American And Chinese Face Concerns In Cross-cultural Business Communications

With the booming of economical integration and international trade,communications between different countries occur more frequently than ever before.It is realized nowadays that cultural differences exert great influence on cross-culturalcommunications. the U.S. and China, as the world two major trading powers, are notexceptions. They both have own distinctive cultures, in which face is one importanceaspect that can never be underestimated. Due to the different views on face, Americanand Chinese people deal with face issues differently, and their different face concernsaffect their communication and cooperation in business field.In cross-cultural communications, Hofstede’s cultural dimension has been taken asan internationally agreed standard and also widely used as an important and influentialtheory for researches and practices. The author tries to combine the cultural dimensionsand face conceptions for research. American and Chinese different concerns of faceinvolved in cross-cultural business communications are studied and analyzed for deepinquiry about how certain culture feature affects people’s certain face preference, inorder to well acquire the relation between cultural dimensions and face concerns.This study carries out research based on the theoretical foundation of Hofstede’scultural dimensions, Chinese and western scholars’ studies on cross-culturalcommunications, and the systematic face theories of Brown&Levison, Scollon&Scollon and Stella Ting-Toomey. Further researches in this thesis are from three aspectswhere the U.S. and China show big difference gap according to Hofstede’s survey andresults: individualism and collectivism, low and high power distance, and short-termand long-term orientation. The author tries to connect those three cultural dimensionswith three experts’ different face theories about positive or negative face, involvementor independent aspect of face, the deference or the solidarity face system, and otherpositive-face maintenance or self negative-face maintenance. Therefore, fourhypotheses are proposed.In order to test the hypotheses and achieve the research purpose, quantitative studyand qualitative study are both adopted. Questionnaire is designed as the major methodwith the support of interview results. Among all questionnaires sent out in print form orby e-mails,120completely answered valid copies (60from Americans and60fromChinese) are finally picked out for data collection and statistical analysis. Meanwhile three Americans and three Chinese participating in the questionnaire are asked forin-depth interview. After statistical analyses of the subjects’ answers, three hypothesesare supported except one, and the final results prove that face concerns of American andChinese people in cross-cultural business communications are quite different and thesedifferences are tested to be related to the culture features of the two countries.The results of current study reveal that during the cross-cultural businesscommunications, individualistic Americans concern more about negative face, whilecollective Chinese concern more about positive face. Moreover, individualisticAmericans concern more about the independence aspect of face, while collectiveChinese concern more about the involvement aspect of face. Besides the influence ofindividualism and collectivism on face, time orientation has been proved to exertinfluence on the face maintenance. To be specific, American people who are influencedby short-term orientation concern more about self negative-face maintenance, whileChinese who are influenced by long-term orientation concern more about otherpositive-face maintenance. Howerver, no obvious relation has been discovered betweenlow or high power distance and the solidarity or the deference face systems.