Intercultural Communication in the Chinese Workplace

D. Ping, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137381040
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book proposes a new theoretical and methodological approach to the investigation and explanation of intercultural differences in conflict management strategies and relational (politeness) strategies in workplace settings, taking the Chinese workplace as its focus.

1

Introduction

The rapid economic surge of China at the beginning of the twenty-first century has meant that intercultural interactions between people from China and the rest of the world have been deepened and broadened. Intercultural business communication in China is no longer confined to negotiations or business visits. More and more people from other countries are working in China, some in multinational or Sino-foreign companies, some in indigenous Chinese institutions or organizations, some sent by their organizations on overseas assignments, and some on self-initiated expatriation (Doherty et al., 2013). Borrowing Richardson and McKenna’s (2002) definition, ‘expatriates’ are defined as management professional and technical staff who live and work in a foreign country on a temporary basis, but normally for more than one year. This study originates in an indigenous but also multicultural workplace in China. The expatriate participants in this study were all working in this Chinese organization at the time of data collection, either on self-initiated expatriation or on overseas assignment sent by the organization’s business partners. Expatriates working in the indigenous organizations may have very different experiences than those working in multinational and Sino-foreign equivalents. This may not be surprising as workplaces will bear deep marks of the unique social, economic, and political systems as well as the rich historical and cultural legacy of the country.

1.1 A problematic meeting

The focus of this study is on the investigation into a problematic meeting, which proved crucial in the resolution of a management crisis at a private business organization in Beijing. The interest of this investigation is not only in what happened and why it happened at the meeting, but also in how to interpret and explain intercultural interactive behaviours in the increasingly globalized workplace in the 21st century.

The meeting in question was recorded during an ethnographic study of SITE, a newly founded training school that ran one-year preparation programmes for Chinese students planning to study abroad. The investigation was conducted towards the end of the second year of its establishment.

At SITE, most of the teaching staff comprised English native speakers while the CEO and the administrative staff were all Chinese. Unfortunately, there had been continual tension between the expatriate and the Chinese staff; this had evolved into a serious management crisis by the time the data collection started. This manifested itself mainly in non-cooperation and sometimes even open confrontation between the expatriate and Chinese middle managers. When three Chinese managers expressed their intention to quit their positions as a result of the stressful situation, the CEO, Mr Wang, was compelled to take a series of measures to try to resolve the management crisis.

The meeting in question was the first and most crucial move in Mr Wang’s plan for resolving the crisis. As stated by Mr Wang in the retrospective interview, the purpose of this meeting was to enhance mutual understanding and trust through ‘heart-to-heart’ communication between the two parties. This means that building a harmonious cooperative relationship between the expatriate and the Chinese managers was the primary goal of this meeting. In order to achieve this goal, Mr Wang held a number of preparatory meetings with the Chinese and expatriate managers before the meeting. Both the expatriate and the Chinese managers took great care to prepare their speeches. The Chinese managers even rehearsed their speeches in the preparatory meetings in order not to sound ‘provoking’ (interview quote). However, despite the careful preparation on both sides, the meeting interaction still evolved into a severe confrontation between the expatriate and the Chinese managers.

What happened at this meeting? Why did the interaction evolve into conflicts in spite of the carefully designed relational strategies on both sides? How can researchers investigate and explain such incidents in the intercultural workplace? And how can studies of such phenomena help business practitioners understand interactive behaviours of others as well as their own in everyday work life? This study aims to answer these questions, drawing on theoretical insights and tools from cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-cultural psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, and workplace discourse studies.

As a research attempt in intercultural communication in the workplace, this study also aims to propose a new approach to analysing and explaining interactive behaviours in multicultural workplace settings. This research effort addresses some of the key methodological issues in two active research fields: studies of intercultural communication, especially the study of problematic intercultural interactions in the workplace, and studies of politeness, or rather, relational strategies from an intercultural perspective. The following two sections will briefly review and discuss some key issues in these two fields.

1.2 Studying intercultural communication in the workplace

There are two distinct research traditions in the study of intercultural communication. One is led by cross-cultural psychologists (e.g. Hofstede, 1980, 1991; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett, 2003; Triandis, 1989, 1995), anthropologists (e.g. Hall, 1959, 1966, 1976; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961), and intercultural communication theorists (e.g. Gao & Ting-Toomey, 1998; Gudykunst, 2004; Gudykunst et al., 1996; Samovar et al., 2012; Ting-Toomey, 1999), the other by cross-cultural pragmatists (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2008a; Wierzbicka, 2003), ethnographers of communication (e.g. Hymes, 1972; Saville-Troike, 2003), and interactional sociolinguists (e.g. Gumperz, 1982; Tannen, 1989).

Though both are regarded as constituting part of the field of intercultural communication (Scollon & Scollon, 2001; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009), there are very few research efforts that seek to establish a link between the two traditions. The first group of researchers is mostly interested in building cultural models or theories to account for national character, values or communication styles based on quantitative results of surveys, experiments or interviews. These models or theories, developed for understanding intercultural communication, are seldom verified through authentic interactive data collected in intercultural settings. The other group is mainly interested in analysis and comparison of specific discourse performances (e.g. politeness strategies) in cross-cultural or intercultural settings and rarely seeks to provide explanations for cultural differences in linguistic behaviours drawing on established cultural models or frameworks.

