HOW CULTURE INFLUENCES CONFLICT RESOLUTION

During the time of British rule over India, a dispute arose between the British authorities and the King of Bhutan over the Bhutanese having whisked off some English people. To make his point stronger, the King of Bhutan, the “Dragon ruler,” threatened the British with having to face a “divine force of twelve angry gods” who were, in addition, “very ferocious ghosts.” If it was possibly taken as a joke on one side, it was the most serious statement that could be made in Bhutanese culture.

In other traditional societies such as in Africa, China, and elsewhere, unusual parties to Westerners such as evil spirits, or ancestors coming back from the dead, may join in the conflict resolution process (Faure, 2000a). Thus, culture may clearly come in unexpect­edly, confirming the observation from Faure and Rubin: “What is it that cannot quite be seen but follows us around constantly? [...] The answer [.] is culture” (Faure and Rubin, 1993: XI). A Westerner may realize that his way of eating is not universal the day he is in China and has only a pair of chopsticks to eat his rice. A fish does not know it lives in the water until it is taken out of the water, as the old saying goes. What is often observed is that culture's effect on negotiation is subtle and this subtlety, however, does not really reduce the importance of culture but only makes it less visible (Faure and Rubin, 1993). The subtle influence of culture has to be grasped in an organized way to disclose some of its content. Culture does not need to have a visible impact, or to be consciously perceived to be influential.

Negotiating is a multidimensional activity and the overall orientation adopted by an actor to achieve his goal is a strategy. Strategic choices are led by interests and values, which, in turn, relate to culture. A negotiator may rely on legal norms to solve a conflict, or on the relational dimension, or on the affective dimension, or on intuition, or on force, or on mediation.

Culture may impact conflict resolution processes at four different levels: behaviors, beliefs, cognition, and identity. Behaviors, the more visible level, concern the way to play in selecting a range of acceptable behaviors and defensible arguments. In some cultures, action will be direct, conflict widely accepted and problems met head on; in others, action will be indirect, conflict not openly acknowledged and problems only dealt with through allusions. Russians, for instance, tend to negotiate from a position of strength and do not mind resorting to aggressive tactics such as threats, whereas the Japanese are highly reluctant to directly confront the counterpart (Kimura, 1980). Tactics such as “take it or leave it” or issuing direct threats are part of the American culture. The Asian-Pacific cultures would better be illustrated by the use, for instance, of the “salami tactic” (nibbling) or just keeping silent and not answering.

Power distribution may be in some cases very unequal and culture tends to legitimize some types of situational power such as those linked to resources, position, status, age, role and to disavow others. In China, a business negotiation is always conceived as an unbalanced situation. It is not the foreigner who sells to his Chinese counterpart but the Chinaman who buys from the foreigner. Thus, in the Chinese view, the buyer has a strong bargaining position and it is quite legitimate for the most powerful to impose his own views. If the foreign seller treats the Chinese as an equal, he will be viewed as arrogant (Fang, 1999; Faure, 1999a).

Being polite is in some cultures more important than telling the truth. Bluffing, issuing threats can be seen in some societies as some of the very many means available to the negotiator. In other societies, it is a sufficient reason for breaking off the whole relationship. A list of 15 tactics considered as “dirty tricks” in the North American culture has been established by Adler (1986), drawing upon Fisher & Ury (1981). Some of them would never be understood as dirty tricks in the Chinese culture but rather as common practice. For instance, “too little eye contact” does not mean in China the launching of psychological warfare but simply a polite and modest attitude, which is the sign of a good education. Similarly, the absence of a private place to talk does not mean that the Chinese negotiator is trying to put his foreign counterpart in a stressful situation. In the Chinese culture, there is very little privacy and a negotiation is a rather public discussion, as is much of the life of people in professional settings.

A number of publications address the behavioral aspects of negotiation emphasiz­ing cultural differences under the heading of “negotiating styles” (Binnendijk, 1987; Cogan, 2003; Fang, 1999; Fisher, 1980; Graham and Sano, 1984; Smyser, 2002; Snyder, 1999; Solomon, 1999; Wittes, 2005). Some tend to describe the typical ways in which negotiators behave when they are, for instance, Latin American, Japanese, Chinese, or Arab. Conclusions are sometimes drawn in terms of advice for the practitioner such as “do not call your Chinese counterpart by his first name,” “while sitting in a tent, do not show the sole of your shoes to your Arab counterpart,” “do not give a slap on the shoulder of your Japanese counterpart to show him sympathy,” “when you meet a Latin- American negotiator, do not suggest getting to work before getting well acquainted.” These rather anecdotal observations may sometimes be useful to the businessman in an unfamiliar place but bear limitations, as they do not really help to understand the culture of the counterpart across the table, the carpet, or the tent.

