Laughing Matters: A Case Study of Humor in Multicultural Business Negotiations

Abstract

This article reports the results of an ongoing study of multicultural business negotiations. Two meetings were under scrutiny: (1) the internal strategy meeting of a company's sales team (sellers’ internal meeting or SIM); and (2) a negotiation between the same sellers and a potential customer (client negotiation or CN). The analysis revealed that there were interesting differences in the ways humor was used at the two meetings. The meetings lasted equally long, but SIM featured more humor than CN. Based on the analysis of these meetings, humor seems to have strategic potential for negotiations: it can be used to diffuse tension, mitigate a possible offense, introduce a difficult issue, and thus to pursue one's own goals. Among the most common subjects of humor were the national characteristics of the Finns (the parent‐selling company is Finnish), the project itself, and the selling activity. The most common types of joking in the two meetings were ironic exaggerations and jokes expressing an incongruity. Irony, however, was used more cautiously in CN, where outsiders were present, than in SIM. Joking seems related to power, and power is a factor that influences who has the right to begin and end a joke, and also seems to determine whose joke is laughed at. It is also, not surprisingly, in the sellers’ interest to humor the buyers in the competitive stages of the buying process (e.g., supplier search) in order to “stay in the game,” which is reflected in the use of humor during the meeting.

Personality or skill: a qualitative study of humorous recruitment advertising campaign on social media

“…Humour is able to predict mating success (Greenross and Miller, 2011), and humour and fun are important parts of a successful working climate and strategic business communication (Plester, 2009;Vuorela, 2005). Whether or not humour is effective in advertising also strongly depends on the context, and this study addresses recruitment advertising, which might be risky for several reasons.…”

Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective

“…In particular, research designs might incorporate the emotions and motivations involved in strategizing that are innately connected to who strategists are and what they do, and which have been under-explored. It is likely that the affective states that strategists bring to their work (Huy, 2002) and their motivations and intentions (Mantere, 2005;Vuorela, 2005) will be relevant to the types of practices that they draw upon, how they deploy them and the consequences of that deployment.…”

“…Such a question, while it might classify specific practices such as meetings, workshops, analytic tools, management processes and rhetorical or discursive forms, goes beyond simple classifications of what practitioners do (such as Mintzberg, 1973) to how they go about that doing, incorporating their situated and personspecific knowledge. For example, practice researchers may wish to understand how the conduct of a meeting (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2006), the discursive interactions within that meeting, or the way actors deploy vested interests and intentions in the meeting (Vuorela, 2005) shape the social accomplishment of strategy, rather than simply to classify the types of practices in which strategists engage.…”

Business Discourse

“…Secondly, as we have detailed above, Hyland's investigation of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse and their contribution to a series of different appeals to the reader, uncovers the crucial role played by rhetorical strategies in the construction of (persuasive) corporate messages. Since the study was published, many business discourse researchers have turned their attention to communication strategies in both written and spoken genres (e.g., Vuorela, 2005), and for financial reporting in particular, the influence of the study is clear on the growing interest in the rhetorical strategies used by the writers of annual reports to communicate effectively with their stakeholders (for instance, Garzone, 2004;Garzone, 2005;Nickerson & de Groot, 2005;de Groot, Korzilius, Nickerson & Gerritsen, 2006, case study 8.6 below; de Groot, Korzilius, Gerritsen & Nickerson, 2011, case study 8.7 below). De Groot, E., Korzilius, H., Nickerson, C., & Gerritsen, M. (2006).…”

“…Charles, 1996;Vuorela, 2005); an investigation of politeness in face-threatening speech acts (e.g. refusal, criticism, directive) in authentic workplace communication (cf.…”