One example of such a divide in conceptual model development and linguistic analysis of discourse behaviours is the study of intercultural conflict management. In the last four decades, various theoretical frameworks of conflict management orientations/styles or intercultural conflict models (e.g. Hammer, 2005; Rahim, 1992; Thomas, 1976; Ting-Toomey & Oetzel, 2001, 2013) have been proposed by organizational psychological and communication researchers and verified or contested by numerous empirical studies using surveys, experiments or interviews (e.g. Chen & Ma, 2002; Chen & Cheung, 2008; Friedman et al., 2006; Oetzel et al., 2008). However, as pointed out by van Meurs and Spencer-Oatey (2007, p. 116) in a review of intercultural conflict research, though these approaches have made very important contributions to our understanding of intercultural conflict management, they still ‘have some serious limitations and need to be complemented by studies of authentic conflictive encounters and situations’. On the other hand, there is a relative paucity of research that examines authentic interaction data of conflict management from the intercultural perspective, with some exceptions such as Bailey (1997, 2000) and Günthner (2008). One reason for this might be the difficulty in negotiating access to this type of data, especially in acquiring ‘permission to record potentially sensitive interactions’ (Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009, p. 271). It goes without saying that a more multidisciplinary approach that combines theoretical frameworks and research methods from the two research traditions will illuminate new and deeper insights into the understanding of the inherently complex phenomena of intercultural conflictive interactions.

This study therefore sets out to explore the possibility of bridging the gap between the two traditions in the study of intercultural communication.

1.3 Studying relational strategies in the Chinese workplace

It is generally believed that language in use serves two major communicative functions or goals: one is the transmission of information, the other the management of interpersonal relationships (Brown & Yule, 1983; Goffman, 1967; Watzlawick et al., 1967). McCarthy (1998) refers to them as ‘transactional’ and ‘relational/interactional’ goals. Among the various approaches to the linguistic investigations of interpersonal relationship management, the study of politeness is probably the most well established one. Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) face-saving view (Fraser, 1990), also referred to as the strategy-based approach (Sifianou, 2010), has undoubtedly been the most influential politeness theory.

Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) suggest that every competent social interactant has two special properties: face and rationality. ‘Face’ is defined as a public self-image in social interactions consisting of two related aspects: negative face (the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction), and positive face (the desire that the claimed self-image be appreciated and approved of) (Brown & Levinson, 1987, p. 61). ‘Rationality’ refers to a mode of means-to-ends reasoning that enables participants in an interaction to calculate the cost of actions and to select the linguistic strategies (means) that can both achieve their communicative ends and address the hearer’s face wants, since, they believe, it is in every interactant’s best interest to preserve the other’s face, in order to protect one’s own face. Since its publication, Brown and Levinson’s theory has attracted immense interest and inspired heated debates. The debates have focused mainly on three key methodological and conceptual issues, namely, the term of ‘politeness’, the scope of politeness strategies, and the claim of universality of ‘face’ as the motivating force for the choice of politeness strategies. The rest of this section will briefly review the three debated areas and set up the background for the proposal of an alternative approach to investigating politeness (or relational) strategies in the intercultural workplace settings in this book.

1.3.1 Politeness, rapport, or relational strategies

The use of the term ‘politeness’ is problematic. The definition of politeness has been either absent or controversial in previous studies (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2003; Watts et al., 2005). Watts (2010, p. 50) explains that the reason that the attempts to define the term fail is that ‘politeness is not an essential quality or feature of forms of human behaviour that can be objectively isolated’. Indeed, politeness is a situated judgement of individuals in social interactions, depending on what is said in what context (Spencer-Oatey, 2008a). Apart from the difficulty with definition, the term itself is also problematic. Spencer-Oatey (2008a, p. 2) suggests that the term ‘politeness’ can be confusing and limiting, as it often implies the use of relatively formal and deferential language and that the term tends to emphasize the harmonious aspect of social relations, while interactants might have different goals in the management of relationships, for example, to attack rather than support their interlocutors. Spencer-Oatey then proposes the term ‘rapport management’ in place of ‘politeness’ (ibid., p. 3). Compared to ‘politeness’, ‘rapport’ conveys more affective and communicative elements in equal interpersonal relations, without the emphasis on social prescription and coercion associated with ‘politeness’. However, although Spencer-Oatey emphasizes that ‘rapport management’ refers to the use of language not only to promote and maintain but also to ‘threaten harmonious social relations’ (ibid.), the term ‘rapport’ cannot avoid the inherent emphasis on the positive aspects of social relations.

