Business Negotiations in ELF from a Cultural Linguistic Perspective

Milene Mendes de Oliveira

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110626858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Some of the most frequent questions surrounding business negotiations address not only the nature of such negotiations, but also how they should be conducted. The answers given by business people from different cultural backgrounds to these questions are likely to differ from the standard answers found in business manuals.

In her book, Milene Mendes de Oliveira investigates how Brazilian and German business people conceptualize and act out business negotiations using English as a Lingua Franca. The frameworks of Cultural Linguistics, English as a Lingua Franca, World Englishes, and Business Discourse offer the theoretical and methodological grounding for the analysis of interviews with high-ranking Brazilian and German business people. Moreover, a side study on e-mail exchanges between Brazilian and German employees of a healthcare company serves as a test case for the results arising from the interviews, and helps understand other facets of authentic intercultural business communication.

Offering new insights on English as a Lingua Franca in international business contexts, Business Negotiations in ELF from a Cultural Linguistic Perspective simultaneously provides a detailed cultural-conceptual account of business negotiations from the viewpoint of Brazilian and German business people and a secondary analysis of their pragmatic aspects.

1 Intercultural business negotiations and organizational cultures in Brazil and Germany

The idea that there is one people in possession of the truth, one answer to the world’s ills, or one solution to humanity’s needs has done untold harm throughout history – especially in the last century. Today, however, even amidst continuing ethnic conflict around the world, there is a growing understanding that human diversity is both the reality that makes dialogue necessary, and the very basis for that dialogue … We recognize that we are the products of many cultures, traditions and memories; that mutual respect allows us to study and learn from other cultures; and that we gain strength by combining the foreign with the familiar.

(Excerpt from Kofi Annan’s 2001 speech as he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Quoted in Bolton 2005: 79)

1.1 Introduction

Globalization has impacted societies in ways that were unforeseeable a few decades ago: economic relations between countries have increased exponentially; the marketplace has become more and more global; companies continue to expand across borders; processes of international Merger and Acquisition have become common; economic treaties have reduced the amount of bureaucracy for people willing to work overseas.

In terms of the Brazilian-German economic relationship, cooperation and trade between the countries have been increasing. As explained on the website of the German Federal Foreign Office (Beziehungen zu Deutschland 2017), since 2008, Brazil and Germany have been officially involved in a strategic partnership that revolves around topics such as energy, research, economy, and commerce (among others). Brazil is Germany’s most important trade partner in Latin America. In 2015, the German export rate to Brazil was 9.8 billion Euro, and the import rate from Brazil to Germany was around 8.5 billion Euro. Economic events, such as the annual German-Brazilian Economic Days,³ stress an increased collaboration interest in areas such as transport, urban development, and renewable energy among others (Beziehungen zu Deutschland 2017).

From a linguistic perspective, the importance of the speech event ‘business negotiations’ in the international economic context described above cannot be denied. In this regard, my first hypothesis was that, due to cultural influences, Brazilians and Germans conceptualize business negotiations differently. Therefore, my first and main research question was How do Brazilian and German business people conceptualize ‘business negotiations’? Another hypothesis was that cultural conceptualizations are instantiated pragmatically in authentic business negotiations. Therefore, my second research question, which derived from the first one, was Can the cultural conceptualizations previously identified be attested in authentic business negotiations between Brazilians and Germans?. The second hypothesis was narrowed down to a few specific hypotheses after the results of the analysis of cultural conceptualizations were clear. Colloquially speaking, the task set up in the research project was to investigate how Brazilian and German business people conceive of ‘business negotiations’ and how they act these negotiations out.

To answer the research questions delineated above, I investigated (a) ‘cultural conceptualizations’ (explained below) on which Brazilian and German business people rely when talking about ‘business negotiations’ in semi-structured interviews and (b) pragmatic aspects of actual business negotiations via e-mail.⁴ The analysis of cultural conceptualizations features as the main part of my study. The examination of pragmatic aspects adds to this main part.

In order to test the first hypothesis, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 9 Brazilian and 9 German business people from different sectors. In a nutshell, these were the methodological steps: (a) transcription of interviews; (b) identification of cultural conceptualizations (see explanation below); (c) assignment of assessment values to the cultural conceptualizations (positive; negative; or unspecified/neutral); (d) generation of conceptual scripts (see explanation in section 2.1.4). The first hypothesis could be proved, i.e., preferential conceptualizations (Kövecses 2005: 82) were found in both groups.

The specific hypotheses derived from the second hypothesis were tested by looking at whether certain conceptualizations were pragmatically instantiated in real business interactions. The test happened in the context of a research-based consultancy project with 7 Brazilian and 10 German business people working at the Brazilian branch and the German headquarter and of a German healthcare company. E-mail threads from these employees were collected for the analysis of sequences (see explanation in chapter 2, section 2.2.2) and face strategies. The results showed that some of the specific hypotheses could be proved, but others not, as explained in chapter 3 (section 3.2).

