Interpersonal harmony and textual coherence in Chinese business interaction. Multilingua, 20 (3),...

Multilingua 20–3 (2001), 285–310 061–8507/01/0020–0285© Walter de Gruyter, Berlin

Interpersonal harmony and textual coherence inChinese business interaction

LI WEI, ZHU HUA, AND LI YUE

Abstract

This paper focuses on the key Chinese cultural concept of‘harmony’ and investigates how Chinese speakers endeavor toachieve interpersonal harmony in face-to-face interaction. The dataon which this study is based comes from a business meetingamongst four native speakers of Mandarin Chinese in Beijing.Through a detailed Conversation Analysis of a sequence from theclosing stage of the meeting, we demonstrate the ways in which theChinese speakers work together to achieve conversationalcoherence which in turn contributes to the harmonious relationshipthey aim to build with each other, even though their businessinterests and objectives may be different. Implications for cross-cultural business communication are discussed.

‘I’m astounded by people who want to know the Universewhen it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.’

Woody Allen

Introduction

Cross-cultural communication has in the last two decades become some-thing of a global enterprise, with its own investors, shareholders, regula-tors, market researchers, publicists, and so forth. For any enterprise, thesuccess of the business depends on the sale of the product. And in order tosell a product to the mass market, an idea needs to be put into the con-sumer’s mind that one’s social, psychological, and even physical conditiondepends on the possession of that product. This is then followed by a ‘the-answer-to-all-problems’ advertizing campaign, with a catchy one-liner,promoting the particular product (Jeannet and Hennesay 1992; Majaro1992; Usunier 1996; Czinkota and Ronkainan 1998). Despite the gentle

286 Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and Li Yue

but persistent warning from some of the ‘wiser folks’ that culture is not asimple and easy product to sell, the cross-cultural communication enter-prise has successfully created a string of one-liners, such as ‘individual-ism’ versus ‘collectivism’, and ‘low-context’ culture versus ‘high-context’culture. The market is riddled with ‘Internet-for-those-with-better-things-to-do’-style guides on how to communicate more successfully with theChinese, the Japanese, or the Koreans. More often than not, these guidesare written by business-minded academics who have spent a year or two ina ‘foreign’ culture and have actually spoken to one or two Chinese, Japa-nese, or Koreans. They use a simple logic: China (or Japan or Korea) is acollective culture; people from collective cultures communicate indirectly;Jiang is from China; he communicates indirectly.

There is no doubt that the way we communicate is influenced by theculture in which we are brought up. The difficulty, however, is that culturehas been viewed as including everything that is human made. Thosewhose academic and personal lives have thrived with the cross-culturalcommunication enterprise have rarely bothered to give a clear, compre-hensible – let alone one-liner – definition of what they mean by ‘culture’.Bond (1991: 38) describes it as the ‘ “ghost in the machine”, trotted out bythe social scientist to jump the hurdles of the behavior differences he orshe is trying to explain’. To complicate the situation further, Edward Hall,whose thinking and research on different cultures in the world have en-riched our knowledge of ‘other’ peoples as well as ourselves, suggestedthat ‘culture is communication and communication is culture’ (1959: 169;original emphasis). This, in our view, poses a tremendous methodologicalchallenge as to how we can study cultural differences in communication.

In this paper, we see culture as a meaning system, sharing a broad de-sign and deeper principles and varying between individuals in itsspecificities (e.g., Hall 1959, 1966; Geertz 1973; Gudykunst 1998). As ameaning system, culture is learned through social interaction and notbiologically transmitted; it depends on environment and not heredity;therefore it is distinctive from race. Its ‘sharedness’ means that it is inter-nally consistent and not random. While no individual knows all aspects ofa culture, people are generally aware of the key notions and concepts intheir own cultural environment. These key notions and concepts are thebeliefs and values people hold as members of a particular culture, and theyinform and sustain particular norms of interaction and interpretation,which in turn are reflected in the communicative behaviors of individuals(Li Wei 1996). Our aim in this paper is two-fold: we focus on one of thekey concepts in the Chinese culture, namely, harmony, and demonstratehow Chinese speakers endeavor to achieve interpersonal harmony in face-to-face interaction. In the meantime, we wish to address a methodologicalissue and examine how textual coherence is achieved in conversational

Interpersonal harmony and textual coherence in Chinese business interaction 287

interaction involving several speakers with differing interests andobjectives. We shall argue that the two aspects, interpersonal harmony andtextual coherence, are closely interrelated in conversations amongst theChinese.

The paper is based on a larger study which aims to investigate the dis-course strategies by Chinese businessmen when they are interacting inChinese with other native Chinese speakers and in English with English-speaking business counterparts, and to explain how and why their stylemay be different from, say, that of the British businessmen. The study usesa combination of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Ethnography of Com-munication (EC). Transcripts of tape-recorded conversations among agroup of Mandarin-speaking Chinese businessmen from mainland Chinaand between them and their English-speaking business counterparts fromBritain are the main source of data, supplemented by ethnographic obser-vations and interviews. In the present paper, we discuss only one sequenceof interaction during the closing stage of a business negotiation amongstfour native Mandarin Chinese speakers in their own language.

The structure of the paper is as follows: we begin with a discussion ofthe key Chinese cultural concept of harmony, moving on to its role in thestudy of pragmatics. We then discuss the database and analytic frameworkof the present study. A detailed Conversation Analysis of a sequence takenfrom the closing stage of a business negotiation between four Chinesebusiness colleagues is then presented. The discussion of the analysis isrelated to both the concept of harmony and methodological issues of ana-lyzing textual coherence in conversational interaction. Implications forcross-cultural business communication are also discussed. The paper con-cludes with a brief summary of the findings and pointers for further re-search.

