MISUNDERSTANDINGS IN BUSINESS

This is a short summary of my Master's dissertation investigating how social status and cultural background influence politeness in other-initiated repair—specifically checks and corrections—within formal business interactions between native English speakers and Hong Kong Chinese non-native speakers. Misunderstandings can be costly in organisational settings, yet little is known about how repair practices function in formal, cross-cultural business talk. The study combines conversation analysis with quantitative coding, examining 110 repair sequences from a large corpus of business meetings, interviews, Q&A sessions, and conference calls.

The theoretical framework draws on conversation analysis (Schegloff, Sacks), politeness theory (Goffman; Brown & Levinson), and cross-cultural communication (Hofstede). Other-initiated repair involves marking a prior utterance as problematic, while other-initiated corrections explicitly replace an interlocutor’s utterance with a more accurate version. Prior research typically focuses on informal interaction or classroom/child-adult conversations. This thesis addresses the gap by analysing how these mechanisms operate in institutional, multicultural communication, where status hierarchies and cultural expectations may influence how people handle misunderstandings.

Using Seto’s (2016) corpus of 37,000 utterances, I identified instances of checks and corrections, categorised them using established repair typologies and coded politeness through dispreference markers, turn-length and repair structure. Social status and cultural background (Anglophone vs. Hong Kong Chinese) were coded using contextual cues and Hofstede’s dimensions. Intercoder reliability was substantial to near-perfect for most variables.

The qualitative findings reveal that corrections—often assumed to be face-threatening—do not inherently damage politeness. Instead, participants frequently handle corrections cooperatively, co-constructing solutions and even publicly soliciting help from others. Direct corrections often lead to post-correction repeats, which can signal acceptance and alignment, though sometimes they also imply annoyance or indifference. No-prefaced corrections (e.g., “no no…”) create longer, more complex sequences, reflecting higher interactional workload but not necessarily reduced politeness. Overall, politeness emerges as a turn-by-turn negotiation, not predetermined by repair type.

Checks, meanwhile, often appear in clusters, with several repair initiations functioning together to resolve complex or overlapping trouble sources. Restricted repair types, particularly candidate understandings, frequently lead to efficient resolution and often include next-turn repeats, signalling confirmation rather than elaboration. These patterns suggest that checks serve both to repair and to prevent macro-level misunderstandings.

Quantitatively, repair and politeness behaviours showed no systematic effect of social status or cultural background. Both native and non-native speakers cooperatively resolved misunderstandings and hierarchical differences did not reliably predict politeness strategies or repair choices. This suggests that in professional environments, interactants co-manage misunderstandings pragmatically rather than culturally or hierarchically.

The thesis concludes that politeness in business interactions is co-constructed in real time, shaped more by interactional needs than by fixed cultural or status differences. Managers should recognise that inclusive communication practices already manifest at the linguistic level, and future research should further explore repair receipts and their role in maintaining face and social cohesion in multicultural workplaces.

The full research article can be found in Radboud University's educational repository.

© Luka Paul Vethake, 2021