CHAPTER ONE
Introduction to Culture and Negotiation
People who work across cultures, whether internationally or within nations, need general principles—a cultural map, if you will—to guide their negotiation strategies. Such a map will help them to:
• Identify the general topography of cultures—the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, procedures, and social structures that shape human interactions
• Recognize potential hazards, obstacles, and pleasant surprises that intercultural travelers and negotiators might miss without a guide
• Select responses that will be more likely to achieve successful interactions and outcomes

A definition of culture. * Culture is the cumulative result of experience, beliefs, values, knowledge, social organizations, perceptions of time, spatial relations, material objects and possessions, and concepts of the universe acquired or created by groups of people over the course of generations. * Culture enables people to live together in a society within a given geographical environment, at a given state of technical development, and at a particular moment in time (Samovar and Porter, 1988). * Governments and their agencies, corporations and private firms, universities and schools, civil society and nongovernmental organizations have their own specific cultures and ways of doing things, often called organizational culture). * Culture is also rooted in religious beliefs, ideological persuasions, professions, and professional training and in the levels and types of . Finally, families have cultures that are a blend or combination of the cultures of their adult members or of their extended.

WHAT IS NEGOTIATION?

Negotiation is a joint decisionmaking process in which parties, with initially opposing positions and conflicting interests, arrive at a mutually beneficial and satisfactory agreement. It normally includes dialogue