Harmony as a key Chinese cultural concept

The Chinese word for harmony is he. There is some controversy regardingthe etymology of he, partly due to the fact that two different written repre-sentations were used, sometimes interchangeably, in ancient texts. Onerepresentation was:

The component character on the lefthand side referred to an ancientChinese musical instrument, similar to the flute, particularly often used incelebratory events. The component character on the right was a phoneticradical, indicating the pronunciation of the combined character, but whenused on its own it referred to ‘standing grain’ especially rice. One sugges-tion in Chinese philology is that this was the original, full written charac-


ter for he, which was later simplified into , which was turned into 和 bychanging the places of the two components. However, the simpler repre-sentation appeared as early in ancient Chinese texts as the more complexrepresentation and was much more frequently used. The component char-acter , originally on the left hand side (in accordance with a particularconstructional pattern of many Chinese characters in which the semanticradical appears on the left and the phonetic radical on the right) and laterchanged to the right, refers to ‘mouth’. Whatever etymological stance theymay take, most Chinese philologists agree that he means ‘making harmo-nious sounds’, either through musical instruments or verbally. The latterhas a specific literary reference, i.e., composing poetry which has its own,very strict rhyming rules. In Modern Standard Chinese (MSC), he is mostoften used in disyllabic words and phrases such as he’ai (‘amiable’),hehao (‘reconciliation'), heju (‘drawn game’), hemu (‘concord’), heping(‘peace’), heqi (‘friendly and polite’), and hexie (‘harmonious’).

But how is the harmonious sound made? In other words, how can oneachieve he? As with many other Chinese cultural beliefs and values, onehas to go back to the teaching of Confucius. According to Lunyu, (TheAnalects of Confucius), he is the most precious virtue of all and the reasonfor human beings to practise politeness. In Liji (Record of Ritual), a ven-erated text which was reputedly edited by Confucius himself, he means ‘tomeasure what one says and practise the doctrine of the mean each timeone utters’. And in Zhouli (The Rites of Zhou Dynasty), he is achieved by‘echoing others’ and ‘saying the appropriate amount for the purpose andoccasion’. Thus, he is explicitly linked with one’s language behavior, andis as much about what one says as about how one says it.

There were important historical reasons for the emphasis on he in theChinese culture. The Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770–256 BC), a period dur-ing which Confucius (551–479 BC) lived, was marred by social unrest andmilitary conflict right across the nation. Instead of advocating social orderwhich could only be imposed through violent means, Confucius and hisfollowers urged people to accept social hierarchy as a basic condition ofeveryday life and to work together towards the broader, common good.What Confucius promoted was harmony and not agreement, concordanceand not conformity, and sharedness and not sameness. Indeed, Confuciushimself highlighted the difference between he (‘harmony’) and tong(‘agreement’) when he said, ‘Gentlemen live in harmony rather thanagreement; petty men live in agreement but not harmony (Junzi he er butong, xiaoren tong er bu he)’. Hall and Ames (1987: 166) describedharmony as ‘attuning’ and agreement as ‘tuning’: ‘“Attuning” is thecombining and blending of two or more ingredients in a harmoniouswhole with benefit and enhancement that maximizes the possibilities of all


without sacrificing their separate and particular identities. “Tuning” isfinding agreement by bringing one ingredient into conformity andconcurrence with an existing standard such that one ingredient is enhancedpossibly at the expense of others’. As Young (1994: 45) comments, ‘Theactive pursuit of harmony ultimately aims towards a unity of differences, asynthesis of divergences, a confluence of contrast. It is an attempt toengross all while offending none. It is a unity in diversity that is bothdynamic and complex, one that works by way of mutual accommodationand adjustment’.

Harmony in pragmatics

One of the key concepts in the study of pragmatics is ‘co-operation’,which, according to Grice (e.g., 1981), provides the mechanism wherebyspeakers understand each other in conversational interaction. From a so-ciological perspective, co-operation can be defined as ‘acting together in aco-ordinated way at work, leisure or in social relationships, in the pursuitof shared goals, the enjoyment of the joint activity, or simply furtheringthe relationship’ (Argyle 1991: 15). This seems to concur with the notionof harmony we have discussed above.

Grice’s notion of ‘co-operation’ is defined with specific reference toconversational interaction. He proposed four maxims – the maxims ofQuantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner – which are observed in co-operative interactional behavior. It is assumed that conversationparticipants will normally make their contribution as informative as isrequired, no more and no less; they will say only what they believe to betrue, and what they say will be directly relevant to the topic of the con-versation; they will avoid obscurity and ambiguity; they will make theircontribution in an orderly fashion. A detailed discussion of Grice’s co-operative principle and the associated maxims is beyond the scope of thispaper. Thomas (1995: 87ff) offers a critique of Grice’s theory. What weare concerned with here is the cultural-specificity of co-operative be-havior.

In a study which contrasts the so-called co-operative interactional be-havior in ‘Anglo’, Polish, and Japanese cultures, Wierzbicka (1991) sug-gests that the following dimensions are important in formulating what shecalls ‘the cultural script’ for conversational participants:– a relationship between I and YOU– a tendency either TO SAY or NOT TO SAY THINGS– an evaluation of affect (FEEL GOOD/BAD ABOUT THIS)

Using introspective as well as interactional data, Wierzbicka arguesthat members of different cultures operationalize these dimensions of the


script in interactional behavior through the use of various discourse strate-gies, in particular the relatively direct versus indirect speech acts. Culturescloser to the ‘I/TO SAY/FEEL GOOD’ end of the continuum promotedirect speech acts, while cultures closer to the ‘YOU/NOT TO SAY/FEELBAD’ extreme give rise to the more indirect speech acts.

In a similar vein, Ting-Toomey (1988, 1993) links co-operation withpoliteness, an interactional strategy whereby speakers achieve a variety ofgoals, such as promoting or maintaining harmonious interpersonal rela-tions. Using the politeness theory developed by Brown and Levinson(1987), Ting-Toomey (1988) proposed three other dimensions which areat the center of interest when investigating co-operative behavior in cul-tural contexts:1. Face ConcernOrientation: is facework self-directed/other directed?2. Face NeedIs there a stronger need for autonomy or for association?3. ModeConsequence for action: directness (say/not say), affect (positive/negative), judgement of behavior (feel good/bad).At the interactional level, conversation is felt to be harmonious when allparticipants try and co-operate by the use of certain communicative strate-gies in satisfying their own face wants as well as those of their co-partici-pants.

