Face-Negotiation Theory

Face and Politeness Theory

• First formulated in 1978 by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson.
• Politeness is a battery of social skills whose goal is to ensure everyone feels affirmed in a social interaction.
• Being polite therefore consists of attempting to save face for another.

About Face

Past FGT Researches

What does it say?

Types of Face Needs

• The theory suggests that a single message can provoke more than one face threat and can both support or threaten face needs simultaneously, and that politeness and face threats influence subsequent messages.
• Trying to satisfy one face need usually affects the other face need.

• Brown & Levinson 1987 discovered that two types of universal needs exists: Positive face needs and Negative face needs.
• Positive face is the desire to be liked and admired by others.
• Negative face refers to the desire to be autonomous and unconstrained.

Example

• Recognition of face needs explains why a student who wanted to borrow a classmate's note typically wouldn't ask for them boldly ("Lend me your notes, would you?"), but more frequently would ask in a manner that paid attention to a person's negative face wants ("Would it be possible for me to borrow your notes for just an hour? I'll photostat them and get them back to you right away").

• Interpersonal conflict in organizations: Explaining conflict styles via face‐negotiation theory by John Oetzel, et al.
• Facework competence in intercultural conflict: an updated face-negotiation theory by Stella Ting-toomey & Atsuko Kurogi.
• Face Concerns in Interpersonal Conflict A Cross-Cultural Empirical Test of the Face Negotiation Theory by John G. Oetzel & Stella Ting-Toomey.

• Face is a metaphor for the image that we wish to portray to others.
• It's a claimed sense of interactional identity
• We have different faces we adopt depending on where we are and with whom.
• Ting-Toomey states that face can be interpreted in two primary ways: face concern and face need.

Face Concern

Face Need

• Face need is the desire to be associated or disassociated with others.
• It refers to an inclusion-autonomy conflict.
• That is, "Do I want to be associated with others (inclusion) or do I want dissociation (autonomy)?

• Face concern is interest in maintaining one's face or the face of others. In other words, there's is a self-concern and an other concern.
• Face concern answers the question, "Do I want attention drawn toward myself or toward another"

What is FNT?

• FNT is a theory first proposed by Stella Ting-Toomey in 1985 to understand how different cultures throughout the world respond to conflict.

• Specifically used to illustrate differences between individualistic and collectivistic cultures' face concerns and face needs.

Recommendations for Future Research

Who is the theorist?

• Solving conflicts with father and mother in-law.
• Whether to spank children or not, traditional upbringing vs modern upbringing.
• Awkward-questions-filled family gatherings.

• Stella Ting-Toomey is a professor of Human Communication Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
• Authored & edited 17 books and over more than 100 articles/chapters on the topics of intercultural conflict competence and ethnic identity negotiation process.

Face-Negotiation Theory