Face and Power in Intercultural Business Communicatin: The Case of a Japanese Company in Australia

Yasuhisa Watanabe, University, My, Michael Haugh
2018
In intra-company intercultural business communication, an accurate exchange of information between co-workers is necessary to efficiently conduct business as a company. The norms of communication to be followed as well as knowledge of work being conducted that is shared by all involved, i.e., common ground (H. H. Clark, 1996), must be fully utilised in order to communicate smoothly between workers who do not share the same first language. Communication strategies, such as repair and
more » ... g, are also used as necessary to achieve transactional goals in an interaction (Spencer-Oatey, 2005). However, at the same time, there is also a need to achieve relational goals in an interaction in order to maintain the interpersonal relationship between interlocutors. This can emerge in an interaction as sensitivity to the face of the interlocutors. Furthermore, being in an intra-company setting, the position, the knowledge of the products and the motivation to interact held by each interlocutor, all of which can be seen as an emergence of power held by each interlocutors (Raven, 1965, 1993), also play a role in shaping an interaction itself through the choice of language, norm of interaction and face being achieved in interaction. This thesis investigates the video-recorded interactions between Australian employees working for a Japanese company in Australia and their Japanese superiors. Conversation analysis in conjunction with ethnographic approach is used to analyse interactions in intra-company business settings. The Rapport Management Framework proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2005) was applied to analyse interactional achievement of face, which takes into account factors such as face needs of and power held by the individuals and attitude of interlocutors towards each other. Common featuers of intercultural communication, namely repair and codeswitching, and their effects on face achievement of interlocutors are also analysed. The analysis has found that face and power are two fundamental and inter-related notions [...]
doi:10.25904/1912/784 fatcat:zby6g6uagvgklotxb4jkb763xi