It should be pointed out that while ‘co-operation’ and ‘harmony’ areoften used interchangeably in studies of cross-cultural pragmatics, the twoconcepts are nevertheless different in one important aspect, that is,personal goals. Co-operation is fundamentally an individualistic notion, inwhich everyone has his/her own rather different and often conflictinggoals; co-operation is achieved by competition among the personal goalswhich results in one of the parties giving up, or at least suspending, his/herown goal in favor of others. In harmony, on the other hand, each and everygoal of the individual involved in the interaction is achieved to someextent but seldom to the full and all parties try their best to find the com-mon ground or ‘the balance point’. Thus, co-operation is a ‘winner-and-loser’ game whereas in harmony everyone is happy.

The data

The database for the present study comes from a business negotiationamongst a group of Chinese businessmen. Business negotiation as a com-municative event poses a pragmatic dilemma to the negotiating parties, asit involves co-operation as well as competition. It is more often than notthat the different parties start off with rather different interests and objec-


tives; negotiation is a process in which they try to reach an agreement or acompromise in mutual dependence. In intracultural business negotiations,it might seem relatively obvious what the objectives of different partiesare, what can and needs to be negotiated, and what the best negotiatingtact would be. In other words, all the negotiating parties share the same ora similar ‘script’ for the act of negotiating. In cross-cultural business ne-gotiations, on the other hand, the different parties may have rather differ-ent, even conflicting, ‘scripts’ and, as a result, act rather differently andinterpret each other’s acts in rather different ways.

As a first step towards an understanding of how people from differentcultures deal with the pragmatic dilemma of co-operation and conflict inbusiness negotiations, we examine in this paper the ways in which nativespeakers of Mandarin Chinese conduct business negotiations in their ownlanguage with their own nationals. The sequence of conversation we ana-lyze here involves four native Mandarin speakers, one of whom was awoman (A) and three were men (B, C, D), all in their forties. A and Cwere from the same plastic shopping bag producer, A being a seniormember of the marketing department and C the head of production. Theywere trying to market the shopping bags to supermarkets. B was the man-ager of a large, new supermarket in Beijing and the most senior participantof the present negotiation both in terms of age and status. D was an as-sistant of B’s. A and C had met B and D respectively and separately be-fore, but it was the first time the four had met together. The conversationtook place in 1993 in B’s office. B and C were sitting next to each otheron a settee at one corner of the room, while A and D were sitting on sepa-rate sofas. The participants agreed to be tape-recorded during the discus-sion and were told that the purpose of the recording was to help a friend ofours with a linguistics assignment at college. A small microphone wasplaced on a long coffee table right in front of the participants, on whichsome business documents were also laid out. The recording was made inour absence.

Analytic framework

The analytic framework we use in the present study is that of ConversationAnalysis (CA). CA’s theoretical and methodological contributions to thestudy of intercultural communication have been highlighted by Gumperz(1982) and more recently by Bremer et al. (1996) (see also Zhu, Li, andQian 2000, for an example of the application of CA to the analysis of Chi-nese cultural communication). In very general terms, CA aims to providean account of the mechanisms used by ordinary members of society toaccomplish everyday and institutional life through fine-grained analysis oftalk and non-verbal communication. Conversation analysts argue that the


speaker’s ‘responsive treatment’ of the ‘prior turns’ at talk provides thebest evidence of his/her interpretative process, practical reasoning, andconclusion (Schegloff 1984); therefore the ‘causes and sources’ of under-standing, non-understanding, and misunderstanding can all be traced by afine-grained, turn-by-turn analysis of conversation.

At a methodological level, CA is often contrasted with Speech ActTheory (see, e.g., Levinson 1983). The latter focuses on the mapping be-tween form and function of utterances, i.e., the act accompanied by thewords uttered, and uses ‘topic’ as a basic unit of analysis of conversationalinteraction. CA, on the other hand, sees the notion of ‘topic’ as inherentlyproblematic, because of the indeterminacy of ‘what the topic is’ even in asingle sentence, let alone across several sentences or utterances. But moreimportantly, as Schegloff (1990) argues, ‘focusing on “the topic” of someunit of talk risks the danger of not addressing analysis to what participantsin real worldly interaction are doing to or with one another with their talk[exactly the point Speech Act Theory aimed to address – our comments],with their talk-about-something, or with particular parts of it; that is, alltalk is then treated as talk-about, not as talk-that-does, a vulnerability es-pecially of academic analysis’.

Schegloff suggests that ‘sequence’ may be a better candidate type ofunit for the analysis of conversational interaction, because the structure ofsequences in talk-in-interaction is a source of coherence in its own right.Disparate topics can occur coherently within the framework of a single,expanded sequence and achieve coherence by being framed by it. Anutterance that appears to be topically coherent with preceding talk never-theless can appear incoherent if it is structurally anomalous within thesequence it is part of. And an utterance with no obvious surface ties toeither its immediate topical context or to the sequential origins to which itis responsive is nonetheless accessible to understanding by the partici-pants, who are oriented to the pending business of the as-yet opensequence’ (Schegloff 1990: 72). In our present analysis, we use CA termi-nology and transcription conventions and, following Schegloff’s sugges-tions, focus our attention on how conversation participants use their talk toachieve a coherent sequential organization in a real-life interaction.

Analysis

The sequence we examine is taken from the last five minutes of the meet-ing (A full transcript of the sequence is given in the Appendix, togetherwith a list of transcription conventions). A and C have presented theproduct (plastic shopping bags) to B and D and they have discussed thedesign, the price, the volume of production, the supply rate, and other de-


tails. Usually by this stage, the negotiating parties would start to sum upthe main points and agree on a deal. We were quite astonished to see,however, that unlike most business meetings we were familiar with inBritain, the participants did not go through the key points of the discussionand summarize them.

