The Languages of Business: An International Perspective 9781474401005

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THE LANGUAGES OF BUSINESS: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

THE LANGUAGES OF BUSINESS: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Francese a B argiela -Chiappini and Sandra Harris

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

© The Contributors, 1997 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh Transferred to digital print 2008 'JYpeset in Times by Pioneer Associates, Perthshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastboume, East Sussex A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7486 0833 8

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

The languages of business: Introduction and overview Sandra Harris and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini

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SECTION 1: INTER-CULTURAL DISCOURSES

Chapter 2

Spoken discourse in the multicultural workplace in Hong Kong: Applying a model of discourse as 'impression management' Graham T. Bilbow

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Chapter3

Australian-Japanese business interaction: Some features of language and cultural contact Helen Marriott

49

Chapter4

Requests in German-Norwegian business discourse: Difference in directness Ingrid Neumann

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Chapter5

The Asian connection: Business requests and acknowledgements Joan Mulholland

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SECTION 2: CROSS-CULTURAL DISCOURSES

Chapter6

Organisation in American and Japanese meetings: Task versus relationship Haru Yamada

117

Chapter 7

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian: Notes on the achievement of information and advice Laura Gavioli

136

CONTENTS

vi Chapter 8

Joking as a strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations Annette Grindsted

159

Chapter 9

Lexical landscaping in business meetings Heloisa Collins and Mike Scott

183

SECTION 3: CORPORATE DISCOURSES

Chapter 10 Languages within languages: A social constructionist perspective on multiple managerial discourses Tony J. Watson

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Notes

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References

233

Notes on contributors

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Index

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Chapter 1

THE LANGUAGES OF BUSINESS: Introduction and overview Sandra Harris and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini

INTRODUCTION

The surge of interest in language-based research over the past fifteen years or so has underlined the increasing importance of language study to both the social sciences and the humanities. The 'linguistic turn' so evident in the 1970s and 1980s shows no sign of receding in the 1990s. A significant aspect of this interest has been the emergence of business discourse as an identifiable, if developing, field of study. Practitioners as well as academics have clearly begun to recognise that 'talk' in its broadest sense is central to the conduct of business at all levels and that there are in existence a number of definable sub-generic types of business discourse, e.g. negotiations, meetings, service encounters, some of which have been studied much more frequently and intensively than others (negotiations) and from different perspectives. Among the disciplines which have contributed methodological approaches and theoretical constructs to the analysis of discourse in work settings are, in particular, organisational communication, negotiation studies, conversational analysis, ethnography, discourse analysis, applied linguistics and pragmatics. Coupled with the emergence of business discourse as a field of study has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of international business and the economic, social and political significance of multinationals and what is commonly referred to as globalisation, including the massive worldwide growth of the tourism and travel industries. Although crosscultural business communication is hardly a new phenomenon, what is relatively recent is that both 'scholars and practitioners are increasingly becoming sensitized to the fact that cultural factors heavily influence management practices', as Limaye and Victor ( 1991: 281) point out in their

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review of the state of cross-cultural business communication research along with their 'hypotheses' for the 1990s. This heightened sense of cultural awareness takes a number of different forms. On the highest level, it refers to national, or even pan-national, cultural perspectives, i.e., Western vs. Eastern 'world-views', North American vs. European, Southern European vs. Northern European, Japanese v~. Hong Kong. Hofstede's (1980) attempt to link the attributes and workrelated attitudes of managers with national, international (or both) dimensions of cultural patterning and predispositions (masculinity, individualism, power/distance, uncertainty avoidance) has been enormously influential, though clearly the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede are not the only possibilities. In addition, there is now also considerable literature on the notion of corporate culture (e.g. Baron and Walters 1994; Deal and Kennedy 1982; Hampden-Turner 1990), defined either as the creation of a dominant and pervasive ethos which encompasses shared company values and attitudes or, more recently, as the presence of a number of competing managerial 'discourses' (see Watson, this volume) which may create tensions within a company and even be conflictive. (In this sense a company is not only a culture but often several cultures.) How corporate cultures are influenced by national cultures, and to what extent, is still an open question, though one which isincreasingly asked. As Smith (1992) contends in a recent review, while there may be some universality to the organizational structures required around the world, the differing national cultures within which organizations are located frequently give those structures substantially different meanings. Working effectively across cultures is therefore not simply a matter of applying the skills found to be most effective within the culture of one's country or organization. It requires also that one can understand and cope with the processes of communication and decision-making in settings where these are achieved in a different manner. (Smith 1992: 48) Smith concludes that 'we have at present only a very partial understanding of how cross-cultural problems are best addressed'. The chapters in the current volume not only represent some of the current developments within the field of cross- and inter-cultural business communication but are also an attempt to address some of the problems. Among other things, the various authors are intrigued by the ways in which human beings operate linguistically in order to achieve particular goals in a variety of work-related situations, whether cross- or inter-culturally; how their linguistic strategies and interactions are influenced by corporate concerns and cultural factors; and how the use of a foreign language can affect negotiating skills in an inter-cultural setting. The chapters share in particular the following:

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1. A sense that cultural and linguistic differences are clearly manifest in business interactive contexts on a number of levels and that they matter. Whether cross- or inter-cultural, such differences are embedded in the choices and constraints offered (imposed) by the systems of individual languages, interactive patterns and strategies in various sub-generic types of business discourse and in the organisational structures of companies. 2. A commitment to the use of real language data as the basis for research. The focus of the book is on spoken discourse, on which, as Firth ( 1995) points out, there is still a paucity of work undertaken in business contexts. The difficulty of access to real language data in companies and other business environments has almost certainly inhibited the development of the field, especially when compared with other forms of institutional discourse, for example, the media and education, where data is easily obtainable. Even the study of medical and legal discourse, where actual language data has also often proved difficult to come by, has advanced much more rapidly than the study of business discourse. Access to sensitive and confidential boardroom discussions, management meetings and certain types of negotiations is likely to prove as elusive and difficult in the future as it has in the past, though linguistic evidence based on such settings is crucial to our understanding of international business communication. 3. An attempt to bring together the academic and the professional, the researcher and the researched. If, as Smith (1992) contends, we still know little about how to address cross-cultural problems meaningfully, most of the chapters in this book are problemcentred. As is the case in another recent volume on business negotiations (Ehlich and Wagner 1995), the contributors to this book take seriously the perspective of the practitioner, and there is a clear recognition of the need for training, not only in foreign languages but in cultural awareness. Without such training, where academics and practitioners exercise complementary skills and expertise, misinterpretation and negative evaluation of language acts and other types of interactive behaviour are all too common and can jeopardise the success of an inter-cultural business encounter.

Moreover, the three precepts put forward by Cameron et al. (1992) concerning the relationship between the researcher and the researched (that the researched are not objects, that the researched have their own agendas which the researcher should attempt to address, that the outcomes of the research should be shared with the researched) are particularly apposite to research in cross- and inter-cultural business encounters. If

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often a high proportion of social research is carried out on groups of relatively powerless people (Cameron et al., 1992: 2), this is not the case in most business cross-cultural contexts, which can frequently concern interaction between relatively powerful individuals or groups of individuals. Even where power is an important variable, for example, between buyers and sellers or at management meetings, power relationships are likely to be more ambiguous than they are in many other institutional contexts. Since the primary focus of the book is on cross- and inter-cultural business interaction, it is perhaps not surprising that the recurrent theoretical constructs are Goffman's concept of 'face', as expounded and elaborated by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), along with a major concern with the expression of 'politeness' and 'indirection' (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Methodologically, the chapters draw mainly on ethnography, conversation analysis, pragmatics and applied linguistics, and, in the case of Watson, social constructionism and organisational theory. In the design and implementation of their research, many of the contributors have had to contend with the advantages and limitations of their chosen theoretical approaches and analytical tools. Their choices as researchers have concerned the practical planning and organisation of the field activity in order to collect the necessary data; issues related to the amount of data and the delicacy of transcription; the reckoning with 'cultural influences' and other external constraints; the definition, and delimitation in the social space, of what constitutes the 'context' of the interaction; the tension or fusion of the 'micro' and 'macro' influences on language as a social activity; the harmonisation of qualitative and quantitative findings, particularly in traditionally language-based analytical approaches. The move towards 'integrative' research advocated by, among others, Limaye and Victor (1991) and Smeltzer (1993), with its balance between design complexity and perceived value, may not sound like an attractive proposition to many applied linguists or uncompromisingly 'qualitative' researchers. It also seems to sit uncomfortably alongside some recent trends in management and organisational theory that have taken on board 'post-modern', 'deconstructive' or other 'critical' principles and methods (e.g. Harvey 1990; Alvesson and Willmott 1992; Hassard 1993; Linstead 1993; but see also Hammersley 1995 for a critique of paradigmatic research). However, if increasing interdisciplinarity is the future that awaits discourse analysis (Chen 1'}90; Wodak 1990), then discourse analysts, including those concerned with international business discourse as data, must also be willing to consider the merits (and drawbacks) of the quantitative tools employed by, for instance, experimental psychologists.

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Equally, ethnography (Brewer 1994; Rosen 1991; Spencer 1994) and other qualitative approaches (Cassell and Symon 1994) will be enhanced by the employment of, for instance, computational analysis (see Scott and Collins, this volume). IN SEARCH OF CULTURE

One of the most elusive of all epistemological concepts is culture, and many, if not most, of the determinants of social and interactive differences are often ascribed to the cultural. Roberts and Boyacigiller (1984) contend that the meanings of culture associated with anthropology are too limited and that both researchers and business practitioners require a more broadly-based definition if insight is to be gained into the functional and structural differences between multinationals - or within multinationals based in different countries. Indeed, definitions and debates on culture now abound in the literature of many disciplines, including cultural studies itself, and are beyond the scope of this introduction and overview. Hall's (1976) well-known definition of culture as 'man's [sic] medium: there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture' is all-encompassing, and its very comprehensiveness is theoretically unhelpful as a means of interpreting social interaction. If all that happens around us has some explanation in the cultural set-up, then only an understanding of all of the components of that set-up will, in tum, disclose the meanings of the interaction. The risk, of course, is that individuals become shaped and regulated by a system of values that limits their ability to make sense of their experiences self-reflexively. Culture becomes a homogenising force which tends to regulate the behaviour of people and institutions within an integrative framework of values and beliefs, thus necessarily defining variation as deviant. An alternative movement that has developed out of the recent epistemological revolution in the humanities and social sciences (i.e., poststructuralism, post-modernism and hermeneutic approaches) has resulted in a heightened sense of self-reflexivity and the questioning of the relationship between the individual and society, particularly within cultural anthropology and social psychology (e.g., Cohen 1994; Gergen 1990). Gergen (1990), for instance, exposes the mentalistic, individualistic and intersubjective concept of understanding that characterises Western psychology and proposes a shift of focus from the 'psychological' to the 'relational', establishing relational work as the locus of human understanding. An understanding of the culture of a setting would then be derived not from the accounts of the individuals operating in that setting but from the observation and/or reconstruction of their relational work in an attempt to map both distinctive and universal values. Ethnographic

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research is conducted in order to capture the 'discourse of relationships', or, as cultural anthropologists would call it, 'the claims and perceptions' of individuals involved in discursive practices (Cohen 1994). Culture becomes the product of social interaction and the self-reflexive individual is a creator, rather than a passive recipient, of cultural values. Moreover, cultural boundaries are no longer seen as physical entities but elusive and ambiguous symbolic constructs that individuals use to distinguish themselves from other contiguous groups. This understanding of culture, as informed by local consciousness and traceable in local interaction, has far-reaching consequences when applied to organisational research. CROSS- AND INTER-CULTURAL RESEARCH

Since the chapters in this book are grouped around cross- and intercultural studies respectively, it may be useful to clarify the distinction. Cross-cultural research examines and contrasts, at least for our purposes, subsets of generic types of business discourse in different (usually two) cultural settings - for example, Japanese and American management meetings, Italian and British service encounters. Inter-cultural research involves studying how two or more individuals (or groups of individuals) from different cultures interact in a particular work-related encounter (or generic type of encounter)- for example, Hong Kong Chinese and Western managers working for the same company, Norwegian and German business people negotiating a contract. Many of the problems associated with the languages of international business apply to both types of study. For instance, it is worth remembering that much cross-cultural research in organisations has been criticised for paying little attention to the cultural specifics of non-Western peoples and for resorting to national or regional culture only as a way of explaining findings after completing the fieldwork, rather than examining it before undertaking the fieldwork (Tayeb 1988). Also, some researchers seem to have ignored the challenge posed by co-existing or competing cultures in any given organisation (Rowlinson and Hassard 1993). Moreover, for research (whether cross- or inter-cultural) concerned with what Sanders (1994) calls 'substantive illumination' as opposed to 'empirical testing', it is essential that a core of local meanings should be identified before these are translated into constructs which are then operationalised in measurements. This process is far from uncontroversial, particularly when researchers opt for the 'country' as a unit of comparison (Riordan and Vanderberg 1994). When advocating a self-reflexive position on culture, one cannot avoid giving some consideration to the related concept of bias, in the hope that the researcher's own influence on the interpretation of social interactions

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is made explicit. Self-assessment of perceptions of cultures beyond one's own, often in the form of stereotypes and prejudices, form part of the research experience and are a necessary preliminary step in order to engage in meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. 1 Ethnocentrism has been an all too common feature of some past research. Within the academic community, one nee~ not go beyond linguistics and organisational communication to expose the 'Anglocentrism' that has characterised much research until fairly recently (Adler 1991; Wierzbicka 1994).The most visible consequence of this trend has probably been the concentration on Western countries in cross-cultural comparisons at the expense of more wide- ranging and localised studies of peoples and organisational practices (Tayeb 1988). However, ethnocentrism is not the only explanation for this. A more recent, and insidious, product of ethnocentrism has been certain uses of the discourse of globalisation. Because of its vagueness as a simple descriptive term for a complex process, globalisation has become an attractive argument employed by Western Transnational Corporations (TCs) and governments alike in order to promote the concept of a 'new world order' founded on a border-free market. Hence the preference for cultural homogeneity whose beacons (McDonald's, Coca Cola®, Levis® etc.) tower over old capitalist soil and newly-converted lands. 2 The question of the definition and interplay between corporate and national (or regional) cultures remains open. Hofstede et al. (1993), for instance, favour a separation of the two concepts after concluding that individuals who appear to hold similar values may behave quite differently in work situations. This may well be because a large portion of an individual's national culture is apparently absorbed in childhood whereas organisational values tend to be learned much later on in the workplace. On the other hand, the suggestion that it is possible to identify mental maps about organisations which are attributable to national values (Laurent 1983) is an interesting alternative. 3 In summary, we would argue that a language-based, ernie approach to cultural difference is a necessary stage in both cross- and inter-cultural research, quite apart from a general project design which can clearly benefit from mixed (qualitative and quantitative) methodology and a multidisciplinary approach. Van Dijk's (1990) 'prediction' of a discourse analysis which is committed to interdisciplinarity is even more likely to be true of international business communication. As Christopher Candlin convincingly argued at a recent panel discussion on the~Future of the Field of Communication in the Professions,4 applied linguists must be prepared 'to set up activities with the professionals' which entail close collaboration between the two camps. Such activities are based on the establishment of trust and enable linguists to take on roles through interdisciplinary teamwork. The fragmentation of

