The Language of Negotiation

A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Improving Communication

Joan Mulholland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138868267
• eBook ISBN: 9781134928026
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Language of Negotiation aims to heighten awareness of language and to suggest practical ways to use language-related tactics to get results. It encourages the reader to recognise negotiation as a specifically language-centred activity and demonstrates how learning to use language effectively can radically improve negotiation skills.

The book features:

• A step-by-step guide on the practice of negotiation, from preparation to follow-up after the event
• Chapters on various aspects of negotiation, such as the spoken, written and interpersonal sides, as well as media interviewing and using the phone.
• Specific and useful strategies for actions like advising, complaining, confirming and dismissing.
• A range of effective and informative examples throughout, designed to show the value of enhanced language use and practical exercises to encourage the reader to apply the ideas to their own practice.

The Language of Negotiation will be of value to all those in business and professional life whose work involves negotiation. It will also be of particular interest to students in graduate schools of business or management and to anyone who has an interest in improving their negotiation skills. No prior knowledge of language theory is assumed on the part of the reader.

Part I

Preparation—the power of language

Chapter 1

Language and culture

This section raises issues concerning the three factors, language, culture and discourse, that constitute negotiation. Though language, culture and discourse interlock to form negotiation, they are separated here for analytic convenience.

READER WORK Consider the ideas discussed here in relation to your own negotiating experience as speaker and hearer.

(PRACTICE sections are provided to assist in this process.)

GOAL To increase awareness of the factors that impact on negotiation.

LANGUAGE

The functions of language are deeply embedded in human behaviour and there is little in our lives as social beings in which language does not play an important part.

The aspects of language that are of relevance to negotiation are:

1 its role in creating meaning out of the world for social use;

2 the means language adopts in order to realise meaning;

3 its dependence on history and culture;

4 its work as a socially bonding device.

LANGUAGE’S ROLE IN CREATING MEANING

The most important capacity that language has is its power to realise or actualise some speaker’s or writer’s idea, impression, attitude or emotion. Our understanding of the world is not merely expressed in words; it actually comes into existence, is realised through them. That is, language does not work by putting into words some previously existing event in the world, the information about which is then communicated to the hearer. Rather, language works to make some of the phenomena of the world into ‘events’, while ignoring others. By ‘events’ here is meant not only happenings of a physical kind but also (and more importantly) ideas, values and opinions. Language, as it were, imposes digital distinctions on the world, isolating aspects from the great mass of undifferentiated phenomena, making ‘events’ of them, registering them in words, and supplying them with meaning. What gets registered as an ‘event’ depends on the purposes of the speaker, who may wish to direct attention towards some things and away from others. A useful image for this aspect of language is to see it as a map of the world, giving some details of the terrain while omitting others. It is a very helpful instrument by which to understand the world, but it does not give us the world in all its detail.

When the ‘event’ is realised through speech or writing, language acts to share the speaker’s interpretation with others. If the language chosen for the realisation is forceful enough, or the interpretation is reiterated often enough, or the ‘event’ is socially appropriate enough for hearers to accept it, then the speaker’s version of that ‘event’ becomes social currency, and eventually part of a common understanding. Through language a community’s sense of the world is created, modified and developed, and the versions of it which are frequently spoken become institutionalised. Other versions which are omitted from language use become weakened, and matters rarely talked about are perceived as unacceptable or ‘unreal’. So language (a) creates meaning from the world, and (b) offers up that meaning for social understanding and acceptance.

Example

This can be done in at least three ways. First, new objects can be registered through language—for example, a modem. When a situation arose in which computers had to be linked by telephone, a modulatordemodulator was invented to adapt the data to this transmission and reception system. A name ‘modem’ was given to it, for easier social use, and it is now a widely disseminated notion. Its full technical meaning, however, is not so widely understood. This example is one of many which could remind us that we all use words for which we have only a hazy meaning, a fact which leaves us open to manipulation by those with a better understanding of them (for example by the sales representatives who insist we need a new modem), and to exploitation (for example by politicians who can use vagueness to bring about an alteration in meaning by incorporating different aspects of potential meaning as it suits them).

