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Three Tips for Rapport Management Transcultural Business 

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Three Tips for Rapport Management Transcultural Business 

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What we can learn from this analysis is that we pay more attention to the fact that every society or culture has various sociopragmatic conventions because the conventions influence on the rapport management. In business settings, building personal or social relationships is undoubtedly important, and the rapport management plays an important role.  Therefore, we provide three tips for achieving positive communication and avoiding conflicts in transcultural business in the above video.

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Emily communicated with the French clerk at the bakery when she went to buy bread.

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Emily joins her new French company meeting for the first time

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Despite the fact that these systems offer general guidelines for politeness strategies in various contexts, individuals involved in various discourse systems may have varying notions about what constitutes power, imposition, or distance and consequently may have varying expectations regarding whether they should employ independence or involvement strategies.

In the video, when Emily entered the bakery, she took the initiative to speak French to the clerk, and even after the clerk pointed out her grammatical mistakes, she said the goodbye wishes to the clerk in French before leaving. All of these actions reflect her desire to fit in when she first arrives in France. In Emily's view, she and the clerk are standing in an egalitarian system(−P ) and she wants to build a close relationship (−D) with the clerk, and their conversation is just daily talk, not very important (−W), so Emily adopts the involvement strategy. However, the clerk directly pointed out Emily's grammatical errors, taunting her in French when she paid with coins, and again directly pointed out Emily's grammatical errors before she leaving. In the clerk's view, Emily and she come from different countries, so there is a distance between them(+D). Moreover, her focus of the conversation is the correct use of French, which is an important topic (+W) . So She acted in a face-threatening way, without considering Emily's feelings.

In addition to power, distance, and imposition, other factors such as geography, language and culture can influence the politeness strategy choices of conversation participants. In some circumstances, the distinction between ingroup and outgroup communication will also be related to the language spoken or the register within that language (Ross & Shortreed, 1990). The clerk believes that service contact is egalitarian and purely pragmatic (Yuling Pan, 2000), so she does not defend Emily's face and directly points out Emily's grammatical errors. Therefore, it is understandable that the clerk adopts the independence strategy when communicating with Emily, who is from the United States and unable to use French proficiently and correctly.

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The rapport management in this interaction (between Emily and other members) is a failure. Here, we will analyze the interaction of one scene from the American comedy drama series, “Emily in Paris” in terms of sociopragmatic conventions and five domains of rapport management theory.

【In the illocutionary domain】
The speech acts of Emily and her colleagues directly express their different ideas about social media but actually, they disagree with each other about social media from American and French thinking.
【In the discourse domain】
Emily’s discourse content is to show how valuable she is when it comes to social media branding because she thinks she has some successful experiences in the USA, and her ways will improve the company’s web branding. On the other hand, the French members, seemed to refuse Emily and her suggestions, as well as to treat her as a disaster because they don’t highly value her American ways of doing things.
【In the participation domain】
Emily and her colleagues all respect the interchange of their turn-taking and listen to the response with each other.
【In the stylistic domain】
Emily’s speaking style, which is talking in high volume, seems confident and enthusiastic to catch other's attention. But one of her French colleagues, Luc, expresses his dislike about her style since he thinks it is like shouting.
【In the non-verbal domain】
Even though Emily and her colleagues all sit at a round table, the colleagues all pose their bodies facing Emily, which displays their curiosity and imposes the strain on Emily. And Emily actively uses eye contact and body languages to involve her colleagues in the conversation.

【Why do these misunderstandings happen between Emily and French members? In other words, why did the failure in the rapport management happen here? 】
Because Emily and the French members don’t understand the fact that each society or culture has various sociopragmatic conventions in five domains, which have an effect on rapport management in interactions. For example, under American culture (more like Emily’s culture), it is quite natural for her to make suggestions based on her experiences or knowledge. So she did based on this sociopragmatic convention of hers. On the other hand, under French culture (more precisely the company’s culture) it should be avoided to make suggestions from outsiders based on their different countries' ways.
☆We can't overgeneralize from her behaviors to the whole American culture!

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Brown, P., & Levinson, C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pan, Y. (2000). Politeness in Chinese Face-to-Face Interaction. Stamford, Conn. : Ablex Pub.

Ross, S.& Shortreed, I. (1990). Japanese foreigner talk: convergence or divergence? Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 1, 135-145.

Scollon, R., Scollon, S. W., & Jones, R. H. (2012). Intercultural communication : A discourse approach (3rd ed.). Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons.