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traditional approaches to professional discourse, typically represented by LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) research, must be replaced by a focus on the dynamics of interaction (including both synchronic and structural dimensions) that might eventually lead to the identification of a set of 'universals' of professional discourse, shared by many generic types. Past attention to heterogeneity should be replaced, in Candlin's vision, by concentration on the analysis of texts as locally constructed by participants and embedded within institutions. The methodological convergence thus advocated between textual and interactional approaches would incorporate the strengths of both traditional LSP research, and its focus on close (and often de-contextualised) textual analysis, with the ethnographic and anthropological insights of the sociological tradition in language studies. Interactional linguistics, ethnography of communication, social constructionism and conversation analysis, for example, are all disciplines which have influenced to a considerable extent the study of the languages of international business. The chapters in this book represent a first step in this direction. THE CHAPTERS

The book is divided into three sections: Inter-cultural discourses (those involving interactions between participants from different cultures who are native speakers of different languages); Cross-cultural discourses (those involving a comparison between two sets of native speakers engaged in the same generic type of discourse); Corporate discourses (intracultural discourses within a single company). The coverage of languages includes varieties of English (American, Australian, British) used as both L1 and L2, Japanese and some of the lesser studied languages, such as German (used as L1 and L2), Danish, Italian, Norwegian and Brazilian Portuguese. It would also seem fair to assume that native speakers' verbal (and non-verbal) behaviour in intralinguistic situations is likely to be different, and possibly very different, from their behaviour in interlinguistic ones. It has been correctly contended (e.g., Sanders 1994; Tayeb 1988) that for comparative cross-national research to be valid it is first necessary to gain substantive knowledge of the settings to be compared. In short, understanding of the dimensions of intralinguistic behaviour should precede and guide interlinguistic research. Blanket contentions about expected variations in interactional behaviour between speakers from various broad language groups, for example, Northern European (Danish, Dutch, Norwegian etc.), Southern European (Spanish, Italian, Greek etc.), Asian (Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese etc.) are widely applied in prescriptive textbooks on inter-cultural communication

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and rely on the attribution of 'cultural traits' to all individuals originating from a given country. The contributors to this volume tend to take a rather more cautious attitude to generalising their findings. At the same time, their analytical work concentrates on the essence of the interactional process, i.e., language. Their concession to prescriptivism are the 'practical tips' at the end of Chapters 2-8. No absolute claim of general applicability is intended but readers with a more practical inclination, or less time to dedicate to the analysis proper, can rely on advice and remarks that emanate directly from the observation of 'language in use'. On the theoretical side, the approaches represented in this volume include more traditional ones (conversation analysis, applied linguistics and pragmatics) alongside relative newcomers to business discourse, such as corpus linguistics, social constructionism and impression management. Like the dominance of the varieties of English and contrastive research involving Asian languages (especially Japanese), the interest in requesting behaviour in business settings displayed in this volume is not coincidental. Indeed, the literature on inter-cultural communication, business negotiation and cross-cultural pragmatics affords considerable attention to these concerns. Using a substantial corpus of empirical data collected in a large international corporation in Hong Kong, Bilbow (Chapter 2) explores the relationship between Chinese and Western verbal self-presentations and impression-formation among a group of senior managers. Concentrating primarily on two types of speech acts ('directing' and 'suggesting'), he first analyses differences in the lexico-grammatical and prosodic features of such acts as they are used by Chinese and Western speakers, and then metapragmatic assessments of both Chinese and Western participantobservers in relationship to the same acts. Bilbow sets his analysis in the context of the changing demography of Hong Kong and the perceived differences in Chinese and Western cultural values. He is careful, however, to point out the dangers of assuming on the basis of apparent inter-cultural differences that such variation is solely due to speakers' ethnicity. Nevertheless, his results provide compelling evidence that Confucian and Western values do underpin not only the process of self-presentation but also the way senior managers from different ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds perceive their own speech behaviour and that of other managers. Both Marriott and Mulholland examine the ways in which differences in cultural predispositions and expectations affect business interaction between Australians and Asians, mainly Japanese. Marriott (Chapter 3) takes her data from a variety of situations, including business negotiations, courtesy calls and business luncheons, where the language used is English. She also makes reference to tourism service encounters, where the language used is Japanese. Her contention is that communication

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problems in such situations are common, often without interactants being aware of them and/or being able to account for them. On the basis of her research and her work with both Australian and Japanese business personnel, she suggests a number of ways in which interactants can improve their inter-cultural communication skills. Mulholland (Chapter 5) is also both an experienced researcher and someone who has frequently advised Australian business organisations who wish to do business in the Far East. Mulholland proposes a number of 'cultural assumptions' that Western business people often make which can lead to negative evaluations of interactive behaviour in negotiations and, at worst, to a breakdown in communication. She focuses her chapter primarily on the act of the 'request', which is central to most business negotiations, and examines how the form and manner of making a request can be crucial to its being understood and acted upon. Neumann (Chapter 4) also sees the request as central to business talk, but in a very different cultural setting - German and Norwegian managers negotiating in German. Her chapter attempts to identify a number of request strategies and to place them on a continuum involving directness and indirectness. Using a database of audio-recorded business talk between German and Norwegian buyers and sellers, she analyses both quantitatively and qualitatively the distribution of, and differences in, the forms of request which are selected by native and non-native speakers. Her results suggest that Norwegian (non-native) speakers choose more indirect strategies when making requests than do German native speakers. Like Mulholland (Chapter 5), Neumann emphasises the importance of both recognising and attempting to use certain linguistic and pragmatic strategies when making a request in a business negotiation, along with the necessity of a heightened sense of cultural awareness. The importance of cultural awareness is also the subject of Yamada's chapter (Chapter 6) on the comparative organisation of American and Japanese management meetings. Set in the context of their respective banks, such meetings reflect the different interactional goals of the respective sets of managers. Yamada explores a number of interactional strategies which differ substantially, in that the Japanese appear to be relationship-driven while the Americans are task-driven. Like Bilbow, she attributes some of these differences to fundamental contrasts in Eastern (collectivist) and Western (individualist) ways of thinking, including attitudes to both language and silence. Without a heightened sense of cultural awareness, both sides are likely to misinterpret the style of communication of the other and to make negative judgements. Yamada's chapter provides useful examples to support Smith's contention (quoted earlier) that strategies which are effective in an intracultural context can often create confusion when participants are communicating inter-culturally. Gavioli's (Chapter 7) work explores the cross-cultural differences and

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similarities of service encounters set in Italian and British bookshops. Using a conversation-analysis approach, she explores in detail the negotiation of the role of the bookshop assistant with Italian and British customers. Although interactively the encounters may seem 'simple', an analysis of the data reveals considerable differences. While in general terms the British encounters are organised as an 'exchange of information' and the Italian ones as 'giving advice', the reality is in fact more complex and both modes occur in both languages though with differing frequencies. Once again, cultural features are manifest and influential in both national settings. The importance of humour and the fact that jokes often reflect significant cultural differences as to what is regarded as 'funny' is often talked about but less often investigated. There seems little doubt that joking is culture-specific. What is less obvious is that joking strategies appear to play a significant role in business negotiations and that such strategies relate to the structure and sequencing of 'talk' in differing ways in different languages and cultures. Using simulated negotiation exercises aimed at training young business executives in Spain and Denmark, Grindsted (Chapter 8) examines the relationships between joker, butt and audience; and how joking and laughter form different types of exchanges in Spanish and Danish business settings. She also attempts to link differences in joking behaviour to Spanish and Danish 'face-needs', since Spanish and Danish speakers appear to give different priorities to these. Finally, she examines the different nature of joking sequences as they are constructed by Spanish and Danish negotiators. Collins and Scott (Chapter 9) place the emphasis on methodology in their chapter on lexical landscaping, which attempts to contribute to our understanding of what happens in business meetings. Using data comprising five business meetings, two taking place in Brazil (in Portuguese) and three in Britain (in English), they attempt to describe how nonsequential topics are developed and organised in such contexts, i.e., how topics and sub-topics of different business meetings emerge through lexical connections and how topics are lexically linked to one another. Using key concepts of repetition, keyness of words, collocational links and aboutness as tools of analysis, they develop the notion of lexical landscaping, focusing on the analytical features which generate such landscapes. Their work on aboutness is particularly interesting as it reveals different patterns for the different meetings. Collins and Scott also suggest a number of issues for further investigation, including a more comprehensive cross-cultural analysis. Watson's chapter has been placed last for several reasons. First of all, it approaches discourse from a different perspective from the majority of other contributors - that of a sociologist who is based in a business

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school. What Watson's work demonstrates is that the discourse of managers within a corporate context is not a homogeneous one, as has often been assumed. Not only are there sub-generic types of business interactions (meetings, negotiations, memos, etc.) but managerial discourse itself is most fruitfully viewed not as an entity but as comprising potential clusters of 'discourse resources' which individuals or groups of individuals can utilise 'to make sense of their situations'. Watson identifies in his data two such clusters of discourse resources, one based on 'empowerment, skills and growth' and the other based on 'control, jobs and costs'. Such discourses clearly are not ideologically neutral, and point to a future area of development which cross-cultural comparisons of the language of managers must address. Secondly, Watson's experience as a 'participant observation researcher' in a multinational company also points the way to the future of in-depth analyses of business discourse. His 'ethnographic journey' involves an explicit dialogue between the researcher and the research subject which becomes a significant aspect of the research itself. If, as Watson maintains, work organisations are constituted through s.uch dialogues and discursive processes, then understanding how business works on all levels - including the international one- means understanding 'talk' from a participant's point of view. If such talk is also inter-cultural and the participants are from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, then this adds a further dimension to such understanding and requires a more complex concept of cultural awareness. The interface between 'corporate culture' and 'national culture' becomes a significant locus of organisational sense-making processes not only in terms of managerial attitudes but in how managers are positioned in relationship to clusters of 'discourse resources'. CROSS- AND INTERCULTURAL BUSINESS COMMUNICATION: A TENTATIVE GUIDE FOR THE FUTURE

In the intervening time between the two review articles published in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL) in 1987 and in 1991, ('Language in the professions', by Ann Johns and 'Discourse analysis in professional contexts' by John Swales), the study of professional and institutional discourses has not only developed and diversified but, as the titles show, the focus has shifted from 'language' to 'discourse'. This is a significant change which reflects a widening of the scope of applied linguistics as well as the influence of social theorists with a wider political agenda, such as Foucault, along with the increasing interest in textuality and genre studies. As recently as the early 1990s, medical, legal and academic settings still commanded the greater share of the contributions (Swales 1991), with business discourse listed under the 'other professions' category. (A

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current review would undoubtedly reveal the huge growth in the study of media discourse.) As has been mentioned, a serious inhibiting factor in the growth of business discourse research has been and continues to be the question of access to data. To a greater extent than for most other 'institutions', time, perseverance, personal contacts and luck are useful, if not indispensable, prerequisites if the researcher approaching a large business organisation with the intention of 'gathering data' is to meet with success. It seems that only in the last few years have linguists involved in cross- and inter-cultural research begun to consider some of the 'complications' that Agar (1985) correctly pointed to in the conclusion to his proposed descriptive framework for institutional discourse. These can be summarised as follows. Firstly, concentration on the institutional persona in professional-client interactions has overlooked the client as well as ignoring discourse among the professionals themselves. To this we would add that the notion of client or customer has undergone a complete overhaul in management studies, particularly after the introduction of Total Quality Management (TQM). 'Customers' are no longer only individuals external to the organisation but all those to whom products and services, including information, are passed within any given· organisation. In short, most work colleagues with whom on,e interacts at different points in time are very likely to fall into this new category, whether in a private or public sector of activity. Moreover, organisational communication has received much more attention in recent years, attracting the interest of social scientists as well as applied linguists (see, for example, Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1995; Couture 1992; Fiol 1995; Swales and Rogers 1995; Yates and Orlikowski 1992; Tyler 1992), and redressing the balance in favour of inter-professional discourse. Secondly, the understanding of what an institution really is and how it works has benefited greatly from recent insights generated within . organisational theory, particularly work on organisational culture. Crossdisciplinary fertilisation is not only desirable but necessary if applied linguists are serious about doing research in work settings. The mapping of a variety of discourses in companies depends on the willingness of the researchers to don the corporate mantle for extended periods if necessary, mingling with employees at all levels while keeping abreast of developments in relevant branches of management studies such as organisational theory, as well as language- and discourse-oriented disciplines. Finally, Agar reminds us that the relationship of the institution to its organisational context needs clarifying. Alongside efforts to bring together the various traditional disciplines that have contributed to the broad field of professional communication, such as interactional sociolinguistics, text linguistics, LSP, etc. (Gunnarsson et al. 1994), studies of what we

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might call 'corporate discourse' have recently begun appearing which have introduced a holistic concept of organisation as realised through talk (Boden 1994). Boden's monograph on the 'business of talk' focuses on the dynamics of process in organisations, the sense in which employees talk organisations into being. She explores as a recurring theme the dialogic relationship between agency and structure in organisations. Combining the methodologies of social theory and ethnomethodology, though with a clear predisposition towards the latter, she attempts to address the micro-macro debate in new and interesting ways. Such a distinction, she argues, is 'neither empirically observable nor theoretically sensible, though it is certainly useful methodologically' (Boden 1994: 214). Her work provides an insightful and positive contribution to that debate and is a testament to the value of combining approaches (social theory and conversation analysis) which have hitherto appeared incompatible. To Agar's list of 'complications', especially in view of the increasing importance of international communication in the past ten years, must be added the need for a model of business discourse which incorporates a cross-/inter-cultural dimension. This is not an easy task and, as a tentative first step, we would propose the following components as essential aspects of such a model: NATIONAL CULTURE CORPORATE CULTURE INTERACTIONS GENERIC TYPES OF DISCOURSE INDIVIDUAL LANGUAGE SYSTEMS

FIGURE 1.1:

Cross-/inter-cultural business discourse

• Individual language systems. Both cross- and inter-cultural research must be concerned to some extent with the comparative properties of individual languages. 'Requesting', for example, which is a crucial speech act in many business negotiations, may assume different forms in different languages and draw on different linguistic systems. Translating a 'request' literally from one language into another is not likely to be effective. The relationship in a business context between native and non-native speakers is

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•

•

15

always a relevant one, as is the issue of which language is used as the medium of communication. In addition, the relationship between individual languages and cultures has been the subject of a longstanding 'and controversial debate associated with Sapir and Whorf, but there is probably general agreement that different languages tend to foreground certain aspects of 'reality' and comprise differing sets of choices and constraints. Generic types of discourse. Utterances form generic types of discourse, both spoken and written. Business discourse is not a single or simple genre but consists of both sub-generic types and clusters of discourse resources in which are embedded underlying ideologies. Both academics and practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of this. Fluency in a foreign language (or even one's own language) does not necessarily enable speakers to master subgenres such as negotiations between buyers and sellers, management meetings, business correspondence, etc. Trainers recognise this, and discourse strategies are often associated with particular generic types. Interactions. Generic types of discourse both define and reify the nature of the interactions which take place within business organisations. Some of these recurring interactions also become a part of the st:r"Qcture of the organisation itself, for example, Boards of Directors, standing committees. Others are part of the recurrent processes which 'talk' and 'write' the organisation into being, for example, memos, meetings, briefings, etc. Corporate culture/s. Discourse types, through and within interactions, both construct and reflect corporate cultures. Corporate cultures are often best viewed not as homogeneous entities but as comprising a number of clusters of 'discourse resources', along the lines proposed by Watson (this volume). These discourses often reflect particular sets of ideas or interests of certain groups of employees, which may or may not be associated with ethnicity or national culture. National cultures. Business organisations are set within national, and often regional, cultures in particular countries. The influence of national cultures on corporate cultures has been mainly the domain of Hofstede and is a complex issue, particularly so in the case of multinationals.

