Paradoxical cultural categories and paradoxical social relationships: The case of cooperation and competition

Paradoxical Cultural Categories and Paradoxical Social Relationships: The Case of Cooperation and Competition Josh Keller (jwkeller@ntu.edu.sg) Division of Strategy, Management & Organisation, Nanyang Technological University 50 Nanyang Ave. S3-B2C-97, Singapore 639798 Jeffrey Loewenstein (jloew@illinois.edu) College of Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 1206 South Sixth Street MC-707 Champaign, IL 61820 USA Martin Kilduff (m.kilduff@ucl.ac.uk) Department of Management Science and Innovation, University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom Jin Yan (yanjin@zju.edu.cn) School of Management, Zhejiang University Gudun Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310058 China Abstract outcomes and their group’s outcomes. Yet it is not clear whether and why actors might choose to engage in both cooperation and competition. We will suggest that categories play a key role in the choice to engage in both cooperation and competition. As a result, we raise new issues in the study of culture, categories, and complex social relationships. The specific account that we develop centers on what we term paradoxical categorization, or the classification of a single situation as a member of both of two opposing categories. In our case, the paradoxical categorization of interest is the classification of a situation as both an instance of cooperation and an instance of competition. We show that culture influences whether individuals engage in paradoxical categorization. Then we show that paradoxical categorization predicts whether managers have working relationships that are both cooperative and competitive. How individuals think about opposing or paradoxical categories influences their social relationships. We found that Chinese managers were more likely than US managers to categorize attempts to outperform others as an instance of both competition and cooperation. Further, the Chinese managers were more likely than the US managers to perceive a given working relationship as being both cooperative and competitive. The two findings were linked: culturally-guided beliefs about whether the cooperation-competition paradox should be integrated or kept separate influenced how individuals understood their social relationships. More broadly, the implication is that category membership and relations between categories are guided by cultural influences distinct from the particulars of the categories themselves that normally enter into cognitive science research on categories. In addition, those categorization choices are consequential for the network of social relationships individuals form. Keywords: Categories; paradox; cooperation; competition; culture; relationships; China. Paradoxical Cultural Categories Multiple streams of work are now challenging longstanding assumptions about the relation between cooperation and competition, and they are converging to make the joint use of cooperation and competition an important question. One such longstanding assumption in research on cooperation and competition, also implicit in the quote from Secretary Clinton, is that cooperation and competition are separate. Cooperation and competition have long been defined as mutually exclusive types of relationship (Deutsch, 1949), mutually exclusive types of behavior (Komorita & Parks, 1996), and mutually exclusive types of motivation (McClintock & Allison, 1989). However, there are now multiple proposals about why cooperation and competition could be integrated (e.g., Brandenberger & Nalebuff, 1996; Van de Vliert, 1999), suggesting that cooperation and competition can co-occur. Another longstanding assumption in research on cooperation and competition (Fulop, 2004), also implicit in Introduction [O]ur two countries gain far more when we cooperate with one another than when we descend into an unhealthy competition. Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, Beijing, September 5, 2012, at a joint press conference with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. Choices to engage in cooperation and competition are fundamental to a wide range of social life, ranging from diplomacy between nations down to working relationships between individuals. Actors form competitive relationships as they seek to maximize their own outcomes and form cooperative relationships as they seek to achieve group goals. Further, most actors, most of the time, have mixed motives—they are concerned with both their individual