Intercultural Conflict Management In Conversation

With the integration of global economy, intercultural conflicts arise much morefrequently than ever before. These conflicts not only emerge in trade and business,but also in the political field, and people’s daily life. In the communication betweendifferent cultures, how to reduce frictions, harmonize interpersonal relationships andincrease communication efficiency becomes the imperative of our time. Theimportance of conflict management is obvious.Combining intercultural conflict management theory with linguistic theory(discourse analysis, polite principle and face theory), this paper takes theOscar-winning film Crash as an example to do case study. By analyzing theintercultural conflict talks in the film of different situation, the author makes thefollowing major findings: the format of claim vs. counterclaim ranks the first in theinitiative stage of conflict; rhetorical questions and direct confrontation make theconflict escalate in the developing stage. In the terminating stage, the results varydue to the diverse choices of conflict resolution styles.The paper focuses on three variables–culture, gender, and organization tomeasure the seven conflict resolution styles. The quantitative analysis of conflictresolution styles choice reports that culture influences people’s choice to a largeextent. Women use dominating style and confronting style more than the traditionalfemale role does, especially in the conversations between the same genders. Interms of organizational role, high status people incline to use the dominating style;integrating style is the most preferred choice for medium status people; low statuspeople on the one hand tend to choose confronting styles for resolving the conflict ina direct way, on the other hand, they tend to choose avoiding style to settle theconflict.