These components interact in dynamic and interesting ways, and a comprehensive cross-cultural study would incorporate them all. Most studies, however, are not comprehensive, and different researchers can be positioned in relationship to such a model in different ways. Watson's chapter, for example, explores the relationship between generic discourse

16

HARRIS and BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI

types and corporate culture. Boden's work takes as its locus the dialogic relationships between interactions and corporate culture/s and structures. She does not examine the influence of individual language systems on interactions, nor does her data allow for cross-cultural comparisons. She takes as given the American cultural setting, and focuses primarily on a close-up view of how interactants create corporate reality through interactive talk, where talk is simultaneously action and interpretation. Two other recent books on business discourse position themselves differently from Boden. Ehlich and Wagner (1995) focus on 'negotiation' as a broadly based sub-generic type of business discourse. They define a negotiation discourse as one where the participants refer explicitly to their goals and interests, and many of the chapters in their volume explore the nature of negotiation discourse in relationship to types of business interactional settings and the corporate culture. However, there is a strong cross-cultural emphasis in a number of the chapters, and the book taken as a whole addresses the whole range of components in our model. Firth's (1995) book is also focused on 'negotiation' as a generic type of discourse, as related to particular workplace interactive contexts, but makes use of an even more broadly-based concept of negotiation. Most, but not all, of the chapters relate specifically to business settings, and a number relate negotiation discourse to cultural influences. Finally, our own book (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris1997) attempts to map cross-culturally the nature of a different sub-generic type of business discourse (management meetings). Using a database consisting of a series of audio-recorded meetings in two multinationals engaged in the manufacture of a similar range and type of products (one based in Italy and one in Britain), we have attempted to locate and explore the influence of cultural variables, both corporate and national, on the discourse strategies of managers in executive meetings. Since the recordings are in two languages (Italian and English) the research necessarily involves examining how differences in particular aspects of the respective linguistic systems (pronouns in Italian and English, for example) influence the use of specific interactive strategies in the two sets of meeting data. The book also explores the complex relationship between language behaviour which is affected by generic determinants (i.e., the nature of meetings as a generic type of interaction) and cultural determinants (i.e., a British versus an Italian setting). Empirical studies of real-life organisational communication such as those mentioned above reinforce the need for methodological and theoretical multidisciplinarity, both in intracultural and cross-cultural research on business discourse. A first indication that this is happening comes from within the traditionally stable and self-contain-ed domain of LSP studies. 5 Gunnarsson (1995) has criticised the static approach to language and the emphasis on written texts that has characterised the field since its early

The languages of business

17

days back in the 1970s. She goes on to propose a widening of its scope to include a social constructionist view of discourse and a holistic methodological approach that covers both written and spoken communication . If this suggestion to widen the theoretical horizons of LSP is taken on board, studies will begin to share some of the concerns and the advances that have so far been the preserve of business discourse analysts whilst at the same time encouraging the application of research to pedagogy and language training, which remain two of LSP's typical domains (but see also Gunnarsson et al. 1994 for a recent change of emphasis). Alongside an increased sensitivity to the wider contextual factors that affect discourse practices and that are mapped in the language behaviour of corporate actors, there is a perceived need for a deeper understanding of, in Wieck's (1995) words, 'the ignored remainder', those facets of reality-in-the-making that researchers may have dismissed as commonsensical or irrelevant because they do not appear to add anything to their quantitative accounts. Unsuspected significant patterns of action revealed through observation of verbal interactions belong to this category and, risk being overlooked in organisational research that ignores language. This is particularly true when corporate politics comes under scrutiny. As Mumby (1988) engagingly shows in his study of the interrelation between language, meaning, power and ideology in organisations, it is through the deconstruction of stories and metaphors, as repositories of ideology, that one unwraps the mechanics of the reproduction and maintenance of power structures. Mumby also advocates participatory research, i.e., the active involvement of the investigators in uncovering and challenging hegemonic power which is brought about by systematically distorted communication. Critical works such as Mumby (1988) and Daudi (1986) combine a deep awareness of the intimate relationship between discourse and power, played out by social actors in organisations seen as 'political negotiable entities' (Daudi 1986: 159). Thus, it is argued, political language is deliberately put in place to mask the actual exercise of power. Concomitantly, power is unobtrusively exercised through the manipulation of the symbolic apparatus of organisations while rationality appears to be guiding political decision-makin g (Pfeffer 1981). Within linguistics, the agenda of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) addresses the concerns of active involvement with the object of the research while it rejects mere descriptiveness and the ideological neutrality of the researcher (Fairclough 1989, 1995; Wodak 1990). From within management studies, social scientists have looked at the influence of 'specific languages' or registers on the employees' perceptions of their organisation. Terminology, for instance, often thought of as a largely unanalysed repetition of an agreed set of lexical items, has been found to be instrumental in fostering group cohesion and facilitating the

18

HARRIS and BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI

induction process in new employees (Taylor 1987). A more pervasive phenomenon of inculturation through language is the adoption of militaristic terminology found in the literature of management schools (Garsombke 1988). This trend is also reflected in corporate discourse, including higher education. The language of strategic change within management studies relies heavily on 'new discourses' for the introduction of major policies with, for example, Total Quality replacing Quality Assurance. Specific communication patterns, or 'framing devices', are employed by change agents to foster sense-making and cohesive interaction between management and employees during times of significant strategic change (Fairhurst 1993). Finally, recent research into metaphorical discourse shows how language is critical to subjectivity and identity creation in organisations (Alvesson 1994). In the 1990s, language is set to become both the key to interpreting work practices, and the focus of comparative research, particularly where the 'physical' and the 'tangible' tend to be less salient organisational traits and ambiguity is high, for example, in knowledge-based activities such as advertising and consultancy agencies (Alvesson 1994). Internationally, the challenge represented by a 'global business scenario' requires an increased awareness of and sensitivity to distinctive cultural influences that are particularly significant in inter-cultural encounters. Cross-cultural studies are essential if globalisation as a process is ever to be fully understood, but perhaps the greatest challenge in the future to business discourse researchers remains the development of the potential 'usefulness' of their research in order to: 1. Offer new insights into the critical role of language in and across organisations, both nationally and internationally; and therefore 2. Help to provide solutions to real problems and 3. Advance our knowledge of the social and cultural behaviours which inform business contexts.

Chapter 2

SPOKEN DISCOURSE IN THE MULTICULTURAL WORKPLACE IN HONG KONG: Applying a model of discourse as 'impression management' 1 Grahame T. Bilbow

INTRODUCTION

Hong Kong's economic success has always depended on its geographical position at the mouth of the Pearl River. It began as a trans-shipper of opium from the Indian sub-continent to China, then as a manufacturer and exporter of low-value-added goods to China and the West, and has more recently emerged as an entrepot for trade between China and the West and a regional business hub for multinational corporations (Flowerdew and Scollon, forthcoming). Despite the fact that some ninety-eight per cent of the population are non-native speakers of the language, Hong Kong has always depended upon English in the spheres of government, business and education. It is likely that, even after the change of sovereignty in 1997, Hong Kong's continuing role as an entrepot between the East and the West will require a workforce with developed English language skills. Hong Kong has always, due to its historical circumstances, maintained a small but significant English-speaking population. Of these, many have traditionally been senior officers in the civil service, senior employees of large companies and holders of other high-profile positions. In recent years, however, as many senior positions have become localised, the country has started to attract a large number of lower-level Englishspeaking managers who are keen to flee the effects of recession in Europe and North America and share in Hong Kong's economic success.2 This changing demography has ·affected in a number of ways how expatriates and local Chinese interact in the workplace. One of the most 21

22

BILBOW

noticeable changes has been the significant reduction in the distance, both physical and metaphorical, between expatriates and local Chinese in recent years. In the new order, expatriates are increasingly expected to work alongside their Chinese colleagues rather than over them. This situation poses a great challenge for companies in Hong Kong, many of whom have, paradoxically, seldom considered inter-group relations in the workplace. This chapter discusses inter-group impression management, an aspect of communication that assumes considerable importance when languages and cultures collide in the workplace. Inter-group impression management is instrumental in establishing the working climate in any organisation in which colleagues of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds interact, and can fundamentally affect the ease with which colleagues coexist. In Hong Kong, this is particularly important now that rapprochement between expatriates and local Chinese staff is a fact of corporate life. Despite relatively harmonious inter-group relations in Hong Kong, there is some evidence that inter-group impression management can be somewhat problematical. For example, in a recent survey of inter-group relations at a large airline employing a multicultural workforce in Hong Kong, certain personal characteristics emerged as being consistently attributed to members of certain cultural groups. Most of the Chinese managers surveyed, for example, felt that expatriates were more 'aggressive', 'rude' and 'direct' than Chinese members of staff, whereas most expatriate managers in the survey felt that local Chinese staff were more 'cautious'~ 'evasive' and 'non-confrontational' than expatriate staff (Bilbow 1996). The focus here is on how inter-group impression managelllent occurs through spoken discourse. Using a large corpus of empirical data collected at an international corporation in Hong Kong, I explore the relationship between Chinese and Western verbal self-presentations and inter-group impression-formation. At the end of the chapter these findings are discussed in the light of Confucianist and Western cultural value systems. My approach in this chapter owes a great deal to the work of others in the field of cross- and inter-cultural discourse analysis, such as Candlin (1987), Gumperz and Tannen (1979), Thomas (1983, 1984) and Scollon and Scollon (1981, 1983, 1995), who have sought to explain problematical inter-cultural discourse in terms of culturally-differentiated patterns of behaviour. It has also been influenced by the work of critical discourse analysts, such as Fairclough (1989), Fowler et al. (1979) and Kress and Hodge (1979), who have sought to explain discourse as a tool by which people and organisations control and manipulate others, and maintain social relations based on power. ·

Spoken discourse in the multicultural workplace in Hong Kong

23

METHODOLOGY

As this chapter focuses on certain aspects of the verbal behaviour of Western expatriate (WE) and local Chinese (LC) staff in inter-cultural meetings at a large corporation in Hong Kong, WE staff are defined as staff whose 'first culture' (C1) is 'Western' (Australian, British or North American) and whose first language (L1) is English; LC staff, on the other hand, are considered to be those staff whose C1 is Chinese, and whose L1 is Cantonese, the local variety of Chinese. 3 It is clear from this classification that certain groups of staff are not accounted for in this analysis, namely: 1. Members of staff whose C1 is Chinese, and whose L1 is English (Chinese staff brought up in the West, for example), and 2. Members of staff whose L1 is English, and whose C1 is not Western, e.g., Indians. Given the ethnic composition of the corporation in question, however, the bipartite distinction between WE and LC staff does allow the verbal contributions of the great majority of meeting attenders to be considered. Analysis in this chapter is based on a large corpus of authentic spoken discourse collected over a two-year period at the corporation. This corpus is termed the Meetings at Work, or MAW, corpus (Bilbow 1996). The meetings in this 140000-word corpus are a range of 'co-ordination', 'departmental' and 'problem-solving' meetings. All meetings involve interaction between WE and LC staff at approximately the same senior managerial rank. For purposes of analysis, two types of 'directive' speech act are isolated within the MAW corpus. These are the speech acts of directing (consisting of requests and commands) and suggesting (consisting of suggestions and proposals). The speech act of directing

In directing speech acts, the speaker requests or commands others to act. Directing speech acts relate to courses of action (inside or outside the meeting room), which it is hoped (in the case of requests) or anticipated (in the case of commands) the hearer(s) will undertake. The force of propositions contained in directing speech acts is significantly greater than the force contained in suggesting speech acts (see below). The identification of an utterance as a directing or a suggesting speech act usually rests on not only the lexico-grammatical realisation of the utterance, but also: 1. Certain prosodic features of the utterance; and 2. Consideration of the relative roles of speaker and hearer.

BILBOW

24

This is the case with the italicised portions of Extracts 2.1 and 2;2 below. In both cases, the speaker is of a higher status than the hearer, and in both the speaker uses a highly assertive low-fall intonation contour. These two factors mark the utterances as directing speech acts (requests or commands). EXTRACT 2.1: Directing Speech Act 1

=No yeah sorry Penang KL, you're right- forty nine. (3) So there's another one that really is five minutes too little {EL: Yeah} Well go on- pencil it in, I mean we're never gonna get this right if we aren't honest! ((Tom guffaws)) The trouble is we've visited II this so many times] It doesn't matter], it's if you keep II fudging all the] bloody numbers, we'll never make a sensible decisionyou've gotta (1) write down the facts and start from {TK. OK} them. TK Alright we'll visit it again].

BC

(Speaker profile4 : M/WE/Participant)

EXTRA AA:

141

Good morning. Good morning. I wanted 'Daisy Miller' by: Henry James, in English. + I think I've finished it, let me check. (09)

AA: Cm: AA: Cm: AA:

Yes it's finished, it's being reprinted. A h. But not before end of January beginning of February. =I see. + Okay. + Thank you. You're welcome bye bye.

