Managing Business Relationships in New Zealand and China

This paper investigates communication strategies for building business relationships from a semantic perspective (culture-specific interpretation of meanings). The research method is based on discourse analysis of interviews with the New Zealand and Chinese managers. This study suggests that using a semantic perspective provides in-depth analysis of the managers' discourse of target cultures, which complements the prevalent approach of using cultural dimensions. New Zealand and Chinese managers prefer different sets of semantic frames for constructing business relationships. Furthermore, Chinese business managers tend to use interpersonal strategies to initiate a business relationship while New Zealand managers employ inter-group strategies. Both cultures, however, employed interpersonal communication strategies in the maintaining stage.