Laughter as Strategies in Business Communication Between Thai and Burmese Professionals

Abstract

Laughter is not just an element in human communication that signifies happiness and enjoyment, it can be used as a communication strategy to lubricate successful interaction including business communication. Nonetheless, not many studies have paid attention to laughter in business communication. Therefore, this paper sheds light on how Thai and Burmese participants used laughter in a restaurant and in a business meeting in Yangon, Myanmar. Audio data was collected together with various pieces of ethnographic data, for example, participant observations reported from extensive field notes, semi-structured interviews and audio recordings. The analysis was based on the classification of laughter adopted from Hayakawa (2003), and Murata and Hori (2007). The findings reveal that laughter is deployed as a communication strategy with different purposes such as to make fun of work, to ease tension and to threaten other interlocutors and unveil those factors which stimulate the laughter in informal and formal settings.