These two examples seem to illustrate the two principal conversational mechanisms for extending turns and keeping the floor described in the literature. Schegloff (1982) proposes two main ways of negotiating an extended tum in conversation. One routinely occurs when a speaker wants to produce a multi-unit tum such as a story or a lengthy explanation. In this case, the current speaker may book a space for talk by the use of preliminaries such as 'you know what?' or 'can I ask you a question?' (Schegloff 1980). This seems to be the function of the opening pair in the Italian Example 7 .4, above. The exchange of greetings here assures the customer of the assistant's attention and a space for talking. The second way of obtaining a longer tum involves a different type of sequential organisation. In this case, one speaker produces a tum after which the interlocutor does not respond with a next tum. When this happens, the current speaker can go on talking. 'Continuers', such as 'uhu', 'erm' and the like seem to indicate that the current speaker can proceed. 'Uhu' claims not only 'I understand the state of talk', but embodies the understanding that extended talk by another is going on by declining to produce a fuller tum in that position. (Schegloff 1982: 81) This seems to be the function of the assistant's 'er' in the second tum in the following example. EXAMPLE 7.5

->

BofB-37 Cm Excuse me. Erm: have you got Will Durant's 'The story of philosophy'? You haven't got it out there, you've got one of his other books, + but: AZ Er:=You might have it in (another) department. In Cm economics. + Or in /politics./

GAVIOLI

142 AZ AZ

/(Yes.)/ [(09) AZ looks in files] No, I'm afraid it's not one we stock. [ ... ]

Similarly, the delayers which preface the negative response in the English Example 7 .3, above, may be interpreted both as a means of indicating that a dispreferred response is coming and as a sign of reluctance to take the tum at this point. This permits both the customer to go on talking and reformulating or adjusting the request and the assistant to think of an alternative solution. While these mechanisms of organisation can be viewed as general conversational mechanisms for extending conversational turns, my data shows that they are adopted differently in English and Italian. In English it is generally the assistant's delayers which prompt the customer to go on talking, while in Italian the paired opening preface seems to suspend the assistant's intervention. An examination of deviant cases supports this finding. In Italian, when a request occurring after paired openings is considered complete after the first possible completion point, its completeness is signalled by the customer who explicitly passes the tum to the assistant, typically with a question such as ce l'ha? or ce l'avete? ('have you got it?'). EXAMPLE 7.6

BofD-01b AA Buongiomo. Cw (Buongiomo.) Questa grammatica inglese ce l'ha, per cortesia. (01) /No./ AA /Man/ca. Manca dal distributore - + Provi a rivedere: [ ... ]

BofD-Olb AA: Good morning Cw: (Good morning.) This English grammar have you got it please. (OJ) /No.I AA: /It's miss/ing. It's missing at the agent's - You can try to see again:[ ... ]

In the English corpus, we do not have such explicit signals to pass the tum, except in one case where a long, very apologetic request is proffered. Notably, such a request is introduced by paired openings.

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian

143

EXAMPLE 7.7

->

Lod B-Ola Right. Can I help anybody. AJ Thank' you. I'm looking for a book that- that is: either Cm JUST been published or about to be published, called I THINK 'The secret cult'. I don't know its publisher or authors. Have you: heard of it?

Typically, requests are introduced and organised in different ways in English and Italian. Not only is the number of the encounters opened by the customer as opposed to tho

AA Cw AA Cw AA Cw

[fra se1 lntarito (???) sono 1l [a C] Ne cercava una in particolare signora? No. [sospira] E mio figlio che deve fare una relazione. La vuole in inglese o in italiano. =In inglese. + Se ce l'ha, + inglese e italiano, /tanto meglio./ /No, non esiste./ + /Non e/siste.

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian AA

/(No.)/

AA

Su Dickens ho questo.

145

(10) [.

->

0

.]

BofC-05b Good evening Cw Good evening AA Good evening. Listen, I need a book of criticism on Cw Charles Dickens [mumbles something, then to C] Are you looking for a AA particular one madam? No. [sighs] It's my son who has to write an essay Cw Would you like it in English or in Italian. AA In English. Ifyou've got it in English and I~alian, /that's Cw even better./ /No, it doesn't exist./ AA + /It doesn't elxist. Cw /(No.)/ AA On Dickens I've got this. AA [.

0

.]

In other words, while in English a generic request initiates a sequence of directions to a department which may have the book in question, in Italian it initiates a negotiation of the customer's specific requirements. As mentioned above, differences in the way the encounters are opened in English and Italian seem to account for different mechanisms for extending the tum containing the request. The content of these extensions is also different in the two languages. While in English they tend to specify the subject area the book nlight belong to, i.e., they add to the initial information by providing generalisations, in Italian they tend to particularise the book by adding more specific detail to the initial request. Examples 7.10 and 7.11 (below) illustrate this point. In the English Example 7.10 the customer asks for a section on Portuguese, then pauses and extends the request with reference to a more general category including Portuguese 'language'. In the Italian Example 7.11 the customer asks for a similar category, libri in lingua spagnola (books in the Spanish language) and then specifies that he does not want just any Spanish book, but light books, entertaining literature (libri non non impegnativi, libri di letlura cosi). Note that the subsequent action in Example 7.10 is a direction to a department which stocks language books, while in Example 7.11 the assistant's direction to the book's location contains a reformulation specifying the category: romanzi qua (novels, here).

146

GAVIOLI

EXAMPLE 7.10

Lod B-04 Excuse me, do you have a- + a section of Portuguese: Cm + /language./ /Yeah. Ask/ in the next department which: -language? AJ (Yes.) Cm Yeah. Ask in the next department. AJ EXAMPLE 7.11

BofG-21a [in lontananza] Buongiomo. Cm =Buongiomo. AA Scusi + volevo vedere cioe- dei libri: + in lingua spagnola, Cm pero non- NON libri impegnativi, libri di lettura, cost. Romanzi, qua. AA Romanzi. Cm Questa zona. AA [(04) scaffale scorrevole] Corninciano qua, e poi proseguono fino a qua giu. AA BofG-2la [in the distance] Good morning. Cm =Good morning. AA Excuse me + I wanted to see 1 mean- some books + in Cm Spanish, but not- not heavy books, books to read, something like that. Novels, here. AA Novels. Cm This area. AA [(04) rolling shelf] They start here and go on to down there. AA Although the general tendency in structuring information is from specific to generic in English and from generic to specific in Italian, occasionally we find cases where information is structured in the opposite direction. What is interesting about these occurrences is that they seem somehow 'resisted'. If we look at Example 7 .12, the information provided about the subject that the customer is looking for goes from the more generic 'Latin texts' to the more specific 'classical Latin'. The assistant's response, although not fully comprehensible, also seems to move towards further specification of what exactly the customer is looking for. In the fourth tum, however, the customer seems to resist this movement to greater specificity, hedging ('erm: well editions of Horace's odes largely') and then generalising again ('maybe other things as well'). In Example

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian

147

7.13 from the Italian data, the customer resists a move in the direction of greater generalisation. He first indicates the subject he is looking for, qualche pubblicazione su Oldenburg (some editions about Oldenburg), and specifies it, in inglese (in English). When no assistant response is provided, we have a pause and then a generalisation, oppure sulla Pop Art (or about Pop Art). This is, however, immediately 'corrected' to be more specific, pero in particolare su Oldenburg (but in particular about Oldenburg), and overlapped with the assistant's response. EXAMPLE 7.12

-> ->

LodA-07 Good morning. AP Latin texts, please, classical Latin. Cm Yes. ++What, may-/(???)/ AP /Er:/ well editions of: Horace's odes, largely.++ Maybe Cm other things as well, but(???). AP [they move away]

EXAMPLE 7.13

->

BofG-07b Cm Sto cercando qualche pubblicazione su: Oldenburg. + In inglese. + Oppure sulla pop art. /Pero in particolare su Oldenburg./ AA /No. Non ho niente del gen/ere. No, niente? Cm AA =Tutto quello che abbiamo di ar:te e nell'altra libreria ultima sala in fondo. [ ...]

->

BofG-07b I'm looking for some editions about Oldenburg. + In Cm: English. + Or about Pop Art. /But in particular about Oldenburg./ /No. Nothing at all./ AA: Cm: Nothing? =All we have about art is in the other bookshop last AA: room in the back. [ ... ]

In both these cases, the mechanisms of the openings deviate from those commonly adopted in the two languages. In English we have a non-reciprocated opening element. Though single opening elements are typical of English, the one which is used here is a greeting, generally a

148

GAVIOLI

first pair part of a couple in other types of conversation (see Levinson 1983: chapter 4). It can also be observed that this is a case where it is the assistant who opens the encounter, signalling his availability. This seems to project expectations for a specific request (see the extension of the customer's request and the assistant's attempt for a clarification), which is resisted by the customer in the fourth tum. This example confirms a resistance to the assistant's attempt to initiate the encounter, which is probably characteristic of English culture and supported by the fact that assistants' openings are less frequent in the English data (thirty per cent). However, it is also the case that other kinds of openings by the assistant (e.g., 'yes') are generally not resisted by the customer, possibly suggesting that there are mechanisms which can be adopted by the English assistant to open the encounter without being considered intrusive. The Italian example is likewise atypical. The extended request is not anticipated by an opening preface and as there is no intervention by the assistant after the first point of possible completion, the customer goes on talking, first restricting the category (in ingleselin English), then generalising (oppure sulla Pop Art/or about Pop Art), then restricting again in overlap with the assistant's response (pero in particolare su Oldenburg/ but in particular about Oldenburg). While such occurrences are relatively isolated, I have discussed them here because they indirectly confirm the regular patterns for English and Italian. The fact that attempts are made to re-establish the regular pattern in cases in which it is not being followed seems to confirm its regularity. In short, while the mechanism of paired openings followed by a sequence negotiating information from more generic to more specific seems the regular one in Italian, the English mechanism consists of either a single or no opening preface followed by a sequence negotiating information from more specific to more generic. THE ACHIEVEMENT OF ROLES IN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN BOOKSHOP SERVICE ENCOUNTERS

Aston (1995b) shows that the way encounters are opened in the English data tend to project different roles of the assistant in the subsequent interaction. He argues that openings with a greeting by the customer, or with the pair 'Can I help you- yes' project a 'local' role for the assistant, i.e., the role of a person locally responsible for a particular section and the location and availability of books there. Other kinds of openings, such as 'excuse me', project a more generic role, i.e., the role of an informed expert who knows about the bookshop's departments, rules for paying, opening hours, etc. Though this generic knowledge of the assistant is sometimes also called upon in Italian, it seems that the general tendency in Italian is

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian

149

towards negotiating a 'local' role, where the assistant is responsible for a particular section and its books. When generic knowledge is called for or made relevant in Italian, the data shows that speakers resist negotiating an equally generic role for the assistant. The following examples illustrate such resistance. In Example 7.14 the customer asks for an Italian book in a department stocking books in foreign languages. A redirection to the correct department is made relevant in the fifth tum (no, lo deve chiedere sotto allora, eh?lno, you have to ask for it downstairs, then). This redirection is not accepted by the customer, however, who negotiates more specific information (sotto, dove ?/downstairs where?). The assistant's response (sotto al mio collega per favoreldownstairs to my colleague please) stresses that she is not the person responsible for this book and that there is a colleague of hers who has this responsibility. In Example 7.15 the encounter opens with a request for a category of book (libri bestseller/bestseller books). Instead of being redirected to the place where the category is kept, as typically happens in English, a further request follows. This further request negotiates more specific information (bestseller, eh americani?lbestseller er American ones?) in order to determine whether the customer wants bestseller books in English rather than in Italian (only the former are in fact stocked in this assistant's department). Following the customer's confirmation, directions to the location of the books are given, yet this is followed by a more specific request by the assistant (cercava qualcosa in particolare ?/are you looking for something in particular?) which implies that the assistant can provide further help. EXAMPLE 7.14

BofA-04 AF Buongiomo. Cw Buongiomo. AF Mi dica. Cw Avete 'Storia delle linguistica' del Robins?++ II Mulino, mi sembra. AF Nolo deve chiedere sotto allora, eh? Cw Sotto (dove)? AF =Sotto al mio collega, per favore. BofA-04 AF Good morning. Cw Good morning. AF Yes. Cw Have you got 'Storia della linguistica' ('A short history of linguistics') by Robins? + + Il Mulino, I think. AF No you have to ask for it downstairs then.

150

GAVIOLI

Cw AF

Downstairs (where)? Downstairs to my colleague, please.

EXAMPLE 7.15

Bof A-16c Avete libri bestseller (anche)? Cw Bestseller: eh americani? AF Mm. Cw Son tutti questi qua sopra. (02) Cercava qualcosa in AF particolare? No,mm:Cw [si allontanano] BofA-16c Have you got bestseller books (also)? Cw Bestseller er American ones? AF Mm. Cw They are all up here. (02) Are you looking for something AF in particular? No, mmCw [they move away] In Italian, a generic role for the assistant seems to be negotiated only when the location of the cash desk is asked for. Such encounters are typically very short, unprefaced sequences such as the following: EXAMPLE 7.16

Bof A-12 Pago giii? Cm Sotto alla cassa·grazie, /buongiomo./ AF /Grazie./ + Buongiomo. Cm BofA-12 Shall I pay downstairs? Cm Downstairs at the cash desk please, /good-bye./ AF Cm/Fhanks.l+ Good-bye. In English, different kinds of openings project either generic or local assistant roles and anticipate requests providing information about the topic, author or publisher of the book(s), or the category it or they might belong to. In Italian, conversely, paired or three-element openings project a long tum for the customer's request where specific details about the

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian

151

book(s) and its or their user may be provided and where we find actions identified by other authors (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 1990; DeCapua and Dunham 1993) as typical of advice sequences, namely explanation and narration. Examples 7.17 and 7 .18, below, include such requests. In both cases, a customer explains her needs, which in the second example is accompanied by a narration of her experience with the English language (io l'inglese + eh: l'ho: - l'ho studiato, lo sto ancora studiando:, eh sto facendo la Briti- il British/English+ erm I have- I have studied it, I'm still studying it, erm I'm attending the Briti- the British School). In both cases it is the assistant who formulates which category of book is the appropriate one with a deictic in the first example (questi guardilthese ones, look), and with a definition of the book required in the second (lei vuole una grammatica insommalyou want a grammar then; see the arrowed turns in the examples below). It is interesting to note that while in the first example the assistant's formulation leads to a sequence confirming that the category is the correct one, in the second it leads to an explicit request for advice (see the sequences following the arrowed turns). EXAMPLE 7.17

->

BofA-02 Cw Eh: buongiorno. AF Buongiorno! Cw Scusi volevo sapere - avete mica dei libricini facili facili in tedesco per principia:nti /cos'i, (credo) -/ + + Delle storielle. AF /Questi guardi./ /Que/sti? /Ah./ Cw AF /SL/ /Si./ Cw + Sono tutti- allo stesso livello /questi?/ AF /Pressalpoco sL Quelli li. Cw Mm. + (Ho capito). [ ... ]

->

BofA-02 Cw Er good morning AF Good morning! Cw Excuse me I'd like to know - have you got by any chance some very easy books in German for beginners /something like that, (I think)/ + + Short stories. AF /These ones./ Cw /These/ ones? /Ah./ AF /Yes./ /Yes./

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Cw AF Cw

+Are they all at the same level, /these ones?/ /Morel or less yes. Those ones. Mm. + (Okay). [ ... ]

