Negotiation and intransigency in forum discussions on interethnic topic
Negotiation and intransigency in forum discussions on interethnic topic

Summary/Abstract: There are several issues emphasized when studying a forum on arguments for and against the return of emigrants from Canada to Romania: the emigrants realize that in order to get affirmative feedback from the people in the host-country, they need to adjust their identity so that it reunites their own ethnic features with the ethnic features in the new country; it is also to be taken into consideration the fact that for the Romanians in Canada, this hybrid identity might also contain Romanian elements which are compatible with the Canadian elements, the result being the identity of a Romanian - Canadian. The objective of this paper is to establish the way in which some participants in the online Romanian forum debates see the existence of some cultural differences between them and the Canadians. We have mainly referred to the debate forum of the news website “hotnews.ro” whose topic between 2008 and 2010 was “I want to leave Canada for Romania. What would you advise me?” As far as the social negotiation is concerned (on the one hand, it deals with the interethnic negotiation between the Romanians and the Canadians, and on the other hand, it deals with the negotiation between the participants in the discussion on the online forum we analyzed), the five message fragments we have selected from the online discussion regarding the Romanian and Canadian inhabitants can be associated both with competitive and collaborative (who make compromises) negotiators.

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