The sequence begins with A’s utterance Na nin kan (.) na zanmenzenma zhe (‘What do you think we should do then?’), which seems to bean invitation to sum up the discussion. It also sets up an ‘adjacency pair’(Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Notice A not only uses the polite form of nin(‘you’) to identify B as the next turn speaker, but also the inclusive pluralfirst person pronoun zanmen (‘we’). With this particular choice of pro-nouns, she simultaneously claims her membership within the group andinvolves B in the interaction. B is now obliged to respond to her in the fol-lowing turn. However, B’s utterance, which overlaps with the second halfof A’s utterance, does not respond to A’s invitation directly. In fact, the ut-terance which does appears at line 141 towards the very end of the presentsequence, and it is produced by A who has asked the original question. InCA terms, everything that is produced between A’s first question-utterance and her eventual reply in line 141 is ‘insertion sequence’. Ourinterest here is in how the participants manage to drift away from the firstpart of an adjacency pair for so long and get around to it in the end, and atthe same time how B and the other participants manage to carry on withthe conversation without responding to A directly, and then make Aproduce the second pair part herself.

Notice, first of all, that B’s utterance in line 2 took the form of what isknown as a ‘pre-sequence’ in CA, that is, it sets up a conditional relevancewhich pre-figures an upcoming action. In doing so, B gains ‘ratified ac-cess’ (Levinson 1983: 349) to an extended turn-at-talk. B also uses thefirst person singular wo (‘I/me’) in contrast to A’s inclusive plural zanmen(‘we/us’) and the ordinary ni (‘you/tu’) rather than the polite form nin(‘you/vous’). As a result, B has taken over as the main speaking-rightholder (Wilson 1989). Indeed, B uses similar strategies several timesthroughout the sequence and acts as the leading speaker in the conversa-tion. We can pick out B’s utterances at lines 6, 19, 22, 55, 71, 91,114, andfinally 138 and 140, which seem to provide the main structure of the story-line. This story-line centers around a different supermarket and its man-ager. Exactly what they have to do with the current discussion of the pro-duct A and C are trying to sell to B and D (i.e., the ‘topic’ of the conver-sational exchange) is not immediately apparent. What is clear though isthat all four speakers become deeply involved in the collaborative con-struction of the story-line. When new information is given, it is elaboratedupon by all the participants.

For example, B first introduces the manager of the supermarket in line


6 by telling the others that he went to see him the other day, thus indicat-ing that he knows the man in person. But before he has a chance to explainwhy he went to see the man and what that visit has to do with the currenttopic of discussion, C invites B to confirm that man’s name, implying thathe (C) too knows the person. B gives the confirmation in line 17, but as ifto compete with C as to how well he knows the man, B elaborates on theinformation about this supermarket manager in line 19 by saying that theyhave known each other from the days when they (B and the manager inquestion) were both working for a different retail business. When C saysto A (line 21) that she might not know the man they are talking about, Bimmediately offers to introduce her to him (line 22). D, a colleague of B’s,reinforces B’s claim that he knows the manager in question well in line 23,which gives B an opportunity to expand further on how they have got toknow each other in subsequent turns.

We can see that the story-line moves gradually from ‘how well Bknows the supermarket manager’ to ‘how clever the man is’ (from line61), then to a new queuing system introduced by that manager in hissupermarket (from line 71). B then repeats his promise to introduce A andC to the man (from line 91), before finally returning to A’s original ques-tion (line 138). Although we can identify certain topic-oriented ‘episodes’within the sequence, the move from one episode to another is not ‘visible’,i.e., there are no clear-cut boundaries between the episodes. This is partlydue to a large number of contiguous utterances, where there is no intervalbetween adjacent pair parts, the second being latched immediately to thefirst without overlapping it (e.g., lines 4–5, 15–16, 21–22, 31–33–33,34–35, 42–43, 47–48, 55–56, 59–60, 64–65, 68–69. 73–74–75–76, 79–80,88–89, 94–95, 96–97, 100–101, 104–105, 108–109, 116–117, 120–121,122–123, 127–128, 129–130, 135–136, 141–142, 145–146), as well assimultaneous utterances (e.g., lines 8–9, 17–18, 38–39, 44–45, 57–58,67–68, 82–83, 86–87, 124–125). We also see frequent overlaps (e.g., lines1–2, 6–7, 13–14, 22–23, 24–25, 27–28, 28–29, 40–41, 50–51, 69–70,73–74, 84–85, 91–92, 93–94, 98–99, 101–102, 103–104, 105–106,109–110, 114–115, 118–119, 131–132, 138–139, 140–141).

Furthermore, there are ample examples of repetition. It is sometimesdone by the same speaker, either in the same speaking turn or in differentturns (e.g., lines 2 and 6 by B, 11 and 14 by C, 19 and 24 by B, 46 and 48by B, 71 and 79 by B, 108 and 110 by C, 112 and 118 by B, 137 and 139by A, and 143 and 145 by D); other times by two or three speakers re-peating each other’s words and phrases (e.g., lines 11, 13 and 14 by C andB, 23 and 32 by D and B, 35, 36, 37 and 39 by B, A and C, 43, 44 and 45by A, B and C, 53 and 58 by B and A, 73, 75, 76, 78 by B and C, 84, 86and 87 by B and A, 93 and 94 by B and C, 99, 101, 102, 104 and 107 byall four participants, 120 and 121 by B and A, 129, 131 and 133 by B and


A, 128 and 135 by C and D). The latter often occurs after several turn-ex-changes have taken place, thus linking the later parts of the conversationwith earlier parts and making the sequence structurally coherent as awhole, even though the speakers were talking about quite different thingsat the time.