EXAMPLE 7.18

->

BofF-10c Cw E:hm senta AA Dica. Cw =Allora, io cercavo u:na: (01) testo /eh,/ AA /Si./ Cw con struttura grammaticale in inglese. Cioe- io l'inglese + eh: l'ho: -l'ho studiato, lo sto ancora studiando:, eh sto facendo Ia Briti- il British. Pero- eh: a livello generate + volevo qualco:sa che mi aiutasse a livello di struttu:ra, + eh come /usi -/ AA /Lei vuole una gra/MMAtica insomma. Cw =Esa:tto. + /Che cosa pos:so - I AA E:hm lei cosa s-/ che 1- corso sta u/sando?/ Cw /Eh: st/o: utilizzando: il: terzo. AA Quindi 'English alive'. Cw Mhm. AA Mah io piu che una grammatica tradotta le userei:- userei se fossi in LEI, + una grammatica in lingua originale. +. Questa. ++ Perche cosi fa esercizio mentre: + + studia Ia grammatica. Cw Mhm? [ ... ]

->

BofF-JOc Cw Erm listen AA Yes. Cw =Now, I'm looking for a (OJ) text /er,/ AA /Yes./ Cw with an English grammatical structure. I mean - English I have -1 have studied it, I'm still studying it, er I'm attending the the Brit- British school. But er at a general level + /'d like something to help me with structures and erluses -I AA /You want a GRA/mmar then. Cw Right. + /What can I- I AA /Erm what are you -1 what language course are you u/sing?/

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian Cw AA Cw AA

Cw

153

/Erm I'm/ using the third. So 'English alive'. Mhm. Mm rather than a translated grammar I would use -I would use if I were YOU + a grammar in the original language. + This one. + + Because in this way you can practise your English while++ you're studying grammar. Mhm? [ ... ]

The different structure of opening-request sequences in English and Italian and the different sorts of actions that are made relevant seem to be related to what happens in the encounter as a whole, viewed both in terms of the subsequent actions that are negotiated and in terms of the roles that are assumed by the participants. The 'typical' English opening with either a direct request or a request introduced by 'excuse me' seems to project a 'generic role' of the assistant and makes relevant a response in which directions to a department in the shop or to a place where the customer may find the subject in question are provided. Information is negotiated from specific to generic in order to establish a category or a department where the book(s) are kept, and the roles displayed by the customer and the assistant are those of someone seeking information and someone providing it. Alternatively, in Italian, paired openings give the assistant the opportunity to show a willingness to listen, and project a space for the customer where specific details of the book(s) required are provided. Completeness of the customer's tum is signalled either by the customer explicitly passing the tum to the assistant with a ce l 'avete? (have you got it?), or by the assistant who can: a) provide the book(s); b) provide a negative response; or c) ask for clarification with cercava qualcosa in particolare? (are you looking for something in particular?). In all cases the assistant is given, or takes, the responsibility of providing the book. Speakers do not simply exchange information about the book's location, but are concerned with defining the precise book which may fit the customer's needs. While in English what is negotiated is an 'information sequence' with the customer and the assistant displaying roles as information-seeker and information-giver, it seems that in Italian what is negotiated is advice and the appropriate roles displayed are those of advice-seeker and advice-giver. In Italian, where specific details of the book are negotiated, expression of the customer's needs is made relevant as a proper action leading the assistant to suggest something to satisfy them. Even when the suggestion is, referentially, a direction to a place or a department, this assumes the form of an 'advice sequence'; i.e., after negotiation of the customer's specific

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needs. Note the two clarification questions in Example 7.19 below (arrowed) and the suggestion of the assistant (double arrow). EXAMPLE 7.19

BofC-09a AA Prego. Cw =Per piacere, metodi d'insegnamento dell'italiano come lingua seconda, + *(lingua) (???). * Per stranieri? -> AA Cw Sl. -> AA Eh: stranieri di che: lingua madre? Cw Be':: non esiste niente peril portoghese lo so. In generale direi. AA Non ho molto adesso. Cw =No? ->> AA In realta adesso ho pochissimo, ed e tutto qua. + Proprio dietro di lei, in questa zona. [ ... ]

BofC-09a AA Yes. Cw =Please, teaching methods for Italian as a second language. AA For foreign students? -> Cw Yes. Foreign students ofwhich mother tongue? -> AA Cw Well there is nothing for Portuguese, I know that. Something general probably. AA I haven't got much now. Cw No? Actually I have very few things now, and they're all ->> AA here. + Just behind you, in this area. [ ... ]

In contrast, directions provided by the assistant in the turn after a customer's generic request, i.e., following the pattern of organisation identified as the prevalent one in English, are resisted in Italian. The following example illustrates such resistance on the customer's part (see arrowed turn). EXAMPLE 7.20

(BofG-39b) AA + Dilca./ Cw /Sen/ta, ha:- di questa serie?

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian AA

->

Cw

155

+No, tutto quello che c'e: lei su: li in quella zona, su (quello lscalino)./ ILl - I ICioe devol cercare io? [ ... ]

->

BofG-39b Y/es./ AA /Lis/ten, have you got - in this series? Cw No, all I've got lis/ in that area, on (that /step.)/ AA /There -/ /You mean that I have/ to look for it? Cw [ ... ]

While directions are also provided in the Italian data, they are generally anticipated by a sequence such as the one demonstrated in Example 7.18; the customer's specific needs are negotiated, which enables the assistant to formulate the location of the appropriate book(s). CONCLUSION

Although the data was collected from very similar settings (large selfservice, multi-department bookshops), it reveals that bookshop service encounters are substantially different in English and Italian. An analysis of the conversational mechanisms adopted by the English and Italian participants show that while the former tend to organise their conversation as an exchange of information, the latter tend to organise it as an 'advice encounter', where a space for narration and explanation is negotiated in the opening-request sequence and negotiation of specific customer needs is carried out in the request-response sequence. Though this is the tendency, the data also shows that the reality is more complex, and that while negotiation of information seems to be predominant in English and negotiation of advice seems to be predominant in Italian, both information and advice are, in fact, present in both languages. However, while negotiating advice is obviously possible in the English data, it takes place in the way appropriate to an 'information sequence', with, for example, customer's requests such as 'do you know where I could get ... ?'. Similarly, information can be provided in Italian in a way appropriate to an advice sequence, after negotiation of the customer's needs, for example. As a consequence, my data seems to confirm such characteristic cultural features as the fact that Italians are more willing to discuss the 'personal' and that the English tend to avoid personal involvement: The data also reveals that this presence or avoidance of 'personal involvement', is primarily, a negotiation of 'who or what the book is for', (typical of Italian) as opposed to a negotiation of 'what the book is about' (a recurrent

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concern in English). Similarly, personal involvement is not avoided tout court in English; as Aston (1995a) shows, there are opening sequences such as 'can I help you?'- 'yes', which permit more 'local' roles to be negotiated where the assistant is 'the person in charge' of the department and the books whose role can extend to 'advice-giver'. An analysis of the conversational mechanisms adopted in English and Italian service encounters highlights not only which actions are typically carried out in the two corpora, and which participant roles are made relevant, but also how such tum-taking mechanisms can be adopted strategically to negotiate different roles. An understanding of such mechanisms may prove particularly useful both to foreign language learners of English and Italian and to people in business who need to be made aware that even apparently simple interactions can encode significant cultural differences.

Bookshop service encounters in English and Italian

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PRACTICAL TIPS

• Bookshop service encounters may correspond to different sorts of events in English and Italian and speakers from different cultures may have different expectations about what is said or what to say. • English service encounters predominantly involve negotiation of information, while Italian service encounters predominantly involve negotiation of advice; thus an Italian customer in an English bookshop may expect advice. • In Italian, service encounters are generally opened with greetings. Greetings do not only serve 'politeness purposes', they also signal that a 'long' problematic request is coming, which requires involvement by the assistant and possibly a request of advice. Expanding this, greetings might be considered 'nice' in so far as they attribute a particular role to the assistant (in this case that of an adviser). This suggests that apparently insignificant elements of talk, such as greetings, may have an unexpectedly important function both within and across cultures. • Conversation is negotiated jointly; when something 'unexpected' happens the interlocutor shows a 'resistance' to this, which may be exploited by the interlocutor to 'remedy' the mishappening. Nonnative speakers can use this normal conversational mechanism to 'remedy' their 'errors'.

TRANSCRIPTION KEY

AL CwCm [note] text 'Text' (text) (nsyll) (??)

+ ++ (n)

speaker = assistant, where L is first letter of the assistant's name speaker = female/male customer comments (paralinguistic and extralinguistic features) text altered to conserve anonymity title of book or series tape unclear: tentative transcription tape untranscribable: n = approximate number of syllables spoken tape untranscribable short pause (less than one second) longer pause (less than one second) longer pause (length in seconds)

GAVIOLI

158 =

/text/ texttexttext:

TEXT . ' ?. .'

latched to preceding tum latched to previous-but-one tum in transcript spoken in overlap with next /text/ tone group interrupted syllable cut short lengthening of previous sound syllable loud or heavily stressed roughly indicate intonation

Chapter 8

JOKING AS A STRATEGY IN SPANISH AND DANISH NEGOTIATIONS Annette Grindsted

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of negotiation as a discourse in its own right from both cross- and inter-cultural perspectives. Humour is also a well-established field of study, and it has long been recognised not only that what counts as a joke may be culturally specific but that the sequencing.and patterning of laughter may also vary in terms of cross-cultural pragmatics. The aim of this chapter is to contrast joking exchanges produced in Spanish and Danish negotiations in terms of the different priorities given to different kinds of face-work in Spanish and Danish business cultures. Joking is seen as a multiple communicative act whose function is to relieve tension in double-bind situations. This seems to hold true both in Spanish and Danish joking contexts. The way in which joking strategies are built up, however, follows different patterns. In order to analyse these different joking strategies as they are employed in negotiation, it is useful first of all to examine the relationship between joker, butt and audience, and, secondly, to explore how joking and laughter relate to the sequencing and structure of 'talk' in business contexts. DATA

The negotiators who are included in this data were young business executives in Spain and Denmark, all of whom had previous negotiation experience, and had attended training courses to improve their negotiation skills. The training consisted of five-day courses arranged in Spain and Denmark by professionals in training centres. The training programmes in both countries were virtually identical, including the content of the simulation exercise that has been used for the present analysis. In other words, 159

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the data represents as far as possible, in a non-laboratory situation, a series of constants and one variable, i.e., the negotiator's cultural background. A small group of researchers, including the author, attended the courses as observers and videotaped simulated negotiation exercises with the understanding that these were to be used for purposes of linguistic analysis only. The primary issue to be negotiated in the simulation exercise used as the basis of the present analysis concerns the sale of a fishing boat. The selling party consists of a businessman and his wife, who also own a fish restaurant and have a son who has just left college. The buyers are two fishermen, who already own a small fishing boat. In addition to the sale of the fishing boat, secondary issues potentially open to negotiation are the delivery of fish to the restaurant, the possibility of employing the sellers' son on the fishing boat, and whether the small boat is to be included in the deal or not. The simulation exercise was performed by five different groups in Spain and six in Denmark.' Methodological issues concerning the use of simulated rather than 'natural' language data are frequently raised by researchers whose contention is that simulated data often does not reflect what happens in real life and is therefore of limited use. It is certainly true that the present data derives from a 'learning by doing' context. The exercises have been designed for training purposes to be performed by professional negotiators who want to improve their negotiation skills. However, although the negotiators are 'acting', they still engage in a planned, goal-oriented activity which is closely related to their 'real' roles as business executives. It should also be underlined that the simulation exercises have not been designed specifically for the use of linguists interested in the cross-cultural analysis of Spanish and Danish negotiators' communicative behaviour but as the basis of actual negotiations (Fant 1992). A further argument in favour of simulations is that they make possible a much higher degree of comparability than is likely to be the case in data recorded in wholly naturalistic negotiation settings in different countries, even if this were accessible. THE STUDY OF JOKING IN A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Humour and laughter are both universal, but while laughter is clearly visible and audible, humour is much more difficult to analyse. In addition, it is deeply embedded in particular cultures. Laughter is not exclusively a response to humour, though it is an important reaction and a convenient one to include in a definition of joking, which is itself an important aspect of humour. Joking sends a social message that often makes use of both verbal and non-verbal techniques; it can serve a range of functions and is produced in specific contexts. Following Ziv (1988), all such phenomena

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(jokes) may be seen as belonging somewhere on a continuum from the almost universal to the culture-specific. Some joking techniques, arguably, contain universal elements. The functions of joking are also probably universal, in as much as they reflect fundamental human needs. However, it is almost certainly true that some functions are more dominant in particular cultures than in others and the content and context of a joke are likely to be strongly influenced by its cultural environment. Studies of national styles of humour are few, and the works that exist deal mostly with the macrolevel of societal behaviour (Ziv 1988), focusing on the presence of humour in visual arts, the mass media, and in the literary and performing arts. The aim of the present chapter is to study humour in a cross-cultural perspective, but to do so in face-to-face interaction in order to analyse the functions of joking and laughter primarily in terms of faceneeds. Face-needs in Spain and Denmark

In earlier research on divergent features in Spanish and Danish communicative behaviour, Spanish assertiveness and Scandinavian conflict avoidance (Pant 1989, 1992; Grindsted 1989) have been identified as significant. When joking is investigated as a communicative strategy, face theory (Pant 1989, 1995; Grindsted 1990a; Villemoes 1995) seems to provide a possible explanation. Face-needs are often considered to have universal relevance. In terms of research related to Spain and Denmark, it is usually assumed that at least two different needs must be taken into consideration, i.e., the need for autonomy and the need for affiliation, concepts that can be compared to what in politeness theory are generally called negative and positive face (Brown and Levinson 1987). However, Spanish and Danish speakers appear to give different priorities to these needs. For Spanish speakers, affiliation (i.e., being accepted as a member of the group) seems to be the basic need to be fulfilled; but since they must also satisfy their need for autonomy, Spanish speakers also tend to make themselves visible as individuals within the group. Hence, an important defining principle of their communicative behaviour may be: be different. Danish speakers, on the other hand, appear to consider autonomy (i.e., the need for preserving personal freedom) as the basic need to be satisfied. From this point of view, the question is how much independence must be lost in order to be accepted by the group. Consequently, for Danish speakers an important principle governing their behaviour may be: be equal. If these assumptions are transferred to negotiations, it must first of all be emphasised that the activity of negotiating itself calls for a certain degree of co-operation. From the Spanish negotiators' point of view, it

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may therefore be assumed that in order to co-operate a considerable amount of interpersonal involvement is required. Danish negotiators, on the other hand, require a high degree of consensus in order to co-operate. For Spanish negotiators, an indispensable part of co-operation, paradoxically, seems to be to display competitive behaviour. In this way, self-affirmation is to be taken as an invitation to the opposite team to affirm themselves. Mutual self-affirmation produces mutual respect which makes it possible to co-operate. Moreover, self-affirmative behaviour is seen as an emotional display, and as a means of strengthening interpersonal bonding. For the Danish negotiator, on the other hand, self-affirmative behaviour will diminish the desire to co-operate, since it is considered a threat to consensus. Explicit self-affirmative behaviour is taken to be a sign of loss of self-control, making co-operation more difficult (Fant 1995; Grindsted 1995). Jokes and face-work