It is for these reasons, therefore, that in this study the term ‘relationship management’ will be used instead of ‘politeness’ or ‘rapport management’, and ‘relational strategies’ instead of ‘politeness strategies’ or ‘rapport management strategies’. The terms ‘relationship management’ and ‘relational strategies’ are relatively more neutral since they do not have the emphasis on harmonious relationship conveyed by ‘rapport’, or the normative or coercive connotation (which could be perceived as negative in today’s more egalitarian world) of ‘politeness’. In this book, ‘politeness’ is only used when discussing previous studies in the literature.

The use of ‘management’ and ‘strategies’ emphasizes that social interactants are not passive beings driven only by external factors such as social distance and power or the internal psychological want of face protection: they are rational beings who not only need but also actively seek satisfying states of interpersonal relationships. The study of relationship management involves the exploration of choices of strategies that aim to have an effect (positive, neutral or negative) on interpersonal relations in certain (culturally expected) ways. It is these strategies that are referred to as ‘relational strategies’. It is argued in the current study that relational strategies are not universal: on the contrary, they are culture-specific; and it is important to explore cultural differences in relational strategies in order to facilitate effective intercultural interactions.

1.3.2 Scope of study of politeness strategies

The second issue in politeness studies concerns the range of strategies explored. Influenced by ordinary language philosophers such as Grice (1967, published 1975), Austin (1962), and Searle (1969, 1979), early scholars who laid the foundations for politeness studies (Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987; Lakoff, 1973; Leech, 1983) have worked solely with single constructed utterances (Sifianou, 2010). Even up to now, most of the investigations into ‘politeness’ strategies have focused on the use of language on the speech act level, in particular, on speech act realization. As reviewed by Spencer-Oatey (2008b, p. 22), a very large proportion of work on politeness has focused on the wording of speech acts, and especially on the following three aspects of speech act realization: the selection of speech act components, the degree of directness/indirectness, and the type and amount of upgraders/downgraders.

From early in the 21st century, a major turn in politeness studies, from analysing single utterances to studying politeness as ‘a phenomenon traceable in longer fragments of authentic interactions’ (Kádár & Bargiela-Chiappini, 2011, p. 4), was triggered by Eelen (2001) and followed by a number of influential studies (Locher, 2004; Mills, 2003; Watts, 2003). Following this discursive (or postmodern) approach (Kádár & Bargiela-Chiappini, 2011), Pan (2011, p. 77) points out that one of the key methodological issues that politeness researchers are faced with is ‘[W]hat is the unit of analysis? Should it be a single utterance, a string of utterances, or the entire interaction?’

Arguing that politeness is managed through multiple aspects of language use, Spencer-Oatey (2008b, p. 21) proposed five interrelated domains, all of which are believed to play important roles in rapport management: these are the illocutionary domain, discourse domain, participation domain, stylistic domain, and non-verbal domain. However, Spencer-Oatey (ibid.) also admits that apart from the illocutionary domain (that is, speech act realization), there has been a paucity of work in exploring rapport/politeness strategies on the other four domains. Pan (2011) also proposed a analytical framework, the grammar of politeness, to account for situational and contextual factors in the analysis of how politeness is evidenced and evaluated in communities of practice. This situation-oriented approach draws on the ethnography of communication and argues that situational factors, such as scene, key, message form/content, participants, social distance and power relation, and interactional goals, can affect the choice and interpretation of politeness. Pan’s framework takes into consideration a much broader and more complicated composition of contextual factors in accounting for politeness behaviours than Brown and Levinson’s (1987, p. 74) three sociological variables, namely, social distance, relative power, and ranking of impositions. However, the politeness strategies examined in Pan (2011) are still confined to the speech act level, that is, the variables in the grammar of politeness are only used to explain the politeness considerations in making the choices of speech act realization.

The current study converges with the discursive approach and argues that analysis on the speech act level without reference to the broader context may provide a distorted interpretation of the interactants’ communicative intent. This book will propose an analytical framework for relational strategies in the workplace, the Multi-Level Model (the MLM, see Chapter 2). The MLM provides a structured analytical tool for researchers as well as workplace interactants for understanding and explaining relational strategies not only on interactional levels such as the relational designs of speech act scheme and turn-taking strategies, but also on contextual levels such as situational and inter-event levels. Indeed, as will be elaborated in the analysis chapters later in this book, the findings of the study indicate that contextual factors not only can influence the choice and interpretation of relational strategies, but also can be manipulated by workplace interactants as part of a relational strategy scheme for the achievement of certain interactive goals.

1.3.3 Face as the motivating force?

Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) claim of the universality of the two face wants as the socio-psychological motive for politeness strategies has also been met by robust challenges and criticisms, especially from Japanese and Chinese scholars. Most criticisms reject the notion of negative face as being applicable to East Asian cultures (Gu, 1990; Mao, 1994; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription Conventions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Multi-Level Model: The Analytical Framework
• 3 Cultural Self Perception: The Explanatory Framework
• 4 The Management Crisis
• 5 Interactive Strategies for Conflict Management
• 6 The Expatriate Participants’ Relational Strategies
• 7 The Chinese Participants’ Speech Act Strategies
• 8 Coordinated Turn-Taking as Problem Talk Strategy
• 9 Contextual Factors as Relational Strategies
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index