What Causes Differences in the Processes of Negotiation?: A Comparison of Story Co-construction by Japanese, Korean, and American Pairs.

Abstract

This paper demonstrates differences in the establishment of mutual consent in

problem-solving tasks engaged in by Japanese, Korean, and American pairs, and proposes

that the different processes of negotiating agreement cannot be explained by a western

framework of interaction but rather can be accounted for by Asian traditional and cultural

theory. In total, this study examines data from 22 pairs each of Japanese, Korean, and

American female speakers as they attempt to organize a set of fifteen pictures into a

coherent story. The results of a quantitative analysis of the data show that the Japanese

participants` verbalization during the task is only 62% of that of the American participants.

This means that the American participants heavily depend on verbalization whereas the

Japanese participants appear to establish their mutual consent not only by verbalization but

also by synthesizing other various factors. Furthermore, comparing the characteristics of

the verbalization, we find the verbalization of the American pairs to be

propositionally-oriented and that of the Japanese and Korean pairs to be

interactionally-oriented. It appears that the American method of negotiating agreement is

very straightforward while the Japanese and Korean techniques are rather puzzling and

mysterious for a third party. Even in their verbalization, the Japanese and Korean

participants use a variety of interactional linguistic devices such as frequent repetitions or

rephrasings, completing or continuing what the other party says, and using different kinds

of questions. Each of these devices constitutes the essence of establishing mutual consent

and is used to make agreement explicit at every moment in the process. These results

suggest that the common cultural background shared by Korean and Japanese people is an

important key to understanding their language use. Thus, this paper proposes that

traditional and cultural background must be invoked to understand these Japanese and

Korean processes of establishing mutual consent.