Ananalysis Of Business Negotiation Strategy From The Perspective Of Identity Management Theory

With the acceleration of economic globalization,business exchanges and communications with different countries have increased dramatically.Business negotiation as an indispensable part of economic interaction,which plays a crucial role in business activities.Business negotiators are devoted to keeping the process of business negotiation developing smoothly by taking appropriate tactics and strategies.Meanwhile,it is important to examine the negotiator’s changing identity at different given points across time and space in the entire process of business negotiation.However,at present,many scholars and researchers only focus on the pragmatic strategy of business negotiation from different perspectives,such as the cooperative principle,the politeness principle,adaptation and so on.There is almost no substantive research on business negotiation strategies by focusing on the negotiator’s changing identity in the course of negotiation.Therefore,it is crucial and urgent to study the business negotiation strategy from the perspective of identity management theory in order to explain and prove its significance and importance in business negotiation.Based on Imahori and Cupach’s identity management theory,this thesis conducts a tentative and inductive analysis of negotiation strategy in different stages of business negotiation from the perspective of identity management in communication.Through the detailed analysis of business negotiation cases,this thesis illustrates the principles of identity management and the rules of negotiation strategy,expounds its application and usage in negotiation and provides a certain theoretical guidance for the study of negotiation strategy in business negotiation.The thesis mainly adopts a qualitative analysis of a large number of corpora and cases related to pre-negotiation,face-to-face negotiation and post-negotiation by applying the identity management theory together with negotiation strategy to business negotiation.The thesis aims to provide guidance for business negotiators who need to attach more importance to managing their changing identities effectively and taking negotiating strategy appropriately at different given points across time and space in the entire process of negotiation.In this way,business negotiation can proceed smoothly and successfully.This thesis can be divided into five parts.Part one mainly presents the fundamental structure of this thesis,such as research objectives and questions,significance and organization of the research.Part two provides a summary of the overseas and domestic studies on business negotiation strategy from different perspectives.Part three is the theoretical framework of the thesis that mainly introduces identity management theory and presents the detailed analysis of some key notions of the theory,such as relational identity management,cultural identity management and face-work strategy.More importantly,this thesis focuses on analyzing the impact of the identity management theory upon the application of negotiation strategy in the pre-negotiation,face-to-face negotiation and post-negotiation based on the actual case against the theoretical framework.It presents appropriate and decent approaches to utilize negotiation strategy,which will help business negotiators to manage their own identities and take appropriate negotiation strategies in order to avoid stereotyping,identity freezing and face-threatening in business negotiation.The final part is a conclusion which summarizes the importance of improving the negotiator’s understanding and management abilities on identity in the process of business negotiation so as to promote the effectiveness of negotiation strategy from the perspective of identity management theory.Meanwhile,the thesis discusses the limitations in this research and puts forward the prospects for further study of the application of identity management theory in business negotiation and the trend for future development.It is hoped that this study will help business negotiators to improve their negotiation competence and performance in business negotiation.