Another noticeable feature in the present sequence of conversation isthe frequent use of the discourse marker shi-bu-shi (literally ‘BE + not +BE’) (e.g., lines 9, 20, 27, 38, 42, 69). Although it looks on the surfacevery similar to the English tag question ‘isn’t it?’, and indeed is oftentranslated as such, its chief function seems to be describable only ininteractional terms. It is used simultaneously to mark continuing attentionto and interest in the current speaker’s contribution and as a repair initiatorfor the current speaker to reiterate, reinforce or elaborate on what has beensaid. It helps to maintain the speakership of the current turn holder,although potentially (i.e., if the current speaker fails to repair, reinforce orelaborate as expected) it also prepares the ground for speaker transition.Similarly, there are other discourse markers, such as dui/duidui (‘right’),shi/jiushi (‘yes/that’s right’), haohao (‘good’), and the non-lexicalizedai/ei. They are mainly used as recipient tokens (Clark and Schaefer 1987)to indicate continuing acceptance of the current speakership.

The sequence as a whole is an interlocking of embedded episodes, thetransition between which is frequent and seamless. Potential problems areignored or smoothed over very quickly; for instance, B in line 126 says wobu gan qu ta nar (‘I dare not go to his place’). This seems to be somewhat‘out of place’. Apparently nobody understands the meaning and intentionof this particular utterance, as suggested by the 1.2-second silence. But Aand C promptly and simultaneously react with response tokens: the se-mantically empty ei and referentially unspecified or ambiguous jiu shi(‘that’s right’). B then does a self-initiated self-repair in line 129. Nospecific attention is given to the problem, and the conversation carries onas normal in subsequent turns.

The interlocking of the embedded episodes and the rapid and smoothtransition between them give an overall friendly and warm feeling aboutthe sequence as a whole, which is very much the same in nature to the‘high involvement style’ Tannen (1984) has described in her studies ofconversations among friends in the East European Jewish community inNew York City. Further evidence of the friendly involvement can be seenin the collaborative building of sentences in lines 33–34, 48–50–51,73–75, 86–87, 102–104, 131–132–133, in which various participants an-ticipate what the others want to say and ‘speak on their behalf’.


Speaker roles and rights

Throughout the sequence, we can see that B plays a leading part, while Cand D seem to be playing the supporting role. C and D also seem to act asthe ‘go-between’ for A and B (e.g., line 21 by C). We have mentioned ear-lier that B is the most senior member in the present discussion. It is per-haps natural for him to adopt the leading role. Yet B does not give an im-pression of being overtly dominating. In fact, he is especially skilful inleading the story-line of the sequence while giving all the participants achance to contribute their share. His repeated use of insertion sequencesallows him to delay his response to the others and to redirect the questionsto them later. The eventual response by A in line 141 to her own initialquestion in line 1 is a result of an extended insertion sequence initiated byB.

One of the fundamental principles of Conversation Analysis is that ex-tra-linguistic factors such as age, gender, and social status are not simply‘brought in’ by the participants to determine what they do in a conversa-tional interaction. In fact, the speakers share basically equal rights to speakin spontaneous interaction, which gives conversation its defining characterfrom, say, a board meeting or a lecture. Nevertheless participants manipu-late their rights through skilled use of conversational strategies, in order to‘bring about’ their perceived and projected roles. The task of the conversa-tion analyst, therefore, is to demonstrate ‘procedural consequentiality’(Schegloff 1992), i.e., how the speakers’ roles and status were ‘broughtabout’ by the sequential organization of conversational structures (see alsoLi Wei 1998).

In the present sequence, B’s use of repetition, reiteration, and rein-forcement of what he has said in previous turns ‘brought about’ hisseniority and showed off his social connections, while C and D played asupporting role by providing confirmation and additional information oropportunities for B to elaborate and expand. In the meantime, A acted asthe spokeswoman for C, a role suitable for the present negotiation as wellas her relationship with C. In terms of turn distribution, A occupies 40turns, B 56, and C and D 27 and 23 respectively.

Discussion

One of our initial questions when analyzing the present sequence was afairly straightforward, practical one: was the negotiation successful?Looking at the sequence as non-participant analysts, we were not at allsure what exactly had been agreed between the two parties and how theywould proceed from there. Nevertheless, when we interviewed the four


participants individually following the meeting, all of them said that thediscussion was ‘highly successful’. All of them remarked upon the friend-liness and warmth the other party had shown, which they took as a goodindicator for success. A and C were very confident that B’s supermarketwould contract their company to produce large quantities of plastic shop-ping bags. B and D confirmed they would indeed do so. When asked whythey did not raise the issue of ordering specifically in the discussion, theysaid that there was no need to do so. They pointed out that the aim of themeeting was to establish and enhance harmony between the two negotiat-ing parties. This, they felt, was much more important than following afixed agenda, going through each item, and agreeing on a written contract.C said, ‘As long as our relationship is good, we can do any business’.

Graham and Herberger (1983) identified four stages of business nego-tiation which they argued had varying importance in different cultures.The four stages are:

Stage 1: Non-task relationship creation;Stage 2: Task-related exchange of information;Stage 3: Persuasion;Stage 4: Concession and agreement.

Graham and Herberger (1983) suggest that in cross-cultural businessnegotiations, Anglo-Americans are over-eager to get to what they perceiveto be the heart of the matter, and rush through to Stage 3, whereas the EastAsians emphasize rapport building and understanding of mutual advantagein doing a deal, and take much longer on the first two stages. Similarly,Mead (1993) suggests that in the so-called low-context cultures (such asGermany and Switzerland) initial relationship creation may be passed overfairly rapidly, perhaps assuming greater significance when the deal hasbeen signed. In high-context cultures (e.g., Arab and East Asian), non-taskrelationship creation is a very important function throughout the process;that is, the decision whether or not to sign a deal may depend very largelyon the capacity of the counterparts to project sympathetic and reliablepersonalities.

