In negotiation literature, culture has been framed as part of the invisible architecture that shapes negotiations, determining how actors communicate and resolve conflict. By positing culture as fixed, negotiation scholarship has too often reified difference instead of analysing how meaning is produced through interaction. As a result, there is an overwhelming amount of literature that explains behaviour through static cultural categories, leaving lived, relational and political processes underexamined. Brigg and Muller (2009) and Bülow and Kumar (2011) argue that culture should not be merely described as a variable that rests in the background but as something continually created and contested through negotiation. Their work successfully redirects attention from culture as a measured variable used to differentiate actors towards an understanding that is formed through interaction. By shifting normative understandings of culture, we are setting it free to constantly renegotiate power and meaning while evolving throughout time and space. This essay examines Durate’s (2009) case of the Greenery Program of Belo Horizonte and the jeitinho brasilerio, which refers to the practice of navigating social interactions through discretion, reciprocity and personal connection. Jeitinho is not a timeless national trait; instead, it is a dynamic practice that gains meaning through moral reasoning and situational constraints. It transforms into a negotiation mechanism amid institutional pressure, wherein trust and authority are re-established through informal relationships. The paper is divided into four sections. It begins with a brief overview of traditional conceptualisations of culture and its veer towards essentialism. Brigg and Müller (2009) are then used to demonstrate how the authority of the analyst can still be prioritised even in “interpretive” work. Bülow and Kumar (2011) introduce “transaction culture”, whereby negotiations create their own transient norms. Finally, it applies these ideas to Duarte’s circumstances to show how budgetary restrictions, bureaucratic hold-ups, and unequal access to relationships result in jeitinho. Culture is something that negotiators create and debate in real time, not something we can treat as a static variable sitting behind the interaction.

Theoretical Background

Culture exists on many levels, although in the field of negotiation, national culture is the prominent lens it is studied, even when it risks grouping within-country variation and treating nations as coherent cultural units (Boothby, Cooney, & Schweitzer, 2023, pp. 317-318). Hofstede’s logic is a classic example of this outdated definition of culture as “the collective programming of the mind” that distinguishes one group from another (1984, p. 81). Under this definition, culture is positioned as an internalised set of values shared by members of a group, producing systematic differences in communication styles, essentially a shared cognitive “program” produced by socialisation within different groups of a nation. This approach created a measurable structure for negotiators to anticipate communication style and bargaining behaviours when engaging with those from different cultures. Here, national culture is treated as the main explanatory variable. Critics deem this impression as essentialism, the idea that members of a group share a relatively uniform cultural “essence” that explains their behaviour.

Brigg and Muller (2009) push the bounds of negotiation literature further when they move away from definitional debates of culture towards an examination of how culture is constituted and mobilised within analytical frameworks. At the centre of their critique is Kevin Avruch’s (1998) interpretive approach towards culture. His work represents a clear advance over positivist and behaviouralist models by rejecting national homogeneity and emphasising culture as a set of meanings that individuals use to make sense of situations (Avruch, 1998, pp. 17-20). Moreover, underlines the uniqueness of individuals and emphasises that no population can be reduced to represent a cultural whole, as culture is “psychologically and socially distributed,” unevenly shared across subgroups and individuals (Avruch, 1998, pp. 18). However, Brigg and Muller (2009) argue that Avruch creates a paradox between “scientific” or experience-distant uses of culture and “political” or experience-near uses mobilised by conflict parties themselves (Brigg & Muller, 2009, pp. 124-126). While intended to guard against the strategic manipulation of cultural claims, this distinction risks re-privileging Western social science as the legitimate ruler of cultural meaning, thereby reproducing colonial hierarchies of knowledge production (Brigg & Muller, 2009, pp. 127-130). The issue here is that Avruch posits the idea that an analysis is able to stand outside of politics, which obscures the fact that socio-scientific knowledge of culture is itself culturally and historically situated (pp. 130-132). Thus, Brigger and Muller warn that interpretive approaches that aim to be culturally sensitive have the potential to inadvertently devalue difference by subordinating lived cultural meanings to expert interpretation through epistemological privilege.

In an effort to move beyond this impasse, Brigg and Muller consider Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the “empty signifier”, which views culture as a category that is fundamentally incomplete due to culture’s constant evolving nature, but is still politically powerful (Brigg & Muller, 2009, pp. 132-134). Imagining culture as an empty signifier allows for the process through which meaning is continually “filed in” through interactions, instead of assuming culture exists as a stable object awaiting interpretation (pp. 134-136). In doing so, scholars are able to value cultural difference without reifying it or claiming authoritative knowledge over it.

