Face Negotiation Theory

The face negotiation theory, developed by Stella Ting-Toomey, explains the culture-based and situational factors that shape communicators' tendencies in approaching and managing conflicts. The meaning of face is generally conceptualized as how we want others to see us and treat us and how we actually treat others in association with their social self-conception expectations. In everyday interactions, individuals are constantly making conscious or unconscious choices concerning face-saving and face-honoring issues across interpersonal, workplace, and international contexts. Although face is about a claimed sense of interactional identity, facework is about verbal and nonverbal behaviors that protect-save self, other, or mutual face.

The researching of facework can be found in a wide range of disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, management, international diplomacy, and human communication studies, among others. The concept of face has been used to explain linguistic politeness rituals, apology acts, embarrassment situations, requesting behaviors, and conflict interactions. The root of the face negotiation (FN) theory was influenced by Hsien Chin Hu's 1944 anthropological essay “The Chinese Concept of Face,” Erving Goffman's 1955 sociological article “On Face-Work,” and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's 1987 linguistics monograph on “Politeness.”

The foundational concepts of the FN theory first appeared in Ting-Toomey's 1985 article “Toward a Theory of Conflict and Culture.” In a subsequent article in 1988, “Intercultural Conflict Styles: A Face-Negotiation Theory,” the formal version of the theory became available—with five core assumptions and 12 theoretical propositions stating the relationship between individualism-collectivism and different facework interaction styles. In 1998, a second rendition of the FN theory with seven assumptions and 32 propositions was published in an essay on “Facework Competence.” Based on the results of several large data sets, a third version of the FN theory appeared in 2005 in “The Matrix of Face” and contained an updated 24 FN theoretical propositions.