Just before I started writing this piece, I was visited in my office by a dynamic young Russian businesswoman. She had found my work on the Internet and wanted to meet to discuss the courses in Intercultural Communication she is trying to initiate, both in‐house in her company and for Economics undergraduates at a Moscow university. She told me how difficult it was to get hold of current texts and her eyes lit up when she saw, lying on my desk, a copy of International Marketing Review and of Brett’s new book, waiting to be reviewed. Jeanne M. Brett’s new book Negotiating Globally, in effect, became the catalyst of our discussion of several hours, as I explained to her how it related to my own research and teaching and how it also fed into her plans.
Brett’s text demonstrates all the strengths and all the failings of an Amerocentric approach to the topic. It is seductively easy to read; the tone is relatively informal and the book is laced with interesting case studies such as the launch of Disneyland in Tokyo and Hong Kong. The author is well travelled; her findings are based on extensive research, are explained clearly and illustrated with helpful charts and diagrams. As the Dewitt W. Buchanan Jr Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, North Western University, she is clearly a much respected expert in her field. If you are anything like me, as a reader, you respond to the “voice” of a book, that mixture of tone and point of view that produces one half of the dialogue between author and reader. The “voice” in Negotiating Globally belongs, most appropriately in the US MBA seminar with its use, at times, of homespun examples and its acronyms, her favourite being BATNA, “the Best Alternative To the Negotiated Agreement”. In other words, how to leave the negotiating table with something, even if it is not what you originally set out to achieve. It would be churlish to focus on such Americanisms when those of us involved in Intercultural Communications should be the first to acknowledge how easily we Brits can be put off our stroke by a different usage of our own language. What is far more significant is that the author gives only two pages to the topic of language, which must be considered as central to any communication act. As far back as 1960 the scholar Benjamin Whorf described language as a “vast pattern system (…) in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his [sic] reasoning and builds the house of his [sic] consciousness”. Brett’s house of consciousness, I have to say, diverges from my own, although, technically, we speak “the same language”.
Engaging though her book is, I missed any critical edge to much of what she had to say. Her use of acknowledged communication theory is uncritical, selective, and in places (for example, in terms of non‐verbal communication) limited. But more importantly than that, the danger of writing any book setting out to tell the reader “how to …” is that the author is reduced to using homogenized national groupings – the French, the Chinese, the Japanese – and this is only one step away from stereotyping. In a period of history in which more and more people are “on the move” and many societies are more multicultural than monocultural, it is becoming less and less possible to say with any truth that we are defined by our “nation”. The reality is that socio‐economic class is probably far more defining than nationhood.
The author sets out to “provide practical advice about how to manage cultural differences when they appear at the bargaining table”, and what she writes is lively and engaging. In Chapter One she lays the groundwork for understanding how culture affects deal making, dispute resolution and multicultural team decision‐making negotiations. In Chapter Two she gives concrete advice about negotiating deals across cultures. Chapter Three focuses on resolving disputes and Chapter Four on multicultural teams (one of the strongest passages, since it acknowledges, if only in part, that discussions of “culture” are complex – and, I would add, often ambiguous and contradictory). Chapter Five explores different kinds of social dilemmas and “how to use psychology to manage them” (how easy she makes it sound!). Chapter Six introduces the importance of government’s role around the negotiating table and Chapter Seven explores the growing dominance of Western negotiation strategies in different cultures.
What is left out of a book and what is included are not only editorial decisions but also political judgements. Although Brett’s book claims, in its title, to address the topic “globally”, this would seem to be a very loose use of the term. In fact the continent of Africa appears nowhere in her text (except in one passing reference to South Africa) and Russia is given only three brief references. India is given two pages plus a reference to head‐shaking as a mark of listening. There is no entry in the Index for Arab, Islam or Muslim. The message seems to be that, in this context, “globally” means any culture that the author considers useful to include. One of the most interesting sections of the book is where the author writes about the use of power and influence at the negotiating table but her understanding of “power” is relatively politically naïve. She ignores what Young has described as the “ideological distortions” that can occur when negotiations are taking place between business parties from countries placed at differing points on the Human Development Index and yet it is precisely those negotiations which often prove to be the most problematic.
“Some things about cultures you just have to accept”, Brett writes in an end‐note to one of her chapters, in which she is confronted by a situation she cannot categorise in terms of cultural difference. A Chinese employee is told by a US colleague that the report she has submitted is inadequate. She goes running to her Chinese boss to hide behind his status. Brett tries hard to extract from this incident some general rule about Chinese behaviour but has to acknowledge that maybe this is behaviour idiosyncratic to that particular individual rather than common to all Chinese people. The fact is that cultural difference so often defies bullet‐pointing and this is the only occasion I came across where the author made any such concession. You cannot “fix” cultural difference and it is misleading to suggest any way that you can. The danger of any “how to” book is that it can fall into the trap of making something complex appear deceptively simple. I enjoyed Brett’s book as an engagement with this field of enquiry and I think it would be a useful text for an MBA course, just as long as the students were asked to engage in a critique of its approaches to the subject. We need good books about cultural difference, a topic which is exciting as well as problematic, but such books will only serve to maintain the status quo of relative ignorance and even indifference if large areas of the world are excluded as if they have no voice at the negotiating table. An opportunity is open to us here to combine the resources of business practitioners and academic researchers even more than is being done already to grapple with a topic whose importance is further highlighted by the current international crisis.
We will never know all the answers but we can go on asking the right questions. I would like, for example, to have seen Professor Brett move beyond national stereotyping (the French, the Chinese and the Japanese) to explore “the ethnicities of whiteness”; that whole area of negotiations between those, often with the greatest economic power, who speak the same language but come from different cultures; say, between Americans and Australians. But then, I remind myself, the Australian might be Chinese in origin and the American Yugoslav by descent. My point, exactly!