Humour and laughter have been made the subject of various psychological, sociopsychological and anthropological studies, whose aim has been to describe the intrinsic qualities of these concepts. In these studies, the mechanisms of humour and laughter have been examined in two general ways, one of which has to do with superiority theory. We laugh at the errors committed by others because they enhance a feeling of superiority. The other has to do with relief theory, which claims that laughter rids us of an accumulated nervous energy and provides a release of repressed emotion (Apte 1985; Porteus 1988; Wilson 1979). A joke always holds someone up to ridicule, i.e., the butt. According to Wilson (1979), explaining the function of jokes in terms of what could broadly be called superiority theory, the butt is not only to be understood as the interactant him or herself but also his or her 'larger self'. It is argued that an individual casts a wide possessive net in developing an identity. The larger self thus includes all possessions in the widest sense of the term - for example, the body, spouse, children, bank account, reputation, interests, etc. The fate of the person involves all these elements of self, and is affected by their fortunes. The elements of a person's larger self are referred to as 'affiliated objects', and it is suggested that amusement is evoked by viewing an unaffiliated object or person in a disparaging situation, allowing us 'a moment's glory of superiority'. Conversely, when an individual's affiliated objects are disparaged, that person feels insulted by association. For the purposes of the present analysis, I maintain that the interactive function of a joke is not only to give rise to feelings of superiority but also to establish some kind of interpersonal relationship between the joker and the persons who intervene in a joke. Defining the butt as a person and his or her larger self has proved useful in the present case,

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since the simulation exercise supplies the participants with all kinds of information about their roles and larger selves. Face theory has also been used as an approach to the functioning of humour and laughter, and provides the primary framework around which the present study is based. As stated previously, both Spanish and Scandinavian speakers must take into consideration that the individual is endowed with at least two different faces, one concerning the need for personal autonomy and the other the need for affiliation. From a psychological point of view, autonomy and acceptance are to a certain extent mutually exclusive. Autonomy is often realised only at the cost of a certain degree of acceptance and vice versa (Arndt and Janney 1987). Thus, if a speaker uses a communicative strategy which foregrounds one of these 'faces', he may have to ignore the other. Such conflicts are often referred to as double-bind situations, and it may be possible that culturespecific factors determine why individual speakers in one instance seem to prefer one option or the other. It is helpful to see jokes in the light of this particular interpretation of 'face'. In the first place I am assuming that, since the joke is an invitation to laugh, it serves basically affiliative purposes. However, since one of the constituent elements of the joking act is the butt, I am also assuming that one of its intrinsic qualities is that it violates the butt's need for personal autonomy. This dilemma makes the joke an especially interesting object of study. It should also be pointed out, however, that negotiators in their face work must not only take into consideration their relationships with the other parties but also that with their co-negotiators, since, in the vast majority of the cases, negotiators are acting as members of a team. Efforts to do this are considered as team face work, as compared with individual face work as stated above, or group face work, where showing consideration for the whole group ranks higher than the team. Consequently, in communicative acts, a negotiator's face work may be directed towards him or herself, a co-negotiator and/or the member(s) of the other party (Bravo 1991; Grindsted 1990c). Again, negotiators may find themselves locked into a double bind, where they have to choose a side. In such alignment talk, joking and laughter are very frequently used as significant communicative strategies. A further interesting field of study is how, through joking and laughing, negotiators align themselves with their audience. If the assumption is correct that Spanish speakers give a higher priority to affiliation than to autonomy, this must imply that Spanish negotiators are more concerned with doing group face work than team face work. One would expect Danish negotiators, on the other hand, to be more concerned with team face work, since, because of their need for interdependence, they will make an effort not to disturb a co-negotiator's autonomy.

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164 THE BREAKING DOWN OF JOKES

It is often contended that everyday talk contains a large number of jokes (Norrick 1993). This also seems to be the case in negotiation interaction. What is less obvious is how negotiators discussing problematic and/or conflictive issues may suddenly change from a serious mode of interaction to a play mode (Bateson 1953), and how we as analysts can identify the points in the flow of interaction where this happens. In a conversational approach to joking, we take it as a prerequisite for an utterance to count as a joke that it is: (1) spontaneous; (2) intentional; and (3) accompanied by laughter. Spontaneous joking is nourished by the 'here and now' and is constructed in and through discourse. Communicative acts which are spontaneous are not necessarily intentional. Speakers may make mistakes or commit other unintended acts, such as losing a pencil or touching a glass by accident, which may provoke laughter. Such behaviour is not considered joking unless the speaker is quick enough to comment on it, thus transforming it into intentional behaviour. Finally, 'funny' utterances that are not accompanied by laughter have been left out of this analysis. One reason is that the purpose of the study is to find out which qualities of a joke cause amusement. Another reason has to do with the position of the analyst who is not a participant. Sometimes a joke arouses laughter and sometimes not, depending on particular interactive dynamics in each situation that can only be accounted for by the interactants themselves. The joker and his audience

The constituent elements of a joke are the joker, the butt(s) and the laugher(s). Focusing on the interactive dynamics between these elements, a condition is that they are all present in the interaction. The analysis of the interrelationship between the joker and the audience can thus be carried out along at least two different dimensions, one being the joker-butt(s) relationship, the other the joker-laugher(s) relationship. Jokers who hold themselves up to ridicule are making a joke of self-ridicule (Wilson 1979). If they choose another person to be the target, they make a joke of other-ridicule. Finally, jokes may include both themselves and all others taking part in the interaction, in which case they are making a joke of shared ridicule. Turning to the joker-laugher(s) relationship, if neither the speaker nor the audience laugh at an utterance intended to be a joke, it will not be counted as a joke. Consequently, whether an utterance is understood as a joke is a matter of 'negotiating meaning' between the joker and the listening audience. If the speaker chooses not to laugh, it is up to the listeners to decide whether an utterance qualifies as a joke. From the joker's point

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of view the preferred response is, of course, laughter. From the point of view of the listeners, on the other hand, the approval of the utterance to count as a joke by one listener may be dispreferred by others. In this way the 'laughing listeners' may find themselves in an interactive conflict. The organisation of joking and laughter

Operationally speaking, a joke is nourished by the foregoing interaction, frequently from the immediately preceding utterance. In this way the utterance in which the joking material is delivered can be seen as forming the first part and the joke itself the second part of an adjacency pair (Norrick 1993). The recipient of any utterance which ordinarily requires a response may choose to joke instead of producing the 'relevant' secondpart pair. If, for example, a speaker is unwilling to give the information asked for, the option of joking may be chosen. As in punning (Scherzer 1985), a joking strategy plays on the ambiguity, irrelevancy or vagueness in a particular part of the preceding utterance in order to create a joke. A joker may also play upon or initiate an unexpected shift between the topical, interpersonal and meta-oriented dimensions of the interaction process, as can be seen from the examples that follow. EXAMPLE 8.1 (DENMARK):

Seller: A Buyers: B, C Situation: The buyers suggest that their small fishing boat form part of the deal. A: Det rna jeg altsa sige atfllh altsa - det vii jeg bestemt ikke afvise, fordi!llh det kunne da vrer~ med til sadan og sa anspore min!llh interesse yderligere for at komme ind i den branche. Ja sa det kan jeg bestemt ikke afvise, men selvft/Jlgelig skal jeg jo lige have lejlighedtil at se den ogf/Jh C: Det er klart. A: og f/Jh vurdere om om jeg om jeg mener jeg kan finde en ktjJber til den bagefter. B: Det kunne were det var nogetfor ¢hfor din sf/Jn der? A: Ja. [everybody laughs] A: Well I must say that, well I will not refuse that at all because then I might feel more encouraged to enter into this trade. So certainly I cannot refuse it but I must of course have an opportunity to look at it and

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C: Of course. A: and consider if if I if I think I can find a buyer for it afterwards. B: It might be something for your son? A: Yes. [everybody laughs] In this example the joke is created from the uncertainty expressed by the seller (A) whether, if he buys the small boat, he will be able to find a buyer. The unexpected element is that the joker (B) includes the seller's son among the potential buyers, thus initiating an unexpected shift from the topical to the interpersonal level of communication. EXAMPLE 8.2 (SPAIN)

Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: The sellers have just made their first bid on the big fishing boat. D: Hombre, inicialmente eso sale un poco, honradamente no vamos a engafiarnos. Se sale un poco de nuestro de nuestra primera idea. Puff me has dejado un poco sin habla. Me has dejado un poco sin habla. A: jPues, toma un poco de vino, hombre! [A and D laugh] D: This in the first place is a bit, to be honest we should not do ourselves out of a good deal. This is a bit above our first idea Phew, you have made me almost speechless. You have made me almost speechless. A: Then have some wine! [A and D laugh] What creates the joke in this example is that A chooses to respond to a part of D's utterance that D did not expect, suggesting a solution so that D can recover after having heard his price offer. A proceeds at the interpersonallevel, in a situation where D had expected him to switch back to topic talk. EXAMPLE 8.3 (SPAIN)

Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: They are talking about the costs of having the big fishing boat.

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C: jExagerado, espera! D: Pero hombre C: Es que es que son muchos gastos, hombre. D: Pero hombre

jEscucha, deja que termine! No he terminado,hombre. jNo te lances que pareces una moto, coiio! [everybody laughs] B: Entonces de los cinco rnillones ... B:

Exaggerated, wait! Christ You know that is a lot of money. But for heavens sake Listen! Let me finish! I haven't finished, give me a chance. You are jumping the gun, you twit! [everybody laughs] B: So about the five million ...

C: D: C: D: B:

In this example the two buyers are upset and break tum-taking rules by interrupting the seller. The amusement is created by the fact that the seller comments on the buyer's behaviour by comparing him, in the colloquial Spanish version, to a motor-bike, an incongruous and hence funny metaphor which is difficult to convey in English. He is thus changing from topic talk to the interpersonal as well as altering the meta-oriented dimensions of communication. EXAMPLE 8.4 (DENMARK)

Sellers: A, B Buyer: C Situation: They have been talking about the possible employment of the seller's son on the big fishing boat. A: Hvordan kan vi konkretisere det med s¢nnen i en egentlig aftale? (4 seconds) [C laughs] B: Nej men altsa ... A: How can we put this about the son into an actual

agreement? (4 seconds) [C laughs] B: No but ...

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168

Here C breaks a conversational rule by responding to a serious question by laughing after a four-second pause, after which B feels impelled to rescue his co-negotiator. In this instance, it is difficult to know how to interpret the pause. The laughter may be in response to the utterance (which certainly could be interpreted as an attempt at humour) or to the pause itself, which is awkward. However, the aim of the study is not primarily to analyse different kinds of joking techniques, but the interactive dynamics between joker, butt(s) and laugher(s). Consequently, the joke and its subsequent laughter is viewed as a single unit of discourse in which the first-part pair is a joke produced by a speaker and the second part the subsequent laughter produced by a listener. In other words, for the purposes of the present chapter, joking and subsequent laughter form an adjacency pair. Such pairs are referred to as joking exchanges. 1 Following this definition the joking exchanges in the previous examples can be identified as the following: EXAMPLE 8.1 (DENMARK):

Seller: A Buyers: B, C Situation: The buyers suggest that their small fishing boat form part of the deal. B: Det kunne vcere det var nogetfor f/Jhfor din Sf/Jn der? A: Ja. [everybody laughs] B: It might be something for your son? A: Yes. [Everybody laughs] EXAMPLE 8.2 (SPAIN)

Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: The sellers have just made their first bid on the big fishing boat.

A: jPues, toma un poco de vino hombre! [A and D laugh] A: Then have some wine! [A and D laugh] EXAMPLE 8.3 (SPAIN)

Joking as strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations

169

Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: They are talking about the costs of having the big fishing boat. B:

jEscucha! jDeja que termine! No he terminado, hombre. jNo te lances que pareces una moto, coiio! [everybody laughs]

B: Listen! Let me finish! I haven't finished, give me a chance. You are jumping the gun, you twit! [everybody laughs] EXAMPLE 8.4 (DENMARK)

Sellers: A, B Buyer: C Situation: They have been talking about the possible employment of the seller's son on the big fishing boat. A: Hvordan kan vi konkretisere det med srjmnen i en egentlig aftale? (4 seconds) [C laughs] B: Nej men altsa ...

A: How can we put this about the son into an actual agreement? (4 seconds) [C laughs] B: No but ... On a macro-level of discourse, a joke can be said to introduce a frame shift from a 'serious frame' to a 'play frame', and the next speaker is free to choose whether to continue in the play frame or return to the serious frame. If the speakers choose to stay within the play frame, one joking exchange is followed by another or maybe even by several further joking exchanges. An uninterrupted series of joking exchanges is called a joking sequence. A further requirement of the joking sequence is that the jokes are produced alternately by opposite parties and each joke is accompanied by laughter. ANALYSIS

In this study, the contexts into which the joking exchanges and sequences are embedded have not been subject to detailed analysis. It is my overall

GRINDS TED

170

impression, however, that there are no significant differences in these contexts among the Spanish and Danish speakers which would account for the fact that the Spanish negotiators make more jokes (eighty-five) than do the Danes (seventy-three). Rather, a tentative interpretation might be that since joking and laughter serve mainly affiliative purposes, a shift from the serious mode of interaction to the play mode must imply a need for strengthening the interpersonal relationship between speakers. This is to say that the Spanish negotiators appear to be more inclined than the Danes to resort to interpersonal bonding strategies. Analysing joker-butt(s)-laugher(s) relationships and the joking exchange-joking sequence ratio will enable us to confirm or counter the following set of hypotheses about divergent features of Spanish and Danish joking: 1. The Spanish negotiators' preference for displaying competitive behaviour entails that • other-ridicule will be extremely frequent and self-ridicule extremely rare, • the joking sequences score will be higher than the Danish one. 2. Due to their need for displaying affiliation and emotional involvement, the Spaniards will • produce more cases of laughter than the Danes 3. Finally, it is to be expected that the Spaniards, because of their concern for group face work • will produce more cases of shared ridicule than the Danes • will produce more cases in which everybody is laughing 4. Compared with the Spaniards, the Danish preference for displaying egalitarian and consensus-oriented behaviour entails that • they will produce more cases of self-ridicule than the Spaniards 5. The low preference of the Danes for displaying affiliation and emotional involvement implies that • they will produce less laughter than the Spaniards • they will make few joking sequences 6. Finally, it is to be expected that the Danes, because of their concern for team face work • will produce few cases of shared ridicule • will produce few cases where everybody is laughing • will produce a majority of cases with one or two laughers.

Joker-butt relationship Looking at the first part of a joking exchange, i.e., the joking utterance itself, the aim of the analysis is to find out who among the audience the

171

Joking as strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations

joker chooses to hold up to ridicule and whether it is self-ridicule, otherridicule or shared ridicule.

Spain

Butt no.