These apparent differences in negotiation strategies are, to a large ex-tent, due to different ideologies. Scollon and Scollon (1995) describesbusiness negotiations in the Anglo-American culture as part of the so-called ‘corporate discourse systems’. Corporate discourse systems aredriven by the Utilitarian ideology: they are goal-oriented, focused, anti-rhetorical, and deductive. They contrast sharply with the East Asian dis-course systems, which are influenced by the Confucian ideology of facerelationships and interpersonal harmony. We have suggested earlier in thispaper that the main objective of communication under Confucian ideologyis to initiate, develop, and maintain social relationships. There is a strongemphasis on the kind of discourse strategy that promotes such relation-


ships. Other researchers have suggested, for instance, that it is very im-portant for the Chinese (and for the East Asians generally) to engage insmall talk and to communicate personalized information, especially in-formation that would help place each person in the proper context, alongwith discussions of the business matter (Young 1994). Conversational in-teraction becomes an infinite and on-going process of relationship build-ing.

Viewed from this particular perspective, communication has a long-term goal, and is not narrowly focused on the task at hand. For this reasonperhaps, the present sequence, taken from the end of a business negotia-tion, does not contain a summary of the main points, nor any specificmention of a contract. It has, instead, created a co-operative and har-monious relationship between the two negotiating parties, on which afuture business partnership can be built. The sequence as a whole resem-bles a casual conversation among friends, rather than a business negotia-tion. Through the use of a variety of collaborative discourse features, suchas the inclusive first person plural pronoun zanmen (‘we/us’), contiguousand simultaneous utterances, overlap, repetition, self-repair, and the dis-course markers of shi-bu-shi, duidui, haohao, etc., the four participantsshow a high degree of personal involvement, which in turn creates a har-monious atmosphere for the interaction.

Conversational coherence

In the present analysis, we have followed the procedures of ConversationAnalysis, which we believe has the advantage of revealing in fine detailsthe strategies whereby participants, especially in multi-party interaction,achieve textual coherence out of apparently unrelated and often incom-plete utterances. An important feature of ordinary conversation is its im-provised nature. Yet speakers can normally get through a conversationwithout too much trouble. The notion of ‘topic’ has frequently been in-voked as a resource for giving an account of how conversational coher-ence is achieved. However, as we have mentioned earlier in the paper,conversation analysts have criticized the traditional reliance on the notionof ‘topic’ as an analytic tool as being vulnerable to a number of problems.For instance, Schegloff and Sacks (1973) point out that the common prac-tice of topic shading (or step-by-step transition, Sacks 1987 [1973]; Jeffer-son 1984), by which participants gradually shift the topical thrust of thetalk, renders any ‘topic’ of a segment of the talk equivocal even if the‘topics’ of its several component sentences or clauses, each taken in isola-tion, could be rendered unequivocally. Accordingly, while it may beanalytically feasible to characterize some talk as ‘on-topic’ with some


other (ordinarily immediately prior) talk (e.g., Dorval and Echerman1984), it is quite a different matter to characterize discretely what thattopic is, or to develop the notion of ‘a topic’ as an organizing unit for talkin interaction.

The sequence we have presented in this paper is a good example of thekind of difficulties that are associated with the notion of ‘topic’ in analyz-ing conversational data. While it may be possible to identify a ‘story-line’of the sequence, it is not at all easy to say what exactly the topic of thesequence is. In fact, the focus of the story-line changes with every movethe participants make. Nevertheless, the sequence as a whole seems co-herent, and despite the fact that A’s initial question was not responded toimmediately or directly, the participants did eventually return to it andbrought the sequence to a seemingly satisfactory closure. The CA proce-dures which we have followed in the analysis have helped to reveal whatthe participants did to or with one another with their talk in achieving thiscoherence, which in turn contributes to the interpersonal harmony the par-ticipants so desired.

Conclusion

The study on which this paper is based draws attention to the key Chinesecultural concept of harmony. Harmony is seen both as an ideal for societyand social relationships and as the means through which people come to-gether and attain their goals. The Chinese tend to value acts which gener-ate greater harmony among different participants with diverse interests.We have shown, through a conversation analysis of a sequence of a busi-ness negotiation among four native Mandarin Chinese speakers, the kindsof discourse strategies they would employ to achieve interpersonal har-mony. In particular, we have demonstrated the various ploys conversationparticipants use to achieve textual coherence amid apparently disorderlytalk. The two aspects, interpersonal harmony and textual coherence, areclosely interrelated to each other. While the overall goal of communica-tion among Chinese speakers remains as always the development of har-monious personal relationships, the immediate objective in a given inter-actional context is to achieve conversational coherence. Without textuallevel coherence, one cannot achieve interpersonal level harmony.

It has to be said that there is nothing inherently Chinese or Anglo-American about any of the linguistic features revealed in the present se-quence. Linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and communicationtheorists have tried for many years in vain to find uniquely Asian oruniquely European ways of speaking. They all agree, however, that lan-guage has many functions. In particular, language can simultaneously


have both an information function and a relationship function. That is tosay, when we communicate with others, we not only convey a certainamount of information but also indicate our current expectations about therelationship between or among participants. Interpersonal relationshipscannot be built without language, whatever form the language may take.Nevertheless, different cultures are often different from each other in howmuch importance they attach to one function of language over the other.Scollon and Scollon (1995), for example, suggest that the Confuciancultural tradition places a very high value on the communication of subtleaspects of feeling and relationship and a much lower value on the com-munication of information, whereas the Anglo-American cultural traditionplaces a higher premium on clear exposition of facts. International busi-ness culture, especially since the introduction of nearly instant globalcomputer communications, seems to be more congenial to the informa-tion-oriented cultural tradition. We hope to have demonstrated in thispaper that as far as the Chinese are concerned, business agreement repre-sents not just a mutually beneficial contract, but rather the negotiatedachievement of the greater cultural ideals of interpersonal co-operationand harmony. While we do not suppose that the Chinese would let thepossibility of a good business deal slip by just for the sake of a harmoni-ous feeling, we do believe that the cultural differences in assumptionsabout the functions of language and communication will have a significanteffect on intercultural discourse involving people from different traditions.

