Culture

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Although every one criticizes Brown and Levinson’s model, every one is still working with their framework. This phenomenon might be accounted for by House (2005), who proposes a model of politeness operating on four levels: 1) a biological, psycho-social level, 2) a philosophical level, 3) a level of culture-specific norms of behavior, and 4) a level of linguistic phenomena. According to this model, all cultures share certain basic politeness principles due to the same human nature, while possibly differ in the surface forms of politeness due to different cultural values and languages. Brown and Levinson’s “universal stance can be upheld if it refers to levels 1 and 2 only” (House, 2005: 18). Relating to directness, some cultures value directness and some indirectness. As such, the claimed universal phenomenon of politeness – the more indirect the strategy, the more polite – does not hold. Despite all these critiques, Brown and Levinson’s theory is a good starting point to investigate politeness. Their weightiness formula will be used in this dissertation to examine how varying levels of directness are used to accomplish business requests.

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appropriate levels of directness to achieve communicative goals in recurrent situations. Neumann (1997: 74) points out that business people are result-oriented, and they use money and time economically. When these attitudes are applied to business communication, they attempt to formulate their messages in ways that will ensure success and efficiency. Business people are also profit-oriented. One of the principal pricing goals is maximizing profits (Kotler & McDougall, 1985). If business people do not make money, there is no point in doing business. Failure to comply with the two norms of international business culture, business practitioners and organizations cannot continue to exist. This should be kept in mind when analyzing business discourse.

International business practitioners are also influenced by their cultures of origin consciously or sub-consciously. An influential theory regarding how cultural differences determine directness and indirectness is proposed by Hall (1990). His concept of high-low context refers to the amount of information surrounding an event. In high-context cultures such as China and Japan, people are closely involved with each other with resultant extensive information networks; thus, meaning is encoded in the context. As such, high degrees of indirectness can be exploited in high context cultures to convey messages, as Geis puts it: the more we know, the less we have to say (1997: 137). In low-context cultures such as Germany, the US and Switzerland, the majority of people are committed to their jobs and accustomed to short-term relationships. Compartmentalized connections always call for detailed information. Accordingly, meaning must be always explicitly expressed verbally (Hall, 1990: 6-29). Most American business textbooks recommend that business writers adopt a straightforward style in business communication, and express their meaning directly when little knowledge is shared (Victor, 1992: 139).

A most comprehensive study of how cultural values influence people’s attitudes in the work place is conducted by Hofstede (1983, 1991), who proposes five dimensions of culture, in which the dimension of individualism-collectivism is most relevant in this study. In his theory, Individualism-Collectivism refers to whether people see themselves as individuals or as members of bigger groups. Two expressions are used

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by Victor (1992: 102) to show the difference between individualism and collectivism:

the American expression “Everyman is for himself and God is for us all” and the Japanese proverb “The nail that stands up will be hammered down”. In the former, self is the focus. In the latter, individuals identify themselves as members of the group. In individualism-oriented cultures, people “stress such traits as self-freedom”

(Victor, 1992: 102), which might be extended to the freedom to use directness in communication. Thus, only a short conceptual distance is needed to express politeness in individualism-oriented cultures (Panther & Thornburg, 2005). In collectivism-oriented cultures, people pay a great deal of attention to the emotion of others in communication in order to maintain social harmony, which results in the preference for indirectness.

In the famous Chinese fiction “The Dream of the Red Chamber” (Cao, during 1715-1763), a poor old woman wants to borrow money from her rich relative, who rejects her request. Both request and refusal are performed by using hints. The poor woman dwells on the details of her need for money, and the rich woman explains in detail how her big family is short of money as well. Both parties recognize the other’s communicative intention without threatening each other’s face, thereby maintaining an acceptable relationship. Performing speech acts with hints is a salient feature of Chinese culture, which is evidenced by the well-known Chinese proverb: dian-dao-wei-zhi, i.e., Marginally-touching-the-point (Liao & Bresnahan, 1996: 727):

dian dao wei zhi

点

到 为 止

Point to is end

Stop when the vulnerable spot is touched.

Marginally touching the point

Marginally-touching-the-point is a pervasive Chinese strategy, whereby a complete event or action is decomposed into a number of sub-events or actions. S merely mentions one part of a whole event or action to make H aware of S’s intention without explicit explanation of the message. This strategy originated from a rule in

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Chinese martial art contests, in which the goal of the contest is to determine a winner and a loser, not to endanger the competitor’s life. That is, a competitor wins by demonstrating his power and accuracy through marginally touching the vulnerable spots of his challenger in the contest. The advantage of this strategy is to fulfil S’s purpose without hurting social harmony. Marginally-touching-the-point is extended to communication, in which S suppresses all the face-threatening components and foregrounds the undamaging part to put across S’s message.

In fact, implicitness is viewed as beauty in Chinese culture. To provide only a little fraction of the complete meaning offers an opportunity for the audience to feel, appreciate and recover the whole, thereby creating the effect that there is an end to the words but not to the message. On the other hand, directness generates meaning explicitly, leaving no chance of reproduction, which is felt to be tasteless and redundant by Chinese.

Americans can be very indirect in certain situations, and using hints may not be unusual in American English, as Geis states (1995:72):

… among many, if not most or all, speakers of American English, it is understood that if one person has some evident need or desire and some other person makes evident either a willingness or an ability to satisfy that need or desire, this latter person is understood to be committed in principle to satisfying this need or desire.

Thus, American English can be very indirect in certain circumstances.

Which culture, the culture of origin or the culture of the international business profession, is more influential to international business practitioners? There is no existing literature that answers this question. However, Maslow’s theory of hierarchy of needs (1943) might provide clues to this question. In his theory, human needs are classified into five levels and arranged in order of decreasing importance:

physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs, as illustrated in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

The more important needs must be met first. Once these needs are fulfilled, the higher level of needs comes into play. This suggests that in the international business discourse community, the culture of the business profession might be more influential, since business success satisfies business people’s physical needs, while the culture of origin mainly satisfies their spiritual needs. Without meeting the cultural norms of the business profession, business practitioners and their companies would not survive. At any rate, the interactants in the international business discourse community are all human beings with the same basic needs and wants (House, 2005). In addition, the relationships between the business interactants are working relations, and the communicative purpose of the discourse in this dissertation is to get business done, not to socialize (Akar & Louhiala-Salminen, 1999: 212-213). Thus, the values of the business culture such as efficiency and profit-orientation may play a more important role in the determination of the linguistic strategies.