Managing rapport in lingua franca sales negotiations: A comparison of professional and aspiring negotiators

Abstract

This article presents selective findings from a study that investigated how facework is used to achieve interpersonal goals in intercultural sales negotiations. The article reports on linguistic analyses of what Spencer-Oatey has termed “rapport management” which, in a negotiation context, is aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at building a working relationship [Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000a). Analysing rapport management in intercultural encounters: a linguistic framework. In D. Lynch & A. Pilbeam (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sietar Europa congress 1998: Heritage and progress (pp. 429–437). Bath: LTS Training and Consulting; Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000b). Rapport management: a framework for analysis. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally Speaking: managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 11–46). New York: Cassel Academic]. The analyses were comparative, centring around two corpora of quasi-natural negotiation discourse, produced by professional negotiators and aspiring negotiators (students of international business communication). The negotiators were all lingua franca speakers of English for specific business purposes. I investigated the occurrence of interactional (safe) talk, and of personal pronouns, which I regarded as indicators of the negotiator relationship. Overall, the findings indicate that whereas professionals frequently initiate safe talk throughout their negotiations, aspiring negotiators engage in safe talk sporadically, and only in the initial and final stages of a negotiation. Furthermore, the findings suggest that by underusing institutional ‘we’ and formulating potentially face-threatening discourse from a subjective perspective, aspiring negotiators seem unsuccessful at maintaining professional distance, and thus, at creating a professional identity within the negotiation event.