Communication is another major compo­nent of the conflict resolution process. All negotiations depend on effective communi­cation, which means that both parties should interpret messages similarly. When commu­nication is indirect, its content ambiguous, and the related feedback scarce, negotia­tion requires a lot of decoding from the participants. Culture and context provide, then, the two main keys to an accurate perception of signals sent by the other party. Differences do not only lie in what is said but in how it is said and also in the social context of the discussions. For instance, drawing conclusions from a field study on US/Japanese negotiations, Graham (1993: 139) observes, “Americans are unable to read Japanese expressions and wrongly describe the Japanese as expressionless.”

The significance of the Japanese smile is an interesting case with which to illustrate the complexity of the task, and at the same time its necessity, because from an objective data one can derive opposite conclusions. A Japanese smile can be perceived as a mask of politeness, an opaque wall behind which one observes the other. It can express cooperation or denial, joy or anger, certainty or total ignorance, trust or distrust, pleasure or embarrassment. Only some knowledge of the Japanese culture and the reference to the current context of the smile may enable one to get access to its real meaning.

Communication may play an important role in the domain of constructive ambiguity as illustrated by the Hainan incident (2001). A collision near the Chinese island of Hainan between a US surveillance aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet led to the death of the Chinese pilot. Meanwhile, the US plane had to make an emergency landing on Chinese ground. The Chinese authorities demanded recognition of full responsibility and deep apologies that the US government was not willing to give.

The second level, that of beliefs, puts forth a set of values coming from the cultural background of the negotiator. These values, stating what is desirable and what is not, operate as instrumental goals and directly orient the behavior of the actors. For instance, the Chinese culture favors harmony and this has a clear influence on negotiation practices such as face-saving, indirect action, collective concern, and relational orientation (Faure, 1999b). Adair and Brett (2004: 163) suggest a model based on an East-West distinction in negotiation with respect to beliefs, goals, and norms. Negotiators from the East (Japan, China) tend to frame negotiation as a relationship. They look for trust built through indirect information sharing and affective influence. Westerners (USA, Germany) tend to frame negotiation as a distribution of resources. They look for joint gains enacted through direct information exchange and rational influence behaviors.

As mentioned in the introduction to this handbook, conflicts over values are much more difficult to solve than conflicts of interest. If only national cultures were at play, as a set of shared values, culture would generate a highly predictable pattern of nego­tiating behavior. With the corporate culture and the professional culture, the assumption of homogeneity looses its relevance and common values become more difficult to discern. In turn, combined with personality variables within strategic behaviors, the final attitude would become much less predictable, if ever.

Ethics are also brought into the interaction by the negotiators themselves.

Cognition bears upon the definition of conflict and the conflict resolution paradigm that is dominant in a given culture. Cognition relates to ways of perceiving, understanding, conceiving what is at stake in a conflict: goods, money, power, technology, status, face concerns, etc. Cognitive obstacles and biases are sources of misperception, often the cause of failure in reaching an agreement (Jonsson, 1990). Cognition also relates to how the negotiation is perceived in itself, the nature of the game that the actors are playing: a strength test, a relationship, a search for justice, a palabra, a game of seduction, a construction exercise, a human adventure, etc. Cognition also concerns what one party knows about the other party. What are the driving perceptions operating: stereotypes, historical memory, past personal experiences, etc.? Stereotyping by bringing together various traits reduces cognitive complexity to simple terms, easier to handle during the preparation of the negotiation. Selective perceptions, attribution, perpetu­ate stereotypes, strengthen pre-notions and assumptions.

For Americans, negotiation is mainly a give and take exercise, but for the Japanese, it is far from being so and, in any case, much more of a relationship (Kimura, 1980: 65). How negotiators frame the situation and deal with it is influenced by their own culture. For instance, will a set of issues be viewed as a list of items to be discussed sequentially as Americans do, or will it be seen as a system of interconnected elements to be approached in a holistic way as the Japanese do (Graham & Sano, 1984: 29)?

Cross-cultural differences in the perception of time may also affect the conflict resolution process. In the West, time is conceived as a commodity that has a cost and should be used with parsimony. In contrast, in the Orient, time is often viewed as an unlimited resource like the air everyone breathes. As a consequence, time pressure will have very little effect on oriental negotiation behavior. As it has been said by a Chinese negotiator to his Western counterpart who was pushing him to quickly come to an agreement: “China has been able to do without your technology for 5000 years. We can wait for a few more years.”