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000). Rapport management: A framework for analysis. In Helen  Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures, 11-46. New York: Continuum.

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2010). Face, (im)politeness and rapport. In Helen Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. 11-47. London: Bloomsbury.

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In sociological and sociolinguistic research such as Brown and Levinson (1987), the following generic definition of face is frequently used: “Face is the negotiated public image, mutually granted each other by participants in a communicative event.”

Involvement and independence are two paradoxical aspects of face. The involvement, also known as positive politeness, is concerned with the participants' desire for solidarity and approval from others. The independence, also referred to as negative politeness, highlights the participants' individuality, their right to avoid being imposed by others.

The three factors of power (P), distance (D), and the weight of the imposition (W) influence our choice of the politeness strategy. The vertical discrepancy between the participants of a hierarchical system is referred to as "power." Distance is related to solidarity and is most common in egalitarian relationships. The weight of the imposition refers to how important the topic of discussion is for the participants. There are many types of politeness systems in different communications due to the disparity of power and the distance between participants. The deference politeness system(−P, +D), the solidarity politeness system(−P, −D), and the hierarchical politeness system(+P, +/−D) are the three main ones.

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According to Spencer-Oatey (2000), the definition of “Rapport management” is the ways in which people promote, sustain or threaten the (dis)harmony of social relationships in terms of five domains: “illocutionary domain,” “discourse domain,” “participation domain,” “stylistic domain,” “non-verbal domain.”

To be specific, in the rapport management theory (Spencer-Oatey, 2010), every language is used in a wide range of linguistic choices for managing face, sociality rights and interactional goals in communication. The extent of three factors of linguistic options can vary from language to language. Among this process, the five domains play important roles.

The important point here is that the linguistic choices for promoting, sustaining or threatening the (dis)harmony of social relationships vary from one culture to another. In other words, differences among various cultural groups influence rapport management outcomes due to several aspects such as contextual assessment norms, sociopragmatic conventions and pragmalinguistics conventions. Among these aspects, sociopragmatic conventions refers to the culturally-based principles that underlie interactants' performance and interpretation of linguistic action. These include both culturally-based assessments of the typical characteristics of a given communicative activity and culturally-influenced dynamic assessments of actual communicative events. (Spencer-Oatey, 2010).

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Emily in Paris is an American romantic comedy TV series. Emily Cooper, the protagonist, is an American girl from Chicago who moves to Paris for an unexpected job opportunity. Emily is an aspiring marketing executive, and she is expected to bring an American point of view to a venerable French marketing firm. She faces new challenges of cultural clashes between her conventional Midwestern U.S. upbringing and the tradition in Paris. She tries her best to live, work, make friends, and look for love in the new place, Paris.

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Transcultural communication between various countries and ethnic groups has been becoming more and more frequent. Therefore, the study of rapport management and face theory is not only required for the development of sociolinguistics, but also for transcultural communication.  In different cultural contexts, people's choice of the rapport management and face theory shows different characteristics, which also reflects the communicative conventions in each culture. In conclusion, in transcultural communication, considering the different sociopragmatic conventions is helpful to using the proper rapport management, and choosing the right face system is conducive to making the appropriate politeness strategy, thus promoting the effectiveness of transcultural communication.

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1. What factors do you think that can influence the rapport management?

2. Choose one of the two questions to answer.

(1)Have you ever been in a situation where you thought someone's behavior was impolite or inappropriate? According to the face theory, why do you think this behavior is impolite? And what kind of behavior do you think would be polite in that situation?

(2)Have you ever experienced communication failures because your sociopragmatic conventions are different from your interlocutors? If possible, could you share your experiences in terms of some of the five domains?

※communication failures mean the rapport management failures

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When people communicate with each other, we consciously or subconsciously use "face strategy" and "rapport management" in a variety of contexts including transcultural workplaces. Emily in Paris is a drama series about an American girl in a French workplace. Emily, the protagonist from the US, sometimes acts differently from her colleagues in Paris. We supposed that the reason behind misunderstandings and conflicts between Emily and her French colleagues might be related to the use of the "face strategy" and "rapport management" in their interactions.

We believe that these two concepts are essential for people to strengthen or threaten social relationships in interactions. Therefore, we decided to dig deeper. We want to show you our analysis of two representative scenes from the drama. We hope this poster will help you gain more knowledge of the two concepts.