| This study examines the speech event of negotiation in two different settings in Southern China---in local markets selling food and sundries and between companies discussing human resources training services. A social theory of discourse (Fairclough, 1992; van Dijk, 1997) that explains the relatively homogeneous or heterogeneous properties of discourse in terms of the nature of social practice is used to analyze data that include recordings of actual face-to-face and telephone interactions, written documents, and interviews. The remarkable orderliness and regularity in negotiation activities in local markets is analyzed as stabilized social practice that reproduces traditional identities and relations. Consensus between shoppers and hawkers is demonstrated on both the exchange and action levels. As interactants, parties coordinate their efforts to reproduce the asymmetrical relation between them. Hawkers are responsible for a larger share of the conversational labor while shoppers are less constrained by conversational obligations and enjoy more latitude in talk. On the action level, parties produce and interpret speech actions within the tightly circumscribed frame of defining the terms of exchange. The negotiation event is strictly defined as a mutually desired encounter for an exigent exchange between "buyer" and "seller" in the most restricted senses of the labels. The seeming lack of consistency and surface chaos in company meetings is analyzed as innovative social practice where participants make competing identity and relationship claims. Discourse between human resources managers and the consultant demonstrates shifts in and out of four relationship frames---that of traditional buyer and seller, client and vendor, business partners, and lastly, expert and novice. By engaging in alternative positioning, participants resist, contest, and challenge existing structures and practices that are problematic for the task at hand. Juxtaposing the discourse in negotiation events that take place in two different institutional settings allows for an intertextual interdiscursive analysis through which the significance of linguistic elements, both present and absent in discourse, is revealed. The way that participants draw upon various discursive resources is a sensitive indicator of the social and cultural flux that characterizes the contemporary economic scene in the People's Republic of China. |
