The weightiness formula and business requests

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choice of requestive strategies. However, the evidence does not support the claim that familiar interactants are more direct, and unfamiliar ones less direct in all types of business activities.

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performed by prospective sellers (highest imposition + long social distance + S’s low power status) should have the greatest weightiness.

The buyers perform 54 IMPERATIVES to carry out Routine Requests, 77.8% of which are made by current buyers. This means that 77.8% of the IMPERATIVES performed by the more powerful buyers to familiar sellers to carry out business activities with the lowest ranks of imposition have the smallest weightiness. This suggests that when face threat is small, direct strategies tend to be used.

The sellers perform 60 POINT-TO requests to realize Consequence Requests, 97.5%

of which are performed by prospective sellers. This means that 97.5% of POINT-TO requests performed by the less powerful sellers to unfamiliar buyers to carry out business activities with the highest rank of imposition have the greatest weightiness.

The findings seem to confirm that the greater the weightiness of the act, the more indirect the strategy becomes.

However, there are two problems. First, Regulation Requests are not in line with Brown and Levinson’s prediction, because the greater the importance of the business laws or regulations requested to abide by, the more coercive the strategy becomes, and because they are less influenced by changes in social distance. Second, imposition, distance and power cannot account for all the phenomena. Culture, media and communicative purpose also affect the choice of requestive strategies. In Figure

179 Chapter 7. Directness and Indirectness of Business Requests

7.3.1, the requests performed by BI and SI have a reversal pattern, but this pattern does not appear in Corpus II, as is exhibited in Figure 7.5. The difference between Corpus I and Corpus II is partially the result of cultural difference. In Corpus I, BI’s culture values directness. A short conceptual distance may be enough to mitigate face-threat. In contrast, SI’s culture values indirectness. A great deal of indirectness is needed to mitigate face threat. The same request may be seen as face-threatening in SI’s culture but not in BI’s. The cultural difference between BI and SI, which is reinforced by power differentials, results in a reversal directness pattern. The buyer-seller power differential exists in Corpus II, too. Nonetheless, the various buyers in Corpus II come from different cultures valuing different levels of directness, and so do the sellers. A mixture of cultures results in similar patterns of directness and indirectness between BII and SII, although BII are still clearly more direct than SII.

As such, the major distinction between Figure 7.3.1 and 7.5 might be generated by cultural difference.

Since each participant in the international business discourse community is mainly influenced by two cultures: the participants’ cultures of origin and the culture of the international business profession, the latter also contributes to the choice of the levels of directness. That is, business practitioners are more direct when engaged in business communication owing to their needs for efficiency, which will be discussed in depth in Chapter 8.

Media and communicative purpose should also be taken into consideration when calculating the weightiness of an FTA. The portion of direct strategies is 37.2%. In the CCSARP project, the average portion of direct strategies is 26.7% (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989: 47). Direct strategies in the CCSARP project comprise PERFORMATIVES, IMPERATIVE, RESULT and WANT. If RESULT and WANT were classified as direct strategies in this study, direct strategies would make up 46.7% of the requests. Such a large portion is very unusual since direct strategies are generally used with great care. The chief reasons for this remarkable phenomenon lie in the differences in media and communicative purpose.

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Electronic mails are computer-mediated written communication. In face-to-face communication, facial expressions, body language, eye contact and the tone of voice can facilitate comprehension of speech acts. Unfortunately, these cues are lost in written discourse, in which illocutionary acts have to stand on their own. Directness has to be employed to compensate for the loss of video and audio effect. As such, directness is less face-threatening in email conversations.

Directness is also less face-threatening in business discourse. The communicative purpose of business communication is to achieve the goals of buying-selling negotiation, that is, to get business done. This requires efficiency. As directness is the best approach to achieving efficiency, which is in the interest of the business practitioners, it is preferred in business settings.

The above findings confirm that imposition, distance and power affect the choice of the level of directness of requests, but they do not support the claim that the bigger the face threat, the more indirect the strategy. In business communication, face is saved or protected mainly for the purpose of getting business done, not the other way around. In other words, getting business done is more important than face concern.

Further, culture, media and communicative purpose should be added to the weightiness formula. As such, Hypothesis IV is partly confirmed.