The Chinese are known as an inscrutable people in the West. With the rapid globalisation of world business, China, with its booming economy and as one of the world's largest emerging markets, is attracting increasing numbers of international traders and investors. Various sources have shown that language and culture are, among other factors, two of the major obstacles to successful business collaborations between the Chinese and Westerners. This dissertation aims to help remove these obstacles by offering some insights into the intricate mechanisms of business negotiation between the Chinese and the Dutch. While most of the research concerning Chinese-Western communication has used everyday conversation as the subject of study, this research chooses negotiation, the core of international business, as its subject. Micro-level qualitative discourse analyses are used as the main research method in addition to ethnographic methods such as the questionnaire survey and interview. The main data used are simulated as well as real-life video-taped Chinese-Dutch business negotiations. Questionnaire survey and interview data from real-life Chinese and Dutch negotiators are used as support data. The phenomena recurrently cropping up across the negotiations are examined at a turn-to-turn level to pinpoint places where problems arise that prevent the negotiators from reaching mutual understandings and fulfilling negotiation goals. The deep-rooted cultural concepts underlying the linguistic phenomena prove to be the main trouble sources. The results of this research are relevant for both the academic and business world.

One of the most significant developments in recent years has been the emergence of global markets, which has triggered opportunities for multinational firms to seek business across national borders. Global markets offer unlimited opportunities. But competition in these markets is intense. To be globally successful, companies must learn to operate and compete in multiple environments which may be different from the home environment. One important prerequisite for success in foreign markets is the ability to negotiate properly. Global business negotiations are affected by the cultural backgrounds of the negotiators, comprising language, cultural conditioning, negotiating style, approaches to problem solving, implicit assumptions, gestures and facial expressions, and the role of ceremony and formality. Therefore, negotiators assigned to deal with their foreign counterparts need a lot of learning and skills. With training and practice such learning and skills can be enhanced. The proposed book offers a practical guide to acquire negotiating skills. The purpose of this book is to provide consistently effective strategies and systematic approaches to negotiations that will dramatically improve international managers as negotiators. The book provides sufficient familiarity with negotiating styles that will help managers identify their unique strength and weaknesses, thus enabling them to interpret and comfortably use the latest advances in the field of negotiation in dealing internationally.

Saglia, a scholar of some sort whose academic affiliations are not noted, charts the various ways in which, between the 1810s and 1820s, Spain figured in British literary culture. Mainly concerned with narrative versions of Spain, specifically metrical tales and verse romances, he traces the contours of the Spanish "imaginary" in British Romanticism, offering a cultural geography of Romantic Spain as a space of war involving not only France and Britain or the Spanish and Moorish armies, but ideological conflicts between public and private; republicanism, nationalism, and imperialism; and competing models of masculinity and femininity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

The Cultural Context in Business Communication focuses on differences and similarities in business negotiations and written communication in intercultural settings. To set the scene, Edward T. Hall looks back at “culture” as an evolutionary concept and Charles Campbell explains the value of classical rhetoric in contemporary cultures. Further contributions present case studies of cross-cultural encounters and discourse aspects in various settings. Steven Weiss explores the proper character of six cultures: Chinese, French, Japanese, Mexican, Nigerian, and Saudi. Other chapters contrast English with cultures such as Chinese, German, Dutch, Finnish, and Irish. The book closes with two chapters on training for effective business communication and provide models in participatory training and gaming.

The Handbook of Business Discourse is the most comprehensive overview of the field to date. It offers an accessible and authoritative introduction to a range of historical, disciplinary, methodological and cultural perspectives on business discourse and addresses many of the pressing issues facing a growing, varied and increasingly international field of research. The collection also illustrates some of the challenges of defining and delimiting a relatively recent and eclectic field of studies, including debates on the very definition of 'business discourse'. Part One includes chapters on the origins, advances and features of business discourse in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Part Two covers methodological approaches such as mediated communication, corpus linguistics, organisational discourse, multimodality, race and management communication, and rhetorical analysis. Part Three moves on to look at disciplinary perspectives such as sociology, pragmatics, gender studies, intercultural communication, linguistic anthropology and business communication. Part Four looks at cultural perspectives across a range of geographical areas including Spain, Brazil, Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. The concluding section reflects on future developments in Europe, North America and Asia.