Denmark

%

no.

%

Joker himself

6

7.06

12

16.44

Joker and partner

3

3.53

7

9.59

Joker's partner

1

1.18

5

6.85

10

11.77

24

32.88

2 opposites

17

20.00

-

-

1 opposite

56

65.88

45

61.64

Cases of other-ridicule

73

85.88

45

61.64

2.35

4

5.48

85 100.00

73

100.00

Cases of self-ridicule

Cases of shared ridicule Total TABLE 8.1:

2

Joker-butt relationships

For both Spanish and Danish speakers, the number of cases of otherridicule greatly exceeds other joker-butt relationships, with the Spanish negotiators displaying a higher preference for other-ridicule than the Danes. The fact that jokers choose someone from the opposite party as the target of their jokes is in itself a sign of self-affirmative behaviour in which they are willing to disturb the sanctities of another person's private sphere. In this respect Example 8.5 is a typical Spanish joking exchange. EXAMPLE 8.5 {SPAIN)

Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: Sellers and buyers are negotiating the price of the big fishing boat. The buyers maintain that the boat is not in a very good condition, for which reason they cannot accept the sellers' offer.

A: B: C: D:

Pequefios pequefios retoquillos lno? Hombre, hombre, hombre tampoco es para tanto leh? Millon y medio de pequefios retoquillos. Millon y medio o mas leh?

172

GRINDS TED

B: £,Millon y medio de pesetas? A: l,Pero que es lo que vais a hacer al barco? B: £,Que le vais a hacer? l,Le vais a poner camarote de lujo o que? jMadre mfa! [Band C laugh] A: B: C: D: B: A: B:

Small repairs, don't you think? Now look here, look here it is not that bad, is it? One and a half million repairs. One and a half million or more. One and a half million pesetas? But what is it you are going to do with the boat? What do you want to do with it? Are you going to install a luxury cabin or what? What on earth do you have in mind? [Band C laugh]

This is an example of other-ridicule, where, as a response to the buyer's claim that the price put forward is too high, seller B invents the claim that it is the buyers who are over-extravagant. Moreover, as can be seen from the inflection of the verb in his utterance ( vais ), B chooses to address both buyers as the target of the joke. Also, in Examples 8.2 and 8.3, a Spanish negotiator has chosen other-ridicule as his strategy, although this ridicule is directed towards only one opposite negotiator. In Example 8.2 the butt is invited to drink some wine to get control of himself and in Example 8.3 the butt is compared to a motorbike. Apart from representing instances of other-ridicule, these jokes have something more in common. In all of them the assertive element - which is considered to be inherent in other-ridicule - is enhanced by the qualities transferred to the butt, as all involve exaggerations. Furthermore, the verbal devices chosen to accompany them are marked by directness (vocatives: hombre, coiio; imperatives: escucha, deja que termine). Assertiveness and directness can be singled out as typical features of Spanish joking as compared to Danish joking strategies. Turning to cases of self-ridicule, we see that the Danish jokers are much more inclined to choose themselves or their partners as the butt of their jokes. This choice implies that Danish jokers apparently prefer to avoid intruding into the other party's personal autonomy. As has been shown in earlier studies (Grindsted 1989, 1990), such distance-keeping communicative devices are frequently used in Danish negotiations. Examples 8.6 and 8.7 are typical Danish joking exchanges EXAMPLE 8.6 (DENMARK)

Seller: A Buyers: B, C

Joking as strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations

173

Situation: They have been negotiating for about nine minutes without having made any concrete price offers. A: Ja men!11h altsa, ja jeg ved ikk:e altsa, vi kan jo sige altsA. vi bevreger os lidt rundt om den111 den varme gr!11d, altsa. Jeg bar ikk:e selv nogle skilte i vinduet, bar I set jo, og !11h [B and C laugh] A: Jeg ku da egentlig godt forestille mig at I mA.ske var ligesom !11h, altsa altsa I var rimeligt interesserede i og ligesom h!11re hvor vi ligger benne rent !11h prismressigt i forhold til hinanden. Altsa hvad jeres pris er i forhold til min. A: Yes but er well yes, I don't know but we can say, can't we, that we are beating around the bush, er. Well as you have seen I have no price in the window and er [Band C laugh] A: I could imagine in fact that you might be kind of er, that is that you were quite interested in where we are as far as the price is concerned, that is what is your price compared to mine. This is an example of self-ridicule. In the first place, the seller (A) is meant to be a prosperous, enterprising businessman (according to the instructions for the role-play) and not a small shopkeeper, which his remark about not having a card in the shop window seems to imply. Secondly, disclosing his price before the negotiation takes place is not an acceptable tactic; and fmally, his presequence ('we are beating around the bush') makes one believe that he has now reached a point in the negotiation where he wants to get down to business. However, he still does not announce his first bid, but continues hedging. To this should finally be added the mitigating devices A uses in his utterance, A: Ja menf/Jh altsa ja jeg ved ikke altsa, vi kan jo sige altsa vi bevreger os lidt rundt om den!11 den varme gr!11d, altsa. Jeg bar ikke selv nogle skilte i vinduet bar I setjo, og 1/Jh). In fact, the joking utterance is itself an act of mitigation, containing a number of devices to mitigate the mitigation. In summary, the joker is deliberately making a fool of himself by underplaying his role as a negotiator in various ways. EXAMPLE 8. 7 (DENMARK)

Sellers: A, B Buyer: C Situation: They are discussing the possibility of including the small boat in the deal.

174

GRINDS TED

A: Vi bar ikke brug for nogen bade. C: I vil jo geme ind pa markedet? B: Jo deter jo {/jh, problemet er jo, som du jo ogsa selv var inde pa, at {ljh markedet er jo er jo vigende for den her type bade. C: Ja A: Der er ingen fremtid i at ligge inde med den lille bad. C: I ved jo godt at min bad den kan finde fiskene [everybody laughs] A: We do not need any boats. C: But you do want to enter the market, don't you? B: Yes, that's er, the problem is, as you mentioned yourself, that er the market is er is er declining for this type of boat. C: Yes. A: There is no future in having the small boat on hand. C: But you know very well that my boat can find the fish. [everybody laughs] This is another example in which the speaker exposes himself to ridicule. As the buyer of the large boat, he is trying, in tum, to persuade the sellers to buy his small boat that can only be used for inshore fishing. The sellers firmly refuse to take his proposal into consideration. To the surprise of everyone, C argues in response that his boat is endowed with preternatural forces and is able to 'find the fish'. In this way, smallness is set apart as something to b~ sought after. Self-ridicule is typical of the Danish sense of humour, a feature that may be difficult to cope with for negotiators from Latin countries, who may sometimes interpret it as a sign of weakness. Conversely, however, in Danish culture negotiators will ultimately gain credibility for not taking themselves too seriously. They will often deliberately underplay their roles, claiming as virtues smallness, unimportance, and naivety. Example 8.8 illustrates this tendency clearly. EXAMPLE 8.8 (DENMARK)

Sellers: A, C Buyers: B, D Situation: There has just been a break in the negotiations, during which the buyers have a look at the big fishing boat, at the suggestion of the sellers. C: Det var I sandelig ikke lang tid om. B: Nej, en halv time det rna da vrere rimeligt. C: Det rna da vrere en amerikansk time, sa.

Joking as strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations B:

175

Vi ku' ikkefinde baden. [everybody laughs]

C: It certainly didn't take long. B: No, half an hour is reasonable, don't you think? C: It must be American time, then. B: We couldn't find the boat. [everybody laughs] This is another joke, in which a Danish negotiator exposes not only himself but also his team-mate to ridicule. However, buyer B is not only making fools of himself and his team-mate but also frustrating the seller's plans to continue the negotiations. In fact, Examples 8.4 and 8.8 have something in common. 'Misacting' (pretending to be uninvolved) is another frequent constituent in Danish joking strategies. As can be seen from Table 8.1, another salient feature of the Spanish jokers' choice of butt is that in twenty per cent of cases they include both members of the opposing team (Example 8.5). The fact that the Spanish negotiator wants to include the opposition in the on-going activity is in itself a sign of affiliation. However, it is also a sign of competitiveness. It is, of course, more challenging to 'attack' two opposites instead of one, and at the same time more risky, since 'counter-attacks' can be expected from both of them. The fact that there are no examples of Danish jokers selecting both members of the opposing team as the target of their jokes is indicative that this way of doing face work is alien to the Danish sense of humour. It may also confirm the assumption that Danes are able to co-operate with even a very low degree of interpersonal involvement (Pant and Grindsted 1995). Unfortunately, the cases of shared ridicule and those in which the joker has chosen his co-negotiator as the butt are too few to be of significance, although an interesting observation is that the Danish negotiators appear to target their partner as a butt more frequently than Spanish negotiators do. However, all these cases involve a male as co-negotiator who is supposed to be playing the joker's wife. Gender roles are ignored by the Spanish negotiators. Joking-laughing relationship

Since joking is considered as an invitation to laugh, the next aspect to be analysed is who accepts this invitation. Laughing utterances may be produced simultaneously by various speakers or by only one speaker. Using how many persons are laughing per joke as our laughing production measuring scale, important cultural differences can be identified, as Table 8.2 demonstrates.

176

GRINDSTED Spain

All laughers

Denmark

no.

%

no.

%

26

30.59

14

19.18

2

8

9.41

2

2.74

joker, partner, 1 opposite

3

37.5

-

-

2

100

3laughers

joker, 2 opposites

2

25

all except joker

3

37.5

Total

8

21aughers joker, partner

100

-

2

100

21

24.71

21

28.77

6

28.57

9

42.86

joker, 1 opposite

5

23.81

6

28.57

joker's partner, 1 opposite

2

9.52

1

4.76

2 opposites

8

38.10

5

23.81

Total

21

100

1 Iaugher

30

35.29

21

49.31

joker

16

53.33

21

58.33

joker's partner

6

20.00

2

5.56

1 opposite

8

26.67

13

36.11

21

100

Total

30

100.0

36

100.0

Laughing cases: total

85

100

73

100

TABLE 8.2:

Relationship between joker and audience

The number of laughing utterances produced is obviously the same as the number of joking utterances (Spain eighty-five and Denmark seventythree). Spanish negotiators are more likely to joke in ways which provoke laughter from three or more participants (forty per cent as opposed to 21.92 per cent for the Danes). For the Danish negotiators, in the majority of the cases only one or two negotiators are laughing (78.08 per cent as opposed to sixty per cent). Individual laughter is significantly more likely to occur in Danish negotiations. What can we infer from these results? The fact that we find more cases with three or four persons laughing in the Spanish data than in the Danish data may tell us that Spanish negotiators are more inclined to suspend their teamwork obligations. Instead, they appear to allow themselves to break down the barriers that the conflictive elements of the negotiation construct, seeking interpersonal bonding beyond the team they belong to

Joking as strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations

177

in their capacity as either buyers or sellers. This may be taken as an example of group face work. The Spanish negotiators' propensity for establishing interpersonal relationships seems not to be restricted by their team membership but frequently encompasses everyone taking part in the negotiation. On the basis of this data, the importance of establishing interpersonal interrelationships among the group as a whole, buyers and sellers, is less for Danish negotiators, who appear to place more value on individual or team performances. Taking into account cases of simultaneous laughter, the Spanish produce utterances which correspond to 200 cases of individual laughter; whereas the Danes produce utterances which correspond to 132 cases of individual laughter. The fact that the Spanish jokes arouse more laughter than the Danish ones may be taken as another indication of the higher priority given to interpersonal face work in Spain. Examining joking-laughing relationships enables us to describe various kinds of alignment constellations that may arise from the joking exchange. Bearing in mind that each team in the majority of the cases consists of two interactants, the individual negotiator will inevitably be expected to do a certain amount of team face work, i.e., to align himself more with his co-negotiator than with the opposite team. However, it also happens that the co-negotiators' role relationship may be suspended when laughter is produced across the borders set up between buyers and sellers. Such cross-border laughing implies that the negotiators do not always feel obliged to fulfil only their roles as either buyers or sellers. Cross-border laughing may in some way or another act as a bridge between negotiators. Such cases in which we find only one or two laughers require further analysis to determine their function in terms of interpersonal relationships in any conclusive sense. As has been argued, a joke achieves maximum effect if either all participants or all participants excluding the joker laugh. This is the only observation we can make about three laughers, with a limited amount of data. However, important differences can be noted with regard to the other situations. In Denmark, a case involving two laughers is most likely to involve the joker and his partner, which seems to confirm the importance of team face work in Denmark. Conversely, in the Spanish data, the two laughers in the majority of cases are the two members of the opposing team. Furthermore, in these cases the joker must be said to be successful, since the joke achieved maximum effect on the other side of the negotiating table. If the joker is not personally among the laughers, the joking-laughing relationship is more likely to embrace more interactants. Thus, if the joker is a Iaugher, the joking-laughing relationship is likely to comprise only two persons, whereas, if the joker is not a Iaugher, it is likely to comprise three persons. If, in addition, the two laughers belong to the opposite

178

GRINDS TED

party, interpersonal bonding relationships must be said to be stronger than the relationships between buyers on one hand, and sellers on the other. Consequently, we are able to confirm once more that the Danes give a higher priority to their partners as either sellers or buyers than do the Spanish negotiators, who frequently seek interpersonal bonding across buyer-seller role obligations. Looking at the cases in which only one negotiator is laughing, among both the Danes and the Spaniards the most frequent Iaugher is the joker him or herself. An explanation as to why jokers laugh at their own jokes may have to do with the compensating effects of taking the edge off facethreatening joking acts. Looking at cases where one or two laughers are involved and in which a joker's partner laughs, there are no significant differences between Spanish and Danish negotiators. Both sets appear to give approximately the same number of preferred reactions to their joking partner, thus showing more or less the same degree of solidarity. Finally, there are more cases in which only one opposite team member is laughing in Denmark than in Spain. This may indicate that in Denmark as well as in Spain the joker-laughing relationship cuts across buyer-seller interpersonal relationships or, possibly, that jokers and their laughing opposites have developed an interactive process of their own without their partners taking an active part. This may also be explained in terms of team spirit. Why should a laughing negotiator's partner laugh if the co-negotiator and one of the opponents make a joking exchange while they are negotiating something between them? Joker-laughing relationships in joking sequences

It is apparent that Spanish negotiators make more changes from the serious mode of interaction to the play mode. But how long do these last? Table 8.3 indicates how many joking exchanges form part of joking sequences. Spain

Denmark

no.

%

no.