University of Newcastle upon TyneUniversity of Nottingham

Appendix

Transcription Conventions:[ onset of overlap= latching or contiguous turns, where there is no gap between two

utterances(0.0) elapsed time in silence by tenth of secondsword some form of stress, via pitch and/or amplitude:: prolongation of the immediately prior sound; multiple colons

indicate a more prolonged sound↑↓ shifts into higher or lower pitch in the utterance-part immediately

following the arrow.hhh in-breath


Transcript of Data (in Pingyin):

001 A: na nin kan (.) na zanmen zenme zheCON you see CON we how work

002 B: e wo gen ni ↓shuo a PA I PREP. you say PA

003 A: mm004 B: shi zheyang=

BE such005 A: =eh006 B: ni kan a (.hh) neitian wo dao SS {Name} qu zhao tamen

you see PA that day I arrive go find their007 A: mm

jinglimanager

008 B: ei:009 A: shibushi

BE not BE010 B: houlai le

later 011 C: lao S {Name} shi ba

old BE PA012 A: (0.7) mm013 B: ↓dui lao S {Name} (.) jiu shi

right old ADV BE014 C: oh lao S {Name} duile lao S

old right old{Name}

015 A: ah=016 D: =jiushi neige cong SS {Name} diao guoqu de nage

it’s that one from move over PA that one017 B: duidui

right018 A: oh019 B: wo ne ↑shenme (.) wo zai SS {Name} de shihou jiu

I CON what I at PA time ADVrende ta::know him

020 D: shibu shi BE not BE

021 C: (To A) ni keneng bu rende= you maybe not know

022 B: =na mei wenti (.) wo huitou dai ni qu CON no problem I later take you go

023 D: S {B’s Name} jingli gen ta ting manager PREP him quite

shou de familiar PA

024 B: na shi a: women zai nei nar de shihou (.)that BE we at that where PA time

025 A: ah026 B: zai yikuar guo

at together PERF


027 C: ↓shibu shi a BE not BE PA

028 D: o neige shihou nin jiu rendethat time you ADV know

029 A: oh030 B: duiya:: nei shihou women zai yikuar laizhe

right that time we at together PERF031 A: lao tongshi le na nin shi=

old colleague PA CON you BE032 B: = hai shou ↑ji la=

familiar extremely PA033 C: =houlai ta dao nar le nei shenme

later he go where PA that what034 D: SSSS {Name}=035 B: =bububu! na shi you houlai le

no no no that BE again later PA036 A: (laugh) you houlai le

again later PA037 B: ei you houlai le

again later PA038 D: shibushi

BE not BE039 C: you houlai le a

again later PA040 B: ta xian shi zai nei nar (.) zai SS {Name} neige SS {Name}

he first BE at that where at that041 C oh042 D: shibushi=

isn’t it043 A: =na xianzai yijing meila shi ba

CON now already have no BE PA044 B: ei za ;o meila

long ago have no045 C: meila meila

have no have no046 B: ↓chai le

pull down PERF047 A: a na nin nei shihou jiu renshi=

CON you that time ADV know048 B: =dui ya::: ta chai le yiqian jiu diao chuqu le

right he pull down PA before ADV move out PERF049 D: oh::050 C: houlai jiu zai SS {Name} shi ba

later ADV at BE PA051 B: jiu zai SS {Name} la duiya duiya

ADV at PERF right right052 A: oh053 B: houlai women you yiduar ↓tai yuan le

later we have while too far PA054 D: mm055 B: you shihou dada dianhua=

have time make call telephone056 D: =mm


057 B: ta gei wo wo gei ta he PREP me I PREP him

058 A: tai yuan shi a too far BE PA

059 B: houlai jian de buduo=later see PERF not much

060 C: =jiu shi ADV BE

061 B: ta zheige ren ting congming dehe this person quite clever PA

062 A: oh063 D: mm064 B: ting neng gan=

quite able work065 A: =shi ba

BE PA066 B: ei ting you zhuyi de

quite have idea PA067 C: dui ba

right PA068 B: suoyi wo shuo ne=

thererefore I say PA069 A: =shibu shi

BE not BE070 D: oh:071 B: ni kan neige chou hao guitai?

you see that draw number counter072 A: oh073 B: jiu shi ta nar=

ADV BE he there074 D: mm075 C: =oh jiu shi tamen nar ma=

ADV BE them there PA076 B: =jiu shi ta xian qilai de ma

ADV BE he first up PA PA077 A: oh::078 C: dui jiu shi ta nar

right ADV BE he there079 B: vei chouhaor guitai=

draw number counter080 A: =mm081 D: nei shi zhen bucuo

that BE really not bad082 B: shia shia!