This analysis aligns with Bülow and Kumar’s (2011) argument that negotiations generate a temporary “transaction culture,” in which meaning is produced through interaction as parties negotiate norms, expectations, and power relations (Bülow & Kumar, 2011, p. 355). This perspective allows informal practices and relational ties to be analysed as constitutive of the negotiation itself, rather than as external cultural influences. This scholarship shows that cultural practices operate as power resources that negotiators mobilise to shape outcomes, not as a static context sitting behind the interaction. However, from a Brigg and Muller perspective, this framework can still make a mistake by treating culture primarily as an analytical construct rather than interrogating the politics of how cultural meaning is constituted and legitimised.

Duarte’s (2006) investigation into the Brazilian jeitinho provides a great starting point for how culture should and should not be analysed. Jeitinho is widely accepted to be a tactical mode of relations problem-solving, allowing actors to move through the bureaucratic rigidity through personal charm, reciprocity, and flexible interpretations of rules (pp. 54-56). Therefore, jeitinho is a way to influence that relies on culturally recognised norms of empathy. On the one hand, Duarte falls into essentialist fallacies when she describes jeitinho as a “culturally sanctioned” practice and notes it is often perceived as “essentially” Brazilian, listing traits such as creativity, informality, personalism, and ambiguity (Duarte, 2006, p. 512). On the other hand, Duarte’s explanation is strongly contextual and institutional. She links jeitinho to historical legacies of Portuguese legalism and highly formal social relations, alongside personalism and patrimonial arrangements that make rule-following rigid and slow (Duarte, 2006, pp. 512-513). Drawing on Crozier, she shows how bureaucracies inevitably generate “areas of uncertainty” because formal rules cannot cover every situation, creating space for informal bargaining and discretionary problem-solving (Duarte, 2006, p. 516).

The Greenery Program

Durate’s (2006) study examines jeitinho in the Greenery program, a sustainability partnership in Belo Horizonte involving the municipal government (Prefeitura), the environmental NGO Verde, and four community groups (2006, pp. 517-519). This Program was set up in an effort to curb the socio-environmental problems, such as pollution, ill-health, lack of educational opportunities, unemployment, and landslides that usually impact residents of the dwellings. Established in 1995, the Greenery Program is a tri-partnership set up to provide residents with skills to combat the aforementioned socio-environmental challenges. The Prefeitura managed and controlled funds, Verde provided technical expertise and teachers to run courses for the four Greenery services. The objectives were to promote socio-environmental and cultural development, raise awareness for sanitation and environmental issues, provide nutrition education, support local projects targeting such issues and enhance the participation of community groups in the management of public policies.

At the outset of the program, regular environmental education and ‘agro-ecological’ techniques workshops ran. However, between 1999-2002, only limited activities were offered due to insufficient funds for teachers’ salaries, leading to the exit of Verde (Durate 2006, p. 519). In the socio-historical and economic backdrop, Brazil was facing a R$305 billion deficit in 1998, which led to a R$8.7 billion budget cut, which targeted social programs like Greenery. From an allocation of funds totalling $400,00 per annum to a reduction to R$50,000, the program was only able to continue with a fraction of their initiatives, which led to the increase of jeitinhos as described by Durate’s (2006) interview stories.

Enter Mauricio, a worker eager to continue the argo-ecological workshops. After he forwarded his concerns to the divisional manager and was turned down, he turned to informal social mechanisms to achieve his desired outcome as he “couldn’t let the communities down” (p. 520). The person who managed the NGO funding was his childhood friend and proposed an exchange: a reduction in workshop fees for some free lectures for Verde on project management that Mauricio taught. This was done covertly without the knowledge of the Prefeitura.

Another story looks at Osvaldo, the clerical officer shares the struggle of getting petty cash to buy small items. The system was complex, time-consuming, and left staff without their work coffees. However, through informal networks, Osvaldo knew the owner of the local shop, and he was comfortable enough to request that the payment for the coffee be paid at a later date while still being able to access, before the funds from the Prefeitura came. Again, trust was incremental in this arrangement that linked them together through their shared frustration among workers was the rigid and complex bureaucracy. Once again, the formal rules were broken and done without the knowledge of the prefertura, which allowed them to circumvent the system and maintain the flow of work.

The Case & Theory

The Greenery Program illustrates how cultural contexts can be better analysed as something produced and mobilised in negotiations. Duarte (2006) describes Greenery as a tripartisanship, which is a formal arrangement assumed to be stable with institutional cooperation and reliable funding. However, these conditions did not hold and when activities were cut due to wider fiscal tightening, including a large deficit and major budget cuts that hit social programming (Duarte, 2006, p. 519). Put simply, the “negotiation environment” changed materially, and so did what it became rational and possible to do. Bülow and Kumar’s (2011) “transient mini-cultures” explains what manifested in negotiations, observable through the evolving relational dynamics between Prefeitura, Verde, and the community groups. Actors did not act according to stable national values; they adapted their behaviour to evolving constraints. As municipal funding tightened and administrative delays increased, obligations, practices and the expectations of relationships changed. Negotiation interactions began to posit the characterisation of an emerging transaction culture that changed to be characterised by its own norms and expectations shaped by power relations (2011, p. 355). As administrative delays increased and decision-making authority became fragmented, informal negotiations stepped up to bridge the gap left by bureaucratic rigidity.

