The structural organization of business negotiations

Drawing on the assumption that the business negotiation is a specific type of spoken genre, this piece of qualitative research focuses on the mental patterns or scripts that a sample of European Business English students, who have not been trained in negotiating skills, have regarding the discourse structure of sales negotiations, i.e., the presence or absence of a particular ritualistic behaviour as well as the occurrence or non-occurrence of typified procedures and patterns, by comparing different versions of the same negotiation. The methodology used draws on Discourse Analysis. The main research questions are: Do the students sampled share the same script of a sales negotiation? Can we perceive any relevant differences in students’ expectations about the discourse transactions of a sales negotiation? If so, what are the reasons that may serve as an explanation to such differing views and performances? To what extent does the script upon which students base their expectations concerning the episodic structure of a sales negotiation resemble that of the proposed ideal model of negotiation? The data are sixteen videotaped open role-played negotiations