A Contrastive Study On Rapport Management Strategies In Chinese And British Responses To Negative Online Lodging Reviews

In the Internet era,the existence of negative online reviews has played a critical role in passively affecting customers’ pre-purchase decisions on a product or service.Contemporarily,the peer-to-peer sharing lodgings is a bourgeoning business model in the lodging industry,and their e-WOM and image are more strongly damaged by negative reviews.Therefore,the appropriate employment of rapport management strategies in the hosts’ responses to negative reviews to provide targeted reactions and achieve service recovery is conducive to the restoration of reputation and maintenance of stable business operation.Moreover,with the increasing global expansion of the sharing lodgings platforms,the business operations have reached out to all over the world so that hosts and lodgers with diverse cultural backgrounds are able to interact with each other more conveniently through the Internet.The research on transregional computer-mediated communication is an emphasis of intercultural interaction studies.This thesis aims at contrasting and explaining the differences of the rapport management strategies adopted by Chinese and British Airbnb hosts’ responses to negative reviews,and exploring the proper pragmatics strategies to manage rapport and conduct cross-cultural communication on sharing lodgings platforms.Based on the modified framework of Ho’s responses strategy,the research identifies the strategies in Chinese and British Airbnb hosts’ responses to negative reviews.Besides,Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport Management Theory is adopted to illustrate the rapport management realization of each strategy by handling three bases of rapport including the face,sociality rights and obligations and interactional goals,and House and Kasper’s directness level was applied to mark the directness of a denial strategy.Subsequently,SPSS was used for statistical analysis on the frequency data.Afterward,rapport-influencing factors of Spencer-Oatey and cultural factors of Hofstede and Hall were used for explaining the differences.The research results manifested that six passive and seven positive rapport management strategies were employed by both Chinese and British Airbnb hosts’ responses to negative reviews.Major findings of the contrastive study are 1)the British with the low-context culture preferred the direct denial strategies,while the Chinese with the high-context culture preferred the indirect ones;2)the Chinese managed to minimize the effect of a rapport-threatening act by mainly neglecting the interactional goal only but the British reply further impair the other two components besides interactional goal;3)compared with the British with short-term orientation,the long-term-oriented Chinese were better at restoring from the inharmonious relationship;4)the Chinese with collectivism tended to use more positive rapportmanagement strategies but the British with individualism acted reversely with more passive ones;5)the Chinese recognizing power distance took care of the face needs of the lodgers while the British emphasizing equality to handle equity with empathy.This research attempts to provide practical suggestions for the individual Airbnb practitioners on replying to negative reviews with proper selection and combination of rapport management strategies.Moreover,it enriches the studies on both rapport management in business discourse and cross-cultural CMC interaction.