Achieving mutual understanding in intercultural project partnerships: Cooperation, self-orientation, and fragility

Abstract

Communication depends on cooperation in at least the following way: In order to be successful, communicative behavior needs to be adjusted to the general world knowledge, abilities, and interests of the hearer, and the hearer's success in figuring out the message and responding to it needs to be informed by assumptions about the communicator's informative intentions, personal goals, and communicative abilities. In other words, interlocutors cooperate by coordinating their actions in order to fulfill their communicative intentions. This minimal assumption about cooperativeness must in one way or another be built into the foundations of any plausible inferential model of human communication. However, the communication process is also influenced to a greater or lesser extent, whether intentionally and consciously or unintentionally and unconsciously, by the participants' orientation toward, or preoccupation with, their own concerns, so their behavior may easily fall short of being as cooperative as is required for achieving successful communication.

In this paper, we consider in some detail a critical incident from a meeting that took place at the beginning of an intercultural project partnership, and we argue that such communication situations are “fragile” in that they can put pressure on the participants to be more self-oriented (i.e., self centered) and, therefore, less cooperative. We explore the reasons for this and propose that affective factors including face play a key role. We end by considering the theoretical implications of our study for future research.