A specific theory of meaning underlies the study and its research aims, namely the dynamic model of meaning (Kecskes 2008, 2015). According to this theory, ‘meaning’ is composed of prior and actual situational contexts (Kecskes 2008, 2015). Prior context arises from speakers’ previous experiences with a certain word, expression, or concept, and the actual situational context underlying meaning is emergent and is influenced by several situational characteristics of the communicative action. Therefore, investigating how business people conceive of ‘business negotiations’ allows a look into prior context; checking how business negotiations are acted out allows a look into the actual situational context.

In the next paragraphs, I provide a brief outline of the theoretical context in which this study can be inserted. I present a description of disciplines and theoretical orientations and point to a few gaps in the literature. I also explain how the present study can fill some of these gaps by giving a cross-disciplinary treatment to the concept under investigation, i.e., business negotiations. Subsequently, I give a more thorough description of each of the points addressed in this outline in the upcoming sections of this chapter (1.2 to 1.4).

The topic of intercultural business communication has been investigated – or has the potential to be investigated – by different disciplines, intercultural communication being probably the most obvious one. Intercultural communication is itself an interdisciplinary field influenced by anthropology, psychology, and sociology to name just a few (Wolf 2015: 445). To be noted is the fact that many of the intercultural communication studies dealing with business contexts rely heavily on frameworks that support cultural comparisons on the basis of dichotomist or scalar relations ranging from two poles, such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (1991), Hall’s (1976) and Hall and Hall’s ([1987] 1990) classifications of polychronic and monochronic cultures, and high- and low-context cultures. However, if applied alone, such bipolar categories can only offer a simplistic and reductionist view of the cultures under investigation.

Amongst the disciplines that have a strong potential to deal with intercultural business communication, cognitive and cultural linguistics, world Englishes, and English as a lingua franca can be mentioned. Starting with the two former ones, it should be explained that cognitive linguistics has been mainly concerned with the relationship between language and conceptualization (often regarded as cognitive processes). By contrast, cultural linguistics is an area of studies that draws on theoretical and analytical tools of cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics and explores the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualization (Palmer and Sharifian 2007: 1). Thus, the focus of cultural linguistics is on the role of culture in the cultural cognition (Sharifian 2011) of a given group.⁵

An analytical framework developed in the field of cultural linguistics, named ‘cultural conceptualizations and language’ (Sharifian 2011), allows for an investigation of culture that goes beyond the linguistic surface (i.e., structural features of language, such as morphology, syntax, lexis, and phonology), as several studies have already proved (e.g., Polzenhagen and Wolf 2007; Schröder 2015b; Schröder et al. manuscript; Sharifian 2011; Wolf and Polzenhagen 2009). The study of cultural conceptualizations has an advantage over studies that base their analyses solely on well-established ‘cultural dimensions’ (Hofstede 1991) or other etic and dichotomist categories, as mentioned above. The cultural conceptualization framework leans strongly on emic construals, themselves linked with speakers’ prior knowledge (arising from past experiences). Previous studies have shown that these construals do not always find exact equivalents or opposites in other cultures (see, for example, Schröder 2014; Sharifian 2015; Wolf and Polzenhagen 2009) and that comparisons are not as clear cut as some scholars such as Hofstede believe.⁶

The other two areas mentioned above that are also promising in the investigation of intercultural business communication are world Englishes and English as a lingua franca. World Englishes is concerned with the identification and description of varieties of English around the globe. English as a lingua franca, by contrast, is mainly focused on how speakers of English from all over the world negotiate meaning in online interactions.

Within the field of world Englishes, comparisons between Englishes tend to be done on the level of lexicon, syntax, and phonology (see, for instance, Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008), without regard to cultural conceptualizations. There are, however, a few exceptions to this trend, such as Wolf and Polzenhagen (2009), who explore the conceptual level of African Englishes. These and other authors (e.g., Sharifian 2015) make a call for the investigation of cultural conceptualizations within world Englishes. The study presented here resonates these earlier calls and shows that cultural conceptualizations strongly influence the prior-context component of meaning.

Apart from a lack of attention to cultural conceptualizations, another gap in the field of world Englishes is the fact that a clear focus is given on the contrast of Englishes in the Outer- and the Inner-Circle (considering Kachru’s model 1985). With exception o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Intercultural business negotiations and organizational cultures in Brazil and Germany
• 2 Cultural linguistic and pragmatic perspectives on intercultural business negotiations
• 3 Conceptualization and practice of business negotiations
• 4 The study of language and culture through the speech-community and the community-of-practice perspectives
• Appendix I: Interview script (main study)
• Appendix II: Interview script and procedures (case study)
• Appendix III: Simulated e-mails addressed in the interviews (case study)
• Appendix IV: Report with preliminary results (case study)
• Appendix V: Informed consent (main study)
• Appendix VI: Informed consent (case study)
• References
• Index