Second, new perceptions can be registered through language—for example, the recognition of pre-teens as a specific period in youth. It was always the case that a child grew from being a baby to a child, through ages ten, eleven and twelve, and into its teen years. Recently, however, marketing agencies have specified pre-teen children as an age group, inserted between the group ‘children’ and the group ‘teenagers’. Those involved in sales of goods found it useful, and so accepted it; the children themselves found it attractive because it gave them a more important social presence; and so it has become a common awareness. Society is not always certain, however, which children are in the preteen group, or what features distinguish its members from children and teenagers (since children are notorious for their different rates of development). As a ‘fuzzy’ category, it lends itself to manipulation by those who have an interest in so doing.

Third, current perceptions can be altered through language use—for example, a term like old-fashioned, which once meant ‘of long standing, tried and true, and still valued’, as social values change can gradually be brought to mean ‘outworn, unacceptable, no longer valued, and out of date’. Or speakers can use a phrase in association with others whose meanings society already dislikes, so that it gradually acquires the same valuation. Another possibility is illustrated by the phrase ‘the black problem’, where the very selection of ‘black’ and ‘problem’, and their juxtaposition to represent some happening in the world, makes a judgment which would differ markedly if instead the phrase used were ‘the white problem’, or some other word were substituted for ‘problem’. Another technique to achieve a change in perception, less favoured (and often less successful), is to use argument against or on behalf of an idea. This often fails because it is overt and so allows the hearers to understand what is going on, and hence permits them either to defend the current view, or at least to resist the argument.

Practice

Ask yourself which terms are currently in favour for the important matters in your various negotiations. A standard set might be ‘tried and true’, ‘standard methods’, ‘well-honed skills’ or ‘it’s good because we know where we are with it’. Who instigated them? For what purpose? Could the perception they realise be changed? Have any such terms changed during the negotiation process, and to what effect? Would it be useful for you to seek to change any of the terms, for example to ‘a welcome change’, ‘creative originality’, ‘more efficient methods’, ‘more up-to-date’? (Remember that everyone is suspicious of change and the readjustment of ideas that it will require.) Would it be useful to resuscitate any terms not currently favoured? Does one participant favour a particular set? Would there be negotiating value in your copying this usage? (We like to talk with people who share our perceptions.) What are your own favourite terms? Has using them ever been a help or a hindrance?

THE MEANS BY WHICH LANGUAGE WORKS

When we create communicated events from the happenings of the world, language can work at two levels to give socially accepted meaning to these happenings.

On one level, a speaker can make a careful choice of words or grammar to realise the happening (to suit his or her purposes), or can mention it alongside events already recorded in speech, thereby giving it the same social value that those events have, and creating an association of ideas in the mind of the hearer.

However, meaning can be affected in this way only because the very act of speech is a profoundly significant happening. On this deeper level, any utterance (or act of writing) in our communication with one another, however apparently trivial it may seem, can form the basis for our sense of some aspect of the world and its happenings. We acquire less meaning in directly experienced, unmediated ways than people often understand. It follows then that every utterance has the power to affect our perception of the world. Every utterance is a speech act with three aspects: it is a locution, that is, an uttering of recognisable sounds and rhythms; it has illocutionary force or discursive power, compounded of what can be estimated of the speaker’s intentions and its material content; and it has perlocutionary effect, that is, it has some interactive significance and social meaning (see pp. 88–9, and 94).

Speech is not transitory in value though it may be brief; it is central to our shared understanding of the world and also to the processes of interaction. Every time speakers speak they provide information about their subject matter, and simultaneously reveal such things as their sense of self, the roles they are adopting (and expecting others to adopt), their perceptions of the interaction, their expectations of the other participants’ behaviours, and their anticipation of its outcome. Therefore, any speech event has potentially serious social consequences. Speech is irreversible: once something is said, it cannot be unsaid. It may be an opinion— ‘I think Smith lacks administrative skill’, —or a fact— ‘We offered 17 per cent interest on the loan.’ The first may offend, the second will form a commitment, and in both cases, the speakers will be held to their words.

Example

During an inter-organisational negotiation a speaker says: ‘I am the managing director.’ In so doing, several things occur, and several different kinds of meaning are actualised.

First, referential information is supplied. This can happen because the words have common values for the speaker and hearers who all have perceptions of what a ‘managing director’ is. But while they may share elements of understanding, there is also the possibility of interpretive differences. To one hearer it could mean ‘The speaker is in charge of the company’s contribution to the negotiation’, or ‘The speaker is knowledgeable about the matters in hand’, or ‘The speaker is a policy maker and does not deal in detail’, or ‘The speaker is the principal not an agent’, or any combination of these.