Duarte’s cases show this interactional culture being assembled story by story. Mauricio, trying to keep agro-ecological workshops running after being refused through formal channels, relies on a childhood friendship with the person managing NGO funding and arranges an off-the-books exchange to reduce workshop fees in return for lectures he provides on project management (Duarte, 2006, p. 520). Osvaldo, blocked by petty-cash procedures, uses his relationship to obtain coffee on informal credit until funds arrive (Duarte, 2006, p. 522). These are negotiations, but not in the narrow sense of formal bargaining at a table. They are ongoing micro-settlements over resources, obligations, and legitimacy under institutional stress.

Duarte’s historical account of this interpretation by situating jeitinho as an adaptive response to excessive formalisation and patrimonial bureaucracy and not a cultural idiosyncrasy (2006, pp. 512-514). When formal procedures are slow, impersonal or do not respond, actors seek alternative pathways to achieve their goals. Drawing on Crozier’s theory of bureaucracy, Duarte shows how rigid systems inevitably generate “areas of uncertainty” where discretion and informal negotiation become possible and necessary (2006, p. 516). In the Greenery Program, these areas of uncertainty expanded as institutional support weakened, increasing reliance on informal negotiation practices. Mauricio’s story aligns well with this dynamic present as well in Rosenn’s (1971, p. 516) ‘institutional by-pass’ whereby an actor takes actions out of their mandate due to their judgement that formal norms are unrealistic and unfairly disadvantage the community (Rosenn, 1971, cited in Duarte, 2006, p. 516). Therefore, this was not opportunistic behaviour but a moral judgement rooted in responsibility toward the community. This demonstrates the significance of social capital as a function as a form of leverage in negotiations.

Briggs and Muller’s critique is important in this analysis as it pushes observers to interrogate how jeitinho is being made meaningful in the analysis. A reminder of their central warning that even interactive approaches can reproduce epistemological hierarchy if the analyst treats culture as something definable. This is relevant to this Durate’s case since she frames jeitinho as perceived “essentially” Brazilian and enumerates characteristic traits (Duarte, 2006, p. 512). In the same token, Amando and Vinagre Brasil also describe a distinctive “Brazilian cultural being” whilst also emphasising socio-historical and institutional conditions (Amado & Vinagre Brasil, 1991, p. 39). Notably, a Brigg and Muller reading arguably does not require discarding these authors; it requires treating their cultural labels as part of the politics and meaning-making, not as neutral descriptions.

Brigg and Muller (2009) contend that culture can function as an incomplete signifier whose content is continually filled in through contestation and practice (Brigg & Muller, 2009, pp. 131-136). On this notion, jeitinho is not a fixed national essence but a concept whose meaning is assembled in interaction and retrospectively stabilised through storytelling. In Greenery, what qualifies as jeitinho is filled in through concrete exchanges and the morals attached, and the relations of trust that make them feasible (Duarte, 2006, pp. 520-522). Cultural signifier is a great framework that allows scholars to analyse cultural dynamics without enforcing a definition and making a claim to facts.

Moreover, simpatia plays a major role as an interaction resource. Warmth, empathy and charm are said to facilitate trust-building in contexts where formal authority lacks credibility (Duarte 2006, pp. 511-512). These qualities help negotiations flow by reducing confrontation and maintaining relational continuity. Simpatia is not merely “Brazilian warmth,” but a way of generating affinity and smoothing risky exchanges where formal enforcement is unreliable (Duarte, 2006, p. 509). This case also emphasises power relations within negotiations. Informal power accrued to those with dense relational networks, while actors lacking these social ties were paralysed by bureaucratic inertia. This reflects a shift in authority from formal institutions to an interpersonal system of trust, as institutional legitimacy in Brazil had eroded. When Verde withdrew due to the lack of funds and formal coordination collapsed, parallel trust networks sustained program activities through diffuse reciprocity, captured in the logic that “today it is his turn; tomorrow it will be mine” (Duarte, 2006, p. 511). Negotiation power flowed not from hierarchical positions, but from the relationships that maintain the system. This case demonstrates how cultural practices evolve in response to institutional failure. As trust in the formal system declined, trust was reconstituted at the interpersonal level. This dynamic aligns with Bülow and Kumar’s emphasis on negotiation as an adaptive process shaped by shifting power relations and situational constraints. Culture does not automatically equate to a predetermined set of behaviours; culture is produced through the negotiation itself.

