collectivism between partners, the shorter the text of the contracts. The results highlight the influence of culture on contract text length and, as such, on contract negotiation and design costs. This article contributes to the culture and strategic alliance literature by going beyond the assumption that low-context culture contracts are longer and high-context culture contracts shorter by testing it empirically.

目的：受文化束缚的沟通方式会影响口头和书面信息的长度。法律合同也不例外。本文旨在探讨国际合资（IJV）合同中文化交流方式与书面细节水平之间的关系。使用实际 IJV 合同的数据库，我们实证检验了双方的文化交流方式、文化距离和合同文本长度之间的关系。我们应用 Edward T. Hall 的高语境和低语境交流结构，发现低语境和高语境文化的双方之间的合同更长，而当双方都来自高语境文化时，相对于双方都处于低语境时，合同更短语境。此外，我们发现合作伙伴之间在个人主义与集体主义方面的文化距离越大，合同文本越短。结果突出了文化对合同文本长度的影响，因此，对合同谈判和设计成本的影响。本文通过实证检验超越了低语境文化合同较长而高语境文化合同较短的假设，从而为文化和战略联盟文献做出了贡献。