Guest Post: Face Negotiation Theory

~written by Eva Radcliffe

The following post was written by SPICE student Eva Radcliffe, as part of her German Culture and Communication course. In this course, students are asked to keep a diary of their experiences in Germany. Faculty members Dr. Nick Bowman and Dr. Jaime Banks select a few passages of these dairies (with the student's permission) and share those here. 

The Face Negotiation Theory was created by Stella Ting-Toomey and is explained as the way different people respond to conflict and how others view their actions. The “face” part of the theory refers to being humiliated or embarrassed. There are three different parts of the Face Negotiation Theory: self-face concern, other-face concern, and mutual-face concern. Self-face concern is to be protective about your own image when your face is threatened. Other-face concern is to be accommodating to the other party so they don’t get embarrassed or lose face. Finally mutual-face concern is when both parties accommodate each other so they both save face.

One experience I can think of is when I went to the Norma grocery store the other day. I went through the aisles picking up what I needed for the next few days. It was only after I had all of my items rung up I realized that the grocery store only accepted cash, and I only had brought along my credit card. The woman who rung me up spoke very little English so we had to communicate mostly through hand motions and facial expressions. At the end of the day, she did not have any other-face concern for me having my card declined and to make matters worse forced me to put all of my groceries back where I found them.

In this interaction I think there was a lack of other-face concern from the woman working at Norma’s because she did not try to accommodate me when she realized that I spoke no German, and she did not care that I was embarrassed to have to walk around the grocery store putting back my cart full of items. I also think there was self-face concern in this interaction because even though I was upset, embarrassed, and a little annoyed (even though it was my fault I didn’t bring Euros) I didn’t want to be an American stereotype by acting privileged or throwing a temper-tantrum when something didn’t go exactly how I wanted it to.