Communicative strategies of international business negotiations (IBN) viewed synergistically

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to excite theoretical interest in a synergistic approach to speech communication based on the principles of functional self-organizing systems operating in materially embedded ecological settings. The above approach is based on the principle of complex systems self-organization and their interaction with their extra-linguistic environment. Such systems, known in synergistics as “dissipating” or “embedded” (Prigogine1991) ones, are characterized by dynamic inner interaction of the components and integration, as subsystems, into more complex systemic entities. It is shown that in the process of the subsystems integration, their mutual accommodation is taking place, i.e. a balance is being established between their autonomy and their mutual dependence. It is claimed that the mutual adaptation principle also operates in the sphere of human interaction, cross-cultural communication including. The sphere if International Business Negotiations (IBN) is chosen as a specific example in order to illustrate how the above principle works in the concrete circumstances of cross-cultural communication, which can be described as a “give-and-take” process of mutual communicative adaptation. A survey of interdisciplinary IBN literature is presented and some basic assumptions that trigger off synergistic thinking about IBN are discussed. It is shown that within the general synergistic paradigm, the recently advanced Communication Accommodation Theory seems to provide the best-defined theoretical framework for studying IBN by integrating an interdisciplinary synergistic approach with a communicative focus.