Impacts Of Cultural Differences On West-Eastern Business Negotiations

Today, the world is fast developing in the age of economic globalization. Business contacts among nations get increasingly close, which has brought more and more opportunities to do business. Economic interdependence is much productive to the cooperation between companies. Successful business certainly will benefit the development of the companies and enterprises. And the successful business, to a great extent, depends on the mutually beneficial agreement. To reach an agreement, two parties need to negotiate. Negotiation, a very common and important activity in the business world, can be understood as a process in which two or more parties come together to discuss common and conflicting interests in order to reach an agreement of mutual benefit. With the development of society,the advanced technology and convenient transportation make the businessmen from different countries have more opportunities to communicate than before. Business cooperation between companies is dramatically increased. Negotiators from different countries come together and discuss their common and conflicting interests; meanwhile, they bring different cultures to the negotiating table. Culture is one of the factors that have important impacts on negotiation. Culture forges values and religious belief that define one's thinking and behavior. Therefore, negotiators with different cultural backgrounds employ different negotiating strategies. Cultural differences will certainly result in cultural conflicts, especially for enormous differences between the Eastern culture and Western culture. The negotiators from the two cultures experience failure often due to the cultural factors. Thus, to negotiate effectively, negotiators should have a good understanding of culture and cultural differences. More importantly, they should know how negotiation is affected by culture. In doing so, negotiators can predict the process and adjust strategies in order to reach a satisfactory agreement. Therefore, the research on how culture influences negotiation is in the need of social developing, and is of practical significance. For this research in the field, many foreign scholars have made efforts on it in the past several decades. It is new but fast developing. In the mid of 1970s, scholars like Destler and Clapp, explored the cultural impacts on a serial of the U.S.-Japanese negotiations; then Fish, in his famous work International Negotiation, pointed out that the greater the cultural differences, the more likely barriers to communication and misunderstandings become. From 1980s to the late of 1990s, Cohen carried out further research in his book named Negotiating across Cultures: international communication in interdependent world. In the early of 21st century, more and more books are written about it. However, in China, scholars made few researches on the cultural factors in negotiation. There are many articles and books written only about the comparison of different cultures, or different negotiating strategies. Few of them combine the two elements: culture and negotiation together. With the China's entry into WTO, the opportunities for Chinese negotiator negotiate with western partners are increasing day by day. Scholars at home have come to pay more attention to the research on the cultural factors in business negotiations. Therefore, the study in this thesis is of practical significance, and it is expected to be a little helpful to the Chinese negotiators. On the basis of previous researches, the author tries to focus her research on the impacts of cultural differences on West-Eastern business negotiations. The U.S.-Japanese and Sino-American business negotiations are selected as the negotiating cases in the thesis, for there are two major reasons. One is the differences between Eastern culture and Western culture are great significant, which is worth to refer to; the other is the United States and Japan are the two powerful economic nations in the world, and China is the biggest developing country, playing a more and more important role in economic field. This thesis is consisted of four important parts: culture and cultural differences; an overview of negotiation; how negotiation is affected by culture; recommendations for effective negotiation.