yes yes083 A: mm084 B: ni keyi yibiar mai dongxi yibiar deng ma

you can while buy things while wait PA085 C: ei086 B: yibiar paidui=

while queue087 A: yibiar deng yibiar pai zhe

while wait while queue PA088 D: shi ting hao=

BE quite good


089 C: =guke hao a:: customer good PA

090 A: sheng shi↑jiansave time

091 B: suoyi wo shuo nei tian dai nimentherefore I say when day take you

092 A: ei hao lei good PA

093 B: ni ni gen xiao S {Name} wo dai nimenyou you PREP young I take you

094 C: jiu shi ni gen xiao S ADV BE you PREP young

{Name}=095 A: =dui

right096 B: ni gen wo qu ↑kankan ta qu=

you PREP I go see him go097 A: =ai098 B: kankan tamen nar yaobuyao

see them there want not want099 A: na xing na mei wenti

CON ok CON have no problem100 C: huitou ni gei S{B’s Name} jingli dage dianhua=

later you PREP manager make call telephone101 B: =ei mei wenti

have no problem102 A: na huitou wo gei nin zai dage

CON later I PREP you again make call↑dianhua telephone

103 B: huitou wo kankanlater I see

104 D: dage dianhua jiu xing= make call telephone ADV ok

105 B: =nei shenma there what

106 A: xing ok

107 B: huitou wo xian gei ta dage dianhualater I first PREP he make call telephone

108 C: haohao=good good

109 B: =huitou wo kankan ta shenme shihou you kong later I see he what time have free

110 C: haohao good good

111 A: ↓dui ye kan rejia youmeiyou shi↑jian right also see other have not have time

112 B: ei mei wenti have no problem

113 D: huitou dage dianhualater make call telephone

114 B: suoyi shuo nimen zheige xiangfa a:therefore say you this idea PA

115 C: ei


116 D: jiu shi=ADV BE

117 A: =na nin gen ta shuoshuo CON you PREP he say

118 B: ei mei wenti have no problem

119 C: xingok

120 B: women shou=we familiar

121 A: =nin gen ta shou shi a you PREP he familiar BE PA

122 B: ei women renshi haoduo ↑nian le= we know good many year PA

123 D: =mei wenti have no problem

124 A: na xing CON ok

125 C: haohaogood good

126 B: wo bu gan qu ta narI not dare go he there

127 A: (1.2) ei128 C: jiu shi

ADV BE129 B: qu ↓kankan ta nar=

go see he there130 D: =dui

right131 A: duidui qu kankan ta nar

right right go see he there132 C: kankan kankan

see see133 B: kankan ting hao

see quite good134 A: mm135 D: jiu shi=

ADV BE136 B: =tamen nar bucuo

their there not bad137 A: na xing

CON ok138 B: na (.) zenme ↑zhe

CON how PA139 A: na xing

CON ok140 B: ni kan

you see141 A: na jiu xian zhenme=

CON ADV first such142 B: =haohao

good good143 D: ei zai he diar cha

again drink some tea


144 B: hai youmeiyou=still have not have

145 D: =he diar he diar= drink some drink some

146 C: =ei xing le xing le ok PA ok PA

English Translation:

001 A: what do you think we should do then002 B: let me tell you something003 A: mm004 B: it’s like this005 A: eh006 B: you see I went to see their manager the other day007 A: mm008 B: ei009 A: isn’t it010 B: later011 C: was it old S012 A: (0.7) mm013 B: that’s right, it was old S014 C: old S, that’s right, old S015 A: ah016 D: it’s the one who transferred from SS017 B: yes yes018 A: oh019 B: I got to know him when I was at SS020 D: is that right021 C: (to A) you may not know him022 B: no problem, I’ll take you (to meet him)023 D: manager S knows him quite well024 B: of course, when I was at025 A: ah026 B: (we were) together027 C: is that right028 D: you got to know him then029 A: oh030 B: that’s right, we were together then031 A: you are old colleagues then032 B: (we know each other) extremely well033 C: where (did he) go after that034 D: SSSS035 B: no no no, that’s even later036 A: even later037 B: even later038 D: is that right039 C: even later040 B: he first (worked) at SS041 C: oh042 D: is that right


043 A: it’s no longer there, is it044 B: it disappeared a long time ago045 C: not there (any more) not there (any more)046 B: (it’s been) pulled down047 A: so you knew him then048 B: that’s right, he was transferred before it was pulled down049 D: oh050 C: he was then at SS, wasn’t he051 B: (he was) at SS, that’s right, that’s right052 A: oh053 B: we were for a while too far away (from each other)054 D: mm055 B: sometime (we) made telephone calls056 D: mm057 B: he rang me (and) I rang him058 A: it was too far away, wasn’t it059 B: we didn’t see each other much after that060 C: that’s right061 B: he was quite a clever person062 A: oh063 D: mm064 B: quite capable065 A: is that right066 B: (he) had ideas067 C: is that right068 B: that’s why I say069 A: is that right070 D: oh071 B: you know the counter with the ticket dispenser072 A: oh073 B: it was his place074 D: mm075 C: oh, it was his place076 B: it was him who started it077 A: oh078 C: that’s right, it was his place079 B: the counter with the ticket dispenser080 A: mm081 D: that’s really good082 B: yes yes083 A: mm084 B: you can buy other things while waiting085 C: ei086 B: while you are queuing087 A: you wait while queuing088 D: that’s quite good089 C: it’s good for the customers090 A: (it) saves time091 B: that’s why I say I’ll take you some day092 A: good


093 B: I’ll take you and young S094 C: that’s right, you and young S095 A: right096 B: go and meet him with me097 A: ai098 B: see if they want (any bags) there099 A: that’s fine, no problem100 C: you can give manager S a ring later101 B: no problem102 A: I’ll give you a ring later103 B: I’ll see104 D: a telephone call will do105 B: there106 A: that’s fine107 B: I’ll give him a call first108 C: good good109 B: I’ll see when he is free110 C: good good111 A: yes, (we need to) see if he has time too112 C: no problem113 D: make a call later114 B: that’s why (I) say this idea of yours115 C: ei116 D: that’s right117 A: you have a word with him then118 B: no problem119 C: fine120 B: we know each other well121 A: you know him well, don’t you122 B: we’ve known each other for years123 D: no problem124 A: that’s fine125 C: good good126 B: (?) I dare not go to his place127 A: ei128 C: that’s right129 B: go and see his place130 D: that’s right131 A: right right, go and see his place132 C: (go and) see (go and) see133 B: it’s nice to see it134 A: mm135 D: that’s right136 B: it’s not bad there137 A: that’s fine138 B: so what do you think139 A: that’s fine140 B: you see141 A: in that case, we’ll (leave it) like this142 B: good good


143 D: have some more tea144 B: is there any more145 D: have some more tea146 C: that’s OK, that’s OK

Acknowledgements

The data upon which this paper is based was collected by the third authorwhile working for United Biscuits (UK). We are particularly grateful forthe support and co-operation from her colleagues and from the businesspeople who allowed us access to their meetings. The transcription andmuch of the analysis was done by the second author. Earlier versions ofthe paper were presented by the first author at the 5th International Prag-matics Conference in Mexico City and the 11th Sociolinguistics Sympo-sium at Cardiff, Wales. We are grateful for the constructive commentsfrom the participants of these conferences. We are grateful also to BrigidO’Connor who proofread the manuscript.

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