Second, the social event of the sentence’s being spoken, becoming an element within the interaction, brings another kind of meaning. The speaker has some purpose in saying it and so making it part of the negotiation. The hearer will certainly assume this. The sentence may be intended by the speaker, or read by the hearer, as a clarification, a statement of position, a boast, or a way of preventing embarrassment (which might occur if the speaker’s highranking role were not understood). Each reading can give rise to different social consequences which in turn impact on the negotiation and change its nature. Consider the following examples.

1 If read as a clarification, the hearer may understand that the speaker (a) thinks clarifying participants’ ranks is good for a negotiation, or wants it as an element in this negotiation, or (b) generally likes clarity, or (c) may want something clarified by others. In the short term, it may cause others to tell their rank (and this would have an effect on relationships, which would become more strongly influenced by the concept of rank), and in the longer term it could lead to the negotiation becoming one in which clarification is a major component, occupying much of the participants’ time.

2 If read as a statement of position, the hearer could understand that the speaker wants the negotiation to be one where positions are taken up and declared, and this might have the effect of making the negotiation more adversarial than it would otherwise have been.

3 The hearer may perceive it to be a boast, and in the short term produce an anti-boast response (a snub), and in the long term may hear other contributions by this speaker as arrogant, and so develop a position of antagonism.

4 If taken as a means of preventing embarrassment, the hearer might indicate that it was in fact useful (‘Oh I see, I was going to ask if as an agent you had to seek approval for any decision reached today’). This response, however, contains the implication that the hearer did not recognise the high status of the speaker; some managing directors might find this annoying, with consequences for their future attitudes in the negotiation.

The sentence may also, of course, be presented to appear as a combination of all these things, so as to allow the speaker to avoid being called to account on one particular meaning by claiming that another was intended. It is rare for any speech act to have only one meaning and only one purpose. The skill of speaking lies in producing subtlety of combinations.

It is this capacity of language to form speech events that gives it its greatest social power. Speech events are the most important vehicle for the construction, understanding and maintenance of our sense of reality. Much of everyday life consists of the use of spoken interaction for these ends. It is of course done implicitly for the most part, by the presuppositions and assumptions of what is said, though it is possible to speak in terms which act explicitly to define some aspect of the world. In a negotiation, everything said or written, however seemingly trivial, including any preliminaries and any future matters linked to it, makes that negotiation what it is; and everything that the participants bring to it of their previous experiences of negotiation and of every other kind of communication also makes a contribution.

Example

In a casual exchange during a break in negotiation, one senior participant said to a junior colleague, ‘That was a most unproductive session.’ From this explicit comment, the colleague will (a) understand that for the speaker a negotiation should be productive, (b) understand that for the speaker this particular negotiation was so far a failure, and (c) therefore guess at what outcome would be regarded by the senior as productive. The junior may hold a different valuation, and have found it a useful negotiation because ideas were exchanged and joint goals were set; if the senior sees this as ‘unproductive’, then he or she must have a different sense of the meeting. In that the senior has authority over the junior, the junior could find it useful to adjust his or her sense of what a negotiation should be. Alternatively, if the senior had said, ‘We really must get through more points at our next meeting’, this implicitly suggests that (a) this one a poor meeting, and (b) getting through points is what meetings are about. If the junior then adapted his or her conduct accordingly, this brief and apparently casual speech event could then set the agenda for both speakers’ future discussions, their thinking about future meetings, and their behaviour at them.

Practice

Can you recall from a recent negotiation a word or phrase that had a strong impact on you? Or can you recall a speech act whose illocutionary force markedly affected you? Examine which features of the circumstances might explain this force, and ask what was the nature of the impact and its consequences. Try to recall one of your own speech acts which caused a problem, or which in hindsight you regret. Examine its features for the cause of the difficulty.

THE DEPENDENCE OF LANGUAGE ON HISTORY

By ‘history’ here is meant both the long-term development of language through general community use over time, and the shorter-term personal experience of language use by individuals. Meaning accrues to words and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Preparation—The Power of Language
• Part II The Management of Spoken Interaction
• Part III The Management of Written Communication
• Part IV Negotiating Actions
• Part V Wrap-Up—Language after the Event
• Bibliography
• Index