Revisiting face in Chinese business meetings in Hong Kong

A vast body of literature targeted at practitioners and academics suggests that face is a crucial concept in Chinese business communication. In particular, it is often argued that giving, enhancing, and protecting one’s own and each other’s face are important practices for establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships (Bargiela-chiappini 2003, Mao 1994, Scollon & Scollon 2001). These processes are said to be particularly important in Chinese professional relationships which are typically characterised by strict hierarchical structures and relatively fixed power relations (Pan 2000). Taking a discourse analytic perspective, this paper explores how face is negotiated in professional relationships in Chinese business contexts in Hong Kong. Our study draws on authentic audio- and video-recordings of business meetings conducted in two different companies: a large international consulting company and a traditional small family business. The meetings in both companies were conducted in Cantonese, the Chinese variety spoken in Hong Kong. These discourse data are supplemented by interviews, participant observation and a workplace culture survey.This paper focuses on those potentially very face-threatening instances where subordinates issue disagreements and refusals towards their superiors. In particular, we examine how subordinates communicate disagreements and refusals towards their bosses and how the bosses maintain their face needs or remedy their face loss due to these FTAs. Our findings challenge traditional assumptions that face is relatively static and closely related to power relations. Rather, our examples indicate that the notion of face is dynamically constructed and interactionally accomplished by interlocutors as the interaction unfolds.