Intercultural Communication in the Chinese Workplace

China's sharp economic growth at the beginning of the twenty-first century has resulted in an increasing number of people from the other countries moving to work in China. This inevitably highlights the cultural differences that are apparent between China and other global workplace cultures. This book proposes a new theoretical and methodological approach to the investigation and explanation of intercultural differences in conflict management strategies and relational (politeness) strategies in workplace settings, taking the Chinese workplace as its focus. Drawing upon social psychology, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, the book analyses various types of data such as recordings of meetings, participant interviews, organizational documents and emails to offer a new research approach that has relevance for researchers and scholars of intercultural communication globally.

Ping Du is Assistant Professor at the School of English, the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Her areas of expertise include intercultural communication and sociolinguistic study of workplace interactions. She has previously worked as a lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Tsinghua University, China.