Giving Face

Abstract

In China, any questioning of a manager by workers means that the manager loses face. It is important to ‘have face’ and a manager gets face from their workers. Workers can decide if they want to ‘give face’ or not. This brings drama to something that to us can seem rather trivial events. An example of this is a controversy between the assistant workshop director, Mr Shen, and the crane operator, Mr Zhou. Mr Shen ordered Mr Zhou to move some parts to another place in the workshop, but Mr Zhou said that it would be better to do it later, when all the parts had arrived. Mr Shen became very upset, not so much because Mr Zhou did not carry out the order immediately but because several other workers were present and — even worse — a researcher witnessed what happened. Mr Shen felt that he had lost face; he then became flushed and exclaimed: ‘No wonder other people say that we have too many crane operators over here!’ This was a rather concrete threat to Mr Zhou as the labour market was very difficult, and there was a lot of joblessness.