Negotiation processes as talk and interaction : Interaction analyses of informal negotiations

Sammanfattning: This thesis presents interaction analyses of one Swedish and theee international negotiations, all authentic.The first study cancerns the phase structure and intemctional manifestations of cooperation found in the Swedish negotiation set of three sessions. The phase structure of each session was found to be related to the general negotiation structure of three main parts; an initiation phase, a problem solving phase and a resolution phase. The distribution of the two types of cooperative talk, teamtalk and grouptalk, and the general interaction character differed from phase to phase. The first phase was mainly monologic and included few instances of cooperative talk, the second phase was mainly dyadic and included several instances of team talk, while the interaction of the third phase kept switching between dyadic and multi-party talk. Teamtalk as well as grouptalk were frequently used in this phase.In the second study incipient miscommunication between native and non-native speakers of English was categorized and examined. Cross-cultural miscommunication was found to be an intrinsic part of the establishing of consensus and could therefore be used as a communicative resource. However, miscomrnunication related to the different socio-cultural backgrounds and to unawareness regarding the miscomrnunication sometimes had serious interactional consequences.The third study presents an analysis of the distribution and function of laughter in different types of international negotiations. The analyses foeussed on when the participants laughed, at what the participants laughed and how the participants laughed jointly or unilaterally. The analyses indicated firstly that laughter worked as a discourse boundary device; secondly that laughter signalled what topies were important or less important, sensitive or less sensitive and thirdly; that unilateral laughter, as opposed to joint laughter, was more frequent with those participants that were at a disadvantage.The fourth study describes and analyses the interactional features that justify these informal meetings to be called negotiations. It compared the premisses for and characteristics of the different negotiatians. An institutional type of talk, negotiation talk, i.e. ordinary easual conversation adapted and reshaped to fit a specific communicative event, the negotiation, was found in all the negotiatians. Negotiators pursued instrumental, relational and face-related goals of which the relational and the face-related goals were found to be more important to the negotiators than previous research implies. The negotiations were agenda driven. They included elements of conscious planning and the negotiation discourse had a particular type of topic structure, supported by a particular participation framework. Finally, every negotiation must be studied as an individual part that has reached a particular stage of development within the negotiation process. These characteristics of negotiatians call for a flexible, multi-dimensional interactional competence on thc part of the negotiator.