“I can't remember them ever not doing whatI tell them!”: Negotiating face and power relations in ‘upward’ refusals in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong
-
Stephanie Schnurr
and
Olga Zayts
Abstract
This paper explores how refusals are constructed and negotiated in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong. A particular focus is on the ways in which Hong Kong Chinese subordinates negotiate issues of face and power relations when refusing their expatriate superiors.
Despite abundant research on refusals in a variety of contexts across cultures, there are very few studies of multicultural workplaces. This is particularly surprising considering that refusals have been described as a frequent “ ‘sticking point’ in cross-cultural communication” (Beebe et al. 1990). This paper addresses this gap by drawing on more than 80 hours of authentic audio- and video-recorded spoken workplace discourse and a corpus of emails collected in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong.
Findings of this exploratory study indicate that refusals are complex communicative activities that are carefully negotiated among participants. We argue that in contrast to earlier studies, participants' socio-cultural backgrounds do not appear to be the main determining factor of how issues of face and power relations are negotiated in upward refusals. Rather, a range of other factors, including media of communication, normative ways of interacting in a workplace, the relationship between interlocutors, as well as the content of the refusal, are more relevant for explaining participants’ communicative behavior.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- “I can't remember them ever not doing whatI tell them!”: Negotiating face and power relations in ‘upward’ refusals in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Corpus methods in pragmatics: The case of English and Russian emotions
- What goes unsaid: Expression of complaints and advice about health in Eastern Ecuador
- “I can't remember them ever not doing whatI tell them!”: Negotiating face and power relations in ‘upward’ refusals in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong
- Your kids are so stinkin' cute! :-): Complimenting behavior on Facebook among family and friends
- You get what you put in: Elicited production versus spontaneous verbal interaction in cross-linguistic studies of language use
- A corpus-linguistic study of multiple relative clauses in Chinese
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Contributors to this issue