The Field of Negotiation

This analysis provides valuable lessons for the study of negation as a field through its challenge of traditional ways of understanding culture. It critiques the overreliance on cross-cultural models that treat culture as a stable and national-level variable. Negotiation behaviour cannot be adequately explained through national traits alone, as seen in the Greenery case. Significant attention must be paid to how cultural practices emerge from institutional contexts, power asymmetries and international processes. The case supports a shift toward process-oriented approaches that conceptualise negation as a place of cultural production.

As Brigg and Muller (2009) caution, this tendency to reduce culture to a certain way of being misses the complexity of culture. Negotiation scholarship must not only recognise that culture is dynamic, but also interrogate who gets to define culture and how these definitions travel through research and practice (Brigg & Muller 2009, pp. 130-132). Bülow and Kumar’s (2011) framework of “transaction cultures” is an important step in this direction because it highlights how each negotiation generates its own temporary norms and expectations (p. 355). Notably, through Brigg and Muller’s lens, this framework remains incomplete if it treats these microcultures purely as analytical findings rather than as contested meanings co-constituted by both participants and observers. Recognising culture as a continually “filled in” signifier (Brigg & Muller, 2009, pp. 132-134) encourages negotiation scholars to study not only what practices emerge during interaction, but also how those practices come to be labelled and legitimised as “cultural.”

The Greenery case demonstrates that negotiation practices such as jeitinho and simpatia are not fixed cultural artefacts but situated repertoires that acquire meaning through performance and recognition. When institutional credibility eroded, actors negotiated new forms of trust and power through interpersonal ties and moral reasoning rather than through national values or formal authority (Duarte, 2006, pp. 511-520). For negotiation research, this means culture should be treated as a relational process that both reflects and reorganises power within interaction. Negotiation research must therefore take informal practices seriously as constitutive elements of governance rather than as marginal or pathological phenomena.

Additionally, this study points to conceptualisations of power and trust as areas for negotiation scholars to consider. Informal negotiations redistribute power toward actors with relational capital, reshaping who can act, decide, and influence outcomes. Trust becomes a negotiated resource rather than an institutional guarantee. By foregrounding these dynamics, the field can move toward more realistic and ethically attentive accounts of how negotiation operates in contexts of institutional fragility.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this essay has argued that the Greenery Program is helpful because it illustrates how cultural meaning is created under constraint rather than because it reveals a stable “Brazilian negotiation style.” According to Brigg and Müller, culture cannot be viewed as a neutral background or a fixed essence. Through this difficult process, actors negotiate what behaviour is acceptable, whose interpretations are significant, and how authority is acknowledged. This change is significant because it compels negotiation research to look at its own categories rather than just the actions of others. This is made tangible by Duarte’s description of Jeitinho. Informal interactions and relational bargaining in the Greenery Program go beyond merely expressing predetermined national values. They arise as useful reactions to fragmented decision-making, bureaucratic rigidity, and delayed funding. Actors use reciprocity, trust, and personal ties to continue their work when official channels fail. In this sense, jeitinho functions as a sort of informal negotiation that illustrates how formal authority can be rendered obsolete in day-to-day governance while redistributing power to individuals who possess relational capital. These practices’ analytical significance is explained by the notion of “transaction culture” put forth by Clow and Kumar. The norms that shape Greenery’s coordination are not wholly imported from “Brazilian culture.” They are assembled through interaction as parties alter constraints and expectations. However, Brigg and Müller’s criticism is still a cautionary tale, if jeitinho is viewed as a fixed cultural object rather than a label whose meaning is continuously filled in and stabilised through storytelling, scholarship, and practice, even process-oriented accounts may revert to reification. The wider implication is that culture should be analysed as power-laden meaning-making within negotiation itself rather than as a variable to be controlled in negotiation research. By doing this, a more realistic explanation of how rules are broken or rewritten, how trust is developed, and how informal practices can sustain collective action when institutions are unable to do so is made possible.

Reference List

Amado, G., & Vinagre Brasil, H. (1991). Cultural aspects of negotiations: The Brazilian way. International Studies of Management & Organization, 21(3), 38–52.

Avruch, K. (1998). Culture and conflict resolution. United States Institute of Peace Press.

Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2023). Embracing complexity: A review of negotiation research. Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 299–332.

Brigg, M., & Muller, K. (2009). Conceptualising culture in conflict resolution. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 30(2), 121–140.

Bülow, A. M., & Kumar, R. (2011). Culture and negotiation. International Negotiation, 16, 349–359. https://doi.org/10.1163/157180611X592905

Duarte, F. (2006). Exploring the interpersonal transaction of the Brazilian jeitinho in bureaucratic contexts. Organization, 13(4), 509–527. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508406067003

Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Sage.

Hofstede, G. (1984). Cultural dimensions in management and planning. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 1(2), 81–99.