This volume examines the point where the concepts and practices of escalation and negotiation meet.

This second edition reviews the field of business discourse, centring on the investigation of business language and communication as practice. It combines research-based discussions with innovative practical applications and promotes debate and enquiry on a range of competing issues, emerging from business discourse research and teaching practice.

Culture studies in international business are passing through difficult times of scrutiny and critique. This is due to the fact that the paradigms, approaches, and methods used so far to study culture have been limited in their scope. For several decades now, approaches that consider national cultures and geo-ethnic origins of interacting individuals have dominated management literature. This book distinguishes itself from other books on Culture in International Business (CIB) studies in two important ways. First, it illustrates how Mary Douglas’s Cultural Theory framework (referred to commonly as DCF) can be used to explore different aspects of international business. This sets the stage for future scholars to consider DCF as an alternative tool of cultural sense-making as opposed to limiting themselves to categorical frameworks grounded in static notions of national and/or corporate culture. The second unique feature is that it focuses on the complexities of the applied side of culture (i.e., it takes a culture-in-practice perspective), while simultaneously emphasizing the dynamicity and diversity of culture. The book concludes by offering suggestions for the future of CIB studies. This domain, it predicts, may witness significant changes in the way culture is seen as influencing workplace relations. It also identifies other areas on which CIB scholars may need to focus attention in the future: culture in an increasingly digitalized world, culture and the organization as a system, and culture and the intelligent/knowledgeable organization. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of cross-cultural management, international business, human resource management.

′The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Resolution demonstrates the range of themes that constitute modern conflict resolution. It brings out its key issues, methods and dilemmas through original contributions by leading scholars in a dynamic and expanding field of inquiry. This handbook is exactly what it sets out to be: an indispensable tool for teaching, research and practice in conflict resolution′ - Peter Wallensteen, Professor of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University and University of Notre Dame ′Bercovitch, Kremenyuk and Zartman are among the most important figures in the conflict resolution field. They have pieced together, with the help of more than 35 colleagues from numerous countries, a state-of-the-art review of the sources of international conflict, available methods of conflict management, and the most difficult challenges facing the individuals and organizations trying to guide us through these conflict-ridden times. The collection is brimming with penetrating insights, trenchant analyses, compelling cases, and disciplined speculation. They help us understand both the promise of as well as the obstacles to theory-building in the new field of conflict resolution′ - Lawrence Susskind, Professor and Director of the MIT - Harvard Public Disputes Program ′The last three sentences of this persuasive book: "We conclude this volume more than ever convinced that conflict resolution is not just possible or desirable in the current international environment. It is absolutely necessary. Resolving conflicts and making peace is no longer an option; it is an intellectual and practical skill that we must all posses." If you are part of that "we," intellectually or professionally, you will find this book a superb companion′ - Thomas C Schelling, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University and University of Maryland Conflict resolution is one of the fastest-growing academic fields in the world today. Although it is a relatively young discipline, having emerged as a specialized field in the 1950′s, it has rapidly grown into a self-contained, vibrant, interdisciplinary field. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Resolution brings together all the conceptual, methodological and substantive elements of conflict resolution into one volume of over 35 specially commissioned chapters. The Handbook is designed to reflect where the field is today by drawing on the contributions of experts from different fields presenting, in a systematic way, the most recent research and practice. Jacob Bercovitch is Professor of International Relations, and Fellow of the Royal Society, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Victor Kremenyuk is deputy director of the Institute for USA and Canada Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He is also a research associate at IIASA. I. William Zartman is Jacob Blaustein Professor of Conflict Resolution and International Organization at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University