The way to consider conflict as normal, acceptable, unavoidable, or pathological leads people to deal differently with it. If people are used to living in tense contexts where aggressiveness often bursts, they will be much less disturbed than people who experience a much quieter life, such as in the case of a situation in which the counterpart becomes highly emotional. In doing business in Japan, what is viewed as a conflictual negotiation by the Japanese may not be seen as such by Americans. Similarly, what American negotiators often see as a delaying device can simply be for the Japanese the time needed to get to know the other party better. One of the major obstacles in joint venture negotiations in China, as shown by Faure (2000c), comes from the fact that both parties do not conceive the issues at stake and even the negotiation process itself in an identical way. Often, there is little compatibility between both views, thus leading to an agreement based on a huge misunderstanding.

Studies in chronometrics show that the way people organize and react to time varies according to cultures. Time is not an objective contextual component in which all events happen but a way to organize them (Macduff, 2006). Brislin and Kim (2003) distinguish between flexibility of time and the pace of time. The first category includes punc­tuality, and the polychronic/monochronic distinction. The category of pace encom­passes patience/impatience, orientation to past, present, future, and perceptions about the efficient use of time. These various components of time may play a role at the negotiation table as they also vary considerably from one culture to another.

Views of time may strongly vary according to cultures. For instance, in discussions with government representatives of Canada with First Nation People on land claims, the latter tend to see time as stretching forward and back, binding them in relationship with sev­eral generations in both directions (LeBaron and Grundison, 1993).

Perception is constructed in the way that one perceives what he expects to perceive through selecting information that fits his learned categories. Using English in negoti­ating has some influence on the negotiation process. With its construction of subject­predicate, Kimmel (2000) underlines that English creates a world of objects that act or are acted on with fixed relationships between things and their attributes. It creates a causal world of actors-actions-results (Stewart, 1987). Other ways of thinking are judged as wrong or inferior or, at best, weird.

Culture may also influence how the parties interpret the outcome that has been attained. In some societies, an agreement is a final decision carved in marble that has to be strictly implemented. In others, an agreement is a written paper that was valid the day it was signed and which may be modified if the external conditions prevailing at the time of the signing have changed. For the Chinese, for instance, signing a contract is not closing a deal but substantiating a relationship at a certain stage of a long-term process.

The general approach to conflict resolution is clearly conditioned by actors' culture. To the Cartesian-analytical approach implemented in the West can be opposed by the holistic approach shared by the Chinese and Japanese. The first approach aims to split the problem into subsets and solve the difficulties as and when required; the second tends to assess the entire situation and learn how to accommodate the relative influence of the many forces involved (Redding, 1990). Within the whole problem, language, a basic cultural product, is a major instrument in cognitive activities. Problems can only be defined within existing categories as has already been emphasized. As commonly said, “if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem is a nail.” Labeling is, thus, a major cultural activity that conditions and, to some extent, structures social action. Culture may also influence the method negotiators use in order to reach an agreement Kolb and Faure, 1994. Some cultures, such as the French or the German, favor a deductive approach, looking first for acceptable principles, and then applying them to concrete issues. Other cultures, such as the American, would rather adopt an inductive approach, dealing pragmatically with encountered difficulties, and underlying principles may only become discernible in the end (Salacuse, 1991).

Identity is the fourth level of intervention, the deepest, the most sensitive and the most difficult to deal with. Through symbols, for instance, we produce meanings and enact our identity. Identity addresses queries on the conception of the self, of responsibility, accountability to the group, to history, to future generations. Issues of honor mentioned in the introduction to this book are classi­fied as one of the basic types of conflict issues (D’Neil, 1999; Mitchell, 1981). The Palestinian-Israeli conflict does not have only to do with sharing land, sovereignty, and division of scarce resources, such as water, but includes identity issues through acknowledgement and representation (Lowi and Rothman, 1993).

In international relations, we may identify by nationality, ethnic background, profession, religion, organization, ideological creeds, and many more sources. The point then is not to betray oneself by letting the whole reference group be attacked, humiliated, insulted. In some cultures, even a shopkeeper may feel offended if a client does not start bargaining before buying. People may be humiliated if they feel they are not treated adequately because of what they are, their origin, or their gender. It may also work the other way round and some people may expect to be treated better than others because they are perceived as different, for instance, when being upgraded on a long-haul flight. Identity can undergo negotiated change. Negotiation is construction, evolution of images, beliefs, perceptions, values as illustrated by Mezran (2007) on Magribi identities or by Zartman (2001).

When identity is not built by differentiation but mainly through opposition to the other party, any change likely to improve the conditions for a settlement may appear as a betrayal. Modifying the elements that comprise one’s identity is a denial of oneself and can be viewed, at the symbolic level, as a destructive attempt. Fundamental core values such as national identity and national sovereignty (Salacuse, 1993) can easily, when challenged, turn a negotiation into a merciless fight. Difficult to grasp, highly complex to manipulate, extremely costly to restore, identity aspects remain the untouchable core of culture.