%

Number of joking exchanges

85

100.00

73

100.00

Number of joking exchanges forming part of joking sequences

27

9

12.33

TABLE 8.3:

31.86

Number of joking exchanges forming part of joking sequences

Compared with Danish jokes, a higher proportion of Spanish jokes form part of joking sequences. The fact that Spanish buyers and sellers

Joking as strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations

179

make more consecutive jokes than their Danish counterparts again seems to indicate the Spanish emphasis on the interpersonal dimension of faceto-face interaction. The following exemplifies the interactive qualities of a Spanish joking sequence. EXAMPLE 8.9

Sellers: A, B Buyers: C, D Situation: Buyers have accepted sellers' proposal to employ their son on the big fishing boat. D: De todas formas, aver si meteis en vereda al chavalt,eh? que no nos cause demasiados problemas. A: Eso vosotros ah£ al ldtigo. B: Vosotros alldtigo. D: Delegais en A: Sf totalmente. [A and B laugh] B: Totalmente. Totalmente. D: Nuestra firmeza. A: Con tal de que no lo tireis por la borda. [A, Band D laugh] [C drinks water] B: Que lo devolvais por le menos entero. C: No, como se porte muy mallo utilizamos de cebo. B: Aunque ya sabes silo matdis, pues bueno. Pero mira, que si lo dejais paralitico al chaval. [everybody laughs] C: Nos nos lo echariamos por cachos. [everybody laughs] D: Anyway, I hope you want things to work out for your son. We do not want him to cause too many problems, you see. A: Then you must wield the whip. B: You must wield the whip. D: Delegate. A: Yes, completely. [A and B laugh] B: Completely, completely. D: And we will be firm. A: Only if you do not throw him overboard. [A, Band D laugh] [C drinks water] D: At least you must give him back to us intact. C: No, if he cannot behave himself we will use him as bait. B: Although you know if you kill him, then it is OK, but,

180

GRINDS TED

look, if the boy comes back good for nothing. [everybody laughs] C: We will cut him up and throw him overboard. [everybody laughs] This is an example of a joking sequence consisting of two joking exchanges (printed in bold italics). However, since in the preceding turns various joking exchanges have been produced, the play frame is sustained for a considerable time. The buyers are worried about employing the sellers' son, since they do not know if he will be able to make himself useful on board. This brings the sellers, both laughing, to joke in two individual, consecutive turns that the buyers may have to whip him. Seller (A) continues joking, and a little later buyer (C) is brought to say that if the son does not behave, they will use him as bait. This utterance I take to be an invitation for laughter which is not accepted, and hence does not count as a joking exchange. The sequence that follows, in which B states that they may have to kill him, gives rise to laughter and provokes a counter-joke by buyer (C) that they will throw him overboard, a remark that also gives rise to laughter. The dynamics of this joking sequence is clear. If one participant plays on self-affirmation, it is to be taken as an invitation to an opposite participant also to affirm him or herself. The opposite participant has to accept the challenge and make a countermove to ensure that mutual respect is established between them. This, in tum, is a prerequisite for co-operation to take place. A countermove, which is expected to be more challenging than the initiating one, may serve as a new invitation for laughter and for counter-joking and so forth, until one of the parties surrenders, and the other leaves the game as a winner. CONCLUSION

The complex nature of joking and laughter in interactive business contexts is clearly apparent, even from a fairly limited database. Also apparent, and more important for the purposes of this chapter, is the fact that there are substantial differences in the joking strategies employed by Spanish and Danish negotiators. These involve the organisation of joking behaviour, the relationship between the constituent elements of joking Goker, butt, audience) and the number and type of joking sequences. Such strategies in tum relate to the different cultural propensities for certain types of interpersonal relationships and attitudes towards 'face' which this chapter has explored in some detail. In conclusion, however, it may be useful to foreground three specific issues which have emerged from this research. First of all, not only joking behaviour but also the sequencing and patterning of laughter have strong culture specific elements. It is clearly demonstrable that Danes and

Joking as strategy in Spanish and Danish negotiations

181

Spaniards do not joke in the same context, playing the same roles in the same way. Secondly, the frequency of joking behaviour in both the Danish and the Spanish data (though more frequent in the latter) suggests that humour plays an important part in business negotiations. This is in itself an important conclusion and one which has not been fully investigated either in this chapter or elsewhere. It seems highly probable that if business executives who are role-playing make use of humour to bring about successful negotiations, humour will also feature prominently in 'real' negotiations. Finally, and following on from this, there are clear implications of this research for inter-cultural business negotiations. If joking is a significant communicative strategy with powerful culturespecific elements not only in the substance of jokes but also in the way they are structured into the organisation of talk, then cultural awareness becomes a particularly urgent matter in inter-cultural negotiations. It is the interactive and cultural aspects of negotiations which even fluent non-native speakers often find most difficult to master and which can be most crucial to the success or failure of those negotiations. Further research needs to examine not only how Danes employ joking strategies when they are dealing with other Danes but how they might modify (or not modify) their behaviour when negotiating with Spaniards in intercultural situations.

GRINDS TED

182 PRACTICAL TIPS

• To relieve tension, joking and laughing strategies may be successfully used in cross-cultural business contexts. However, often contrasting priorities relating to face needs in different cultures must be taken into consideration in order to avoid embarrassment. • In particular, in Spanish-Danish negotiations: • the Spanish negotiators should be careful not to be too affirmative and too direct in their jokes in order to safeguard the Danish negotiators' preference for egalitarian and consensus-oriented communicative behaviour. • the Danish negotiators should avoid using acting as the butt of their jokes since their Spanish counterparts, who favour selfaffirmation, may consider this behaviour as signalling weakness. • As far as laughing is concerned, both Spanish and Danish negotiators can feel free to share in the laughter following a joke.

TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

To make it easier to read the transcripts, I have used normal punctuation rules. Joking ex

The clientsupplier meeting

Statistical features

Jj. File length (bytes)

TABLE 9.3:

The transcript corpus

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

General Groups and nets

As a result of the procedures described above, it is possible to offer a description of the lexical organisation of the ideational keywords in each meeting. Each keyword and its collocates have been given the status of a lexical group, i.e., of words that hang together in the meeting texts. So, for example, the keyword worker and its collocates health, environment, life, unions, representation (see Figure 9.1, below) constitute a lexical group in the environment meeting. Some collocates are also keywords in that meeting (represented in bold type), whereas others are not. The single arrows indicate a unidirectional, simple collocation link between words, whereas a double-headed arrow means that the two words involved intercollocate.

COLLINS and SCOTT

194

re~resentation ~ wo\r~k~ ~ ~umons

~ health

environment life

FIGURE 9.1:

A lexical group and its collocational links

The organisation at the level of the group is productive in the sense that it is the first textual reality, more complex than the word, related to non-sequential topic organisation. In this sense it is an element that will tell us about some aspect of the aboutness of the text, to be fully evident when groups come together in nets. What the analysis reveals next is that, through this lexical sharing system, some lexical groups bundle together in even more complex units or nonsequential topical nets. As we shall see below, the number of nets will vary for the different meetings. Likewise, different meetings will display more complex nets (nets constituted by a larger number of groups that intercollocate), whereas others will display a larger number of loose simple groups (groups that do not intercollocate with others). A final element distinguishing the topical arrangement of keywords in the meetings is related to those keywords that do not display any ideational collocates at all. These are not part of the net as such, since no links are observed between them and another ideational word. The number of such nonintegrated keywords varies across the meetings and we believe that this will be an interesting aspect of the analysis in the topical characterisation of the events. The limits of nets are defined at the point when no more collocational links are observed among keywords, within the set span. Non-keyword collocates have not been investigated for their own collocates. Whenever present, they are usually displayed towards the edges of a net. The analysis has shown, therefore, that it is possible to detect the following variables: 1. The number of keywords in each meeting and the number of keywords in the nets, 2. The number of keywords and key or non-key collocates in the nets, 3. The number of links between words, 4. The direction of the links between pairs of collocates.

Lexical landscaping in business meetings

195

Variable 1, established by counting the number of keywords in a meeting and the number of keywords that constitute the nets, gives us the feature density of the net. So, for example, if a text has ninety-seven ideational keywords and twenty-four keywords in the landscape, the net can be said to have a density of 24.7 per cent. Net density seems to contribute to a perception of 'togetherness' of the outstanding words in the meeting, since the keywords that do not form part of the net are those that do not intercollocate. They are outstanding in the meeting but loose, rather than together. A meeting will be perceived as more 'together' as the overall density of its nets increases. The percentage of loose keywords, the inverse of density, will, in tum, show that there may be points which are touched upon during the meetings but that do not link to others through narrow co-text collocation. Variable 2, initially established by simply counting the number of words (keywords and their key and non-key collocates) in the net, immediately circumscribes the size of each net within the text. Then, given the total of words and the number of non-key collocates in the net, it is possible to observe its key coverage. This feature concerns how far the net extends beyond the words statistically identified as key, since it enables us to find out about the proportion of key collocates in the net. The higher this proportion, the higher the key coverage. Variables 3 and 4 make it possible to evaluate the linkedness of the net. A net will be more linked as the ratio between the number of links and the number of words in the net increases. So, if a net is composed of ten words but has fifteen links between them, it will have a linkedness of 150 per cent. For this purpose, a uni-directional link counts one point and a bidirectional link two. The linkedness of the net seems to contribute to the perception of togetherness of the words in the net. Landscape

With those features and their roles in mind, we want to suggest that each particular meeting, with its key coverage, looseness and linkedness, will have a different landscape. In other words, on the basis of how the keywords of the text come together, it is possible graphically to represent the aboutness of our meetings as a landscape and to observe its characteristics, whether shared or unique, across the generically different meetings. The two-level lexical arrangement observed for texts - landscapes and nets - contributes towards a synthesis of topical and collocational perceptions. The landscape of a text appears to relate well to intuitive human perception of topics and sub-topics of text. Thus, in lexical landscaping, we suggest that higher density, coverage and linkedness may indicate more salient and well-developed topics and sub-topics.

196

COLLINS and SCOTT

THE MEETINGS

We shall now present the different landscapes constructed for the meetings analysed.9 The Brazilian meetings The client-supplier meetinglo

The_ landscape, optimally obtained at a collocation span of 3/3, gives an account of the topics and sub-topics of the meeting (Figure 9.2). In agreement with the procedures and criteria described in the methodology section, above, the eighty-three keywords obtained for this meeting were analysed for their collocates. Of these, thirty-nine send and/or receive a link to/from some collocate and thus form lexical nets. The looseness rate of fifty-three per cent thus obtained is comparatively low, showing that of all the propositional content dealt with during the meeting, about half is closely interrelated. In fact, the landscape for this meeting displays two large nets and several peripheral groups. The first net includes three groups, bridged by one shared collocate each time (legal, relat6rio). The second comprises one complex net alone. The remaining forty-four keywords have no ideational collocates and do not, therefore, take part in the landscape. These loose keywords may refer to outstanding points dealt with briefly or to points that may have been dealt with at length but where a collocational span fails to capture the cohesion between them and other lexical items. The nets also reveal a key coverage of seventy-six per cent. Combined with a linkedness of 131 per cent, the highest observed in the five meetings, this coverage shows that the meeting is characterised by a considerable· amount of closely interrelated content. The well-defined purposes of this meeting and the high level of familiarity among its several participants seem to support the profile obtained through the lexical analysis. Most of the links visible in Figure 9.2 concern direct and unsurprising connections between associated key words, e.g.,fornecedor (supplier) and names of participants in the meeting, since participants in this training session were acting out roles such as client or supplier, or were discussing legal information and support systems, etc. The bottom net has to do with training and developing policies for selection, hiring and firing, etc. The landscape thus reflects a meeting which achieved its business training goals. However, the interactional tone of the meeting is also reflected in the net. The participants adopted a generally informal tone with one another. Leadership was mostly in the hands of the speaker we are calling Walter, and Edmundo was the chief joker. Roy was of lower status within the firm and the item quieto (shut up, pipe down) is linked to him as the following section shows:

197

Lexical landscaping in business meetings direto

Noel

quieto /

Romeu /

\ /

f/

-----Walter fornecedor

Roy

E~nd•/\ ~ mforma~ao

cliente

dissimulac;ao

/\

externo historico

simula~ao

I~legal

subsidios

-------~

/~ d/echao 1

I

indice

·

orient/~

suporte

seguran~a

reajuste

l ~"m'

juridico

dispositivos

l

bronca

relatorio

protec;ao

_,,;;:;;,.\~.,.... tomar

col una

\

problema

qualidade instala~ao

~

t -

extra

exporta~ao

~

-

manutenc;ao

importa~ao

conserva~ao

~

hora

area

predial

.----------:_treinamento ~

sele~a0---recrut~ 1 ~nsas

politica

desenvolvimento

/

receber FIGURE 9.2:

Walter

contrata~oes

Topical landscape for the client-supplier meeting (keywords in bold)

Here we're going to take for example the case of Edmundo, as suppliers, then later at the end we'll do this for each client in this list here, we'll write them up on that board, all the topics which were brought up, we'll decide which are worth working on or not.

198 Romeu Noel Walter

Roy Walter Noel Edmundo

COLLINS and SCOTT

Who's the client? The client, Edmundo. It's that I, I haven't had time to think all of these things through, without having seen it properly before, right? Do I answer too? I don't know whether ... Shut up, Roy. Pipe down there (laughter)

A little later on Roy is teased about his writing. He is also the only participant formally addressed as o senhor instead of the informal voce. However, despite some needling, his subordinate role still allows Roy to defend himself. Roy Edmundo

Roy Noel Edmundo Romeu Edmundo Romeu Roy Romeu Edmundo Roy

Well I supply Noel, incYou're the first person I've seen who does a letter b differently, you begin with the round bit and then do the leg ... Well I supply Noel and in the field the field of building maintenance, the field of security and maintenance of the equipment ... They're protectors and safety devices which I've asked for and which he's supplying. Installation and fitting ... Let's put it down as safety devices, protective and other devices, installation and fitting. Remember that. I'll do it. Now that's a firm approach! Yes indeed! Sometimes I have to do all sorts of rubbish for you but I, I do do it. You asked me to ...

The environment meeting The environment meeting produced a list of sixty-five content keywords. Of these, thirteen comprise one larger net and four peripheral groups in the landscape shown in Figure 9.3. The proportion of key coverage was sixtyfive per cent. It has by far the largest percentage of loose keywords (those without ideational collocates) at eighty per cent. The topical landscape of this meeting was obtained with a span of 3/3 and it was hypothesised that some of the fifty-two loose keywords might be integrated into the net by means of intercollocation using wider spans. No ideational intercollocation was observed at spans of 4/4 and 5/5. This suggests that the focal

199

Lexical landscaping in business meetings

point of the meeting includes, in fact, only a very small portion of the ideational meanings conveyed through its keywords. All the other points 'circulate' around the topic expressed by the large net. Additionally, they are kept away from the net due to the lack of collocational links between them and the net words. Our interpretation is that these loose outstanding words are taken up in succession as brief points, i.e.. , they do not remain as points of attention for long. This seems to be supported by the fact that the meeting included a lot of brainstorming in the search for an acceptable agenda for an educational event in a public organisation. This, however, does not stop the main topic (the theme chosen for the event) from being closely structured, as the rate for linkedness (120 per cent) shows.

trabalhador~

sindicatos

~ I ~~-

representac;ao

vida~

;ud~eio) ambiente

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