Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace

Jo Angouri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351068420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

* SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BAAL BOOK PRIZE *

Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace brings new theoretical and methodological insights to the complex relationship between language, culture, and identity in professional settings. Examining the politics of language use at work via a critical sociolinguistic approach, this book:

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• Utilises three case studies from institutional and business contexts to provide a unique illustration of participants' roles and ways of negotiating membership within the business meeting;

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• Questions essentialist meanings of culture and the ways in which they constitute a powerful resource for employees to perpetuate or challenge the status quo in their professional setting;

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• Includes a core section on methodology for the workplace discourse researcher as well as a section dedicated to FAQs and a worked example on data analysis;

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• Provides future directions for workplace sociolinguistics as a field and makes a case for holistic research and multidisciplinary enquiry.

Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace constitutes a key resource for students and teachers of intercultural communication and ESP and will also be of significant interest to researchers in the fields of workplace studies and business interaction.

1

Introduction

Talking ‘culture’¹ at work

The modern workplace is international, multilingual, and diverse and employees are expected to work in teams and to operate at the interface of linguistic, professional, and geographical boundaries. Transitions between jobs, countries, professions, and time zones are common and this requires managing multiple different norms and ways of doing work. This complex work environment is linguistically enacted and involves an ongoing meaning negotiation between the individual and the community. In this context, this volume aims to unpack the complex relationship between language and culture in the workplace, focusing on the ways in which individuals negotiate organisational practice in daily routines at work. Special attention is paid to the relationship between ideology and essentialist meanings of culture as emerging in interaction. The discussion is grounded in the field of workplace discourse and draws on research in Critical Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication. My interest in workplace interaction, research in sensitive fields, and critical discursive analysis is reflected in the set-up and organisation of the volume.

The volume is organised in three parts and nine chapters. The first part – Part 1 (Chapters 2 and 3) – aims to set the scene and provides a discussion of the theoretical framework that underpins the arguments put forward. The discussion of the literature is aimed at the informed reader but not a specialist, and the text provides references to relevant sources. The chapters are addressed to both those familiar with the field and also to those who come from a different disciplinary background and intend to either undertake research or to provide training and consultancy.

Part 2 (Chapters 4 and 5) is concerned with theoretical and methodological issues, relevant when designing and carrying out research in the workplace. Turning to the third part – Part 3 (Chapters 6, 7, and 8) – data from three different organisational settings are discussed. This part forms the empirical heart of the book and provides an insight into how organisations in general and professionals in particular talk themselves into being (Heritage, 2011); through this process professional roles in a range of organisational practices are enacted. The closing chapter (Chapter 9) provides a synthesis and paves the way for research in areas where gaps have been identified. The following two sections of the introduction provide a brief insight into/overview of the field of workplace discourse and the core theoretical stances I adopt and refer the reader to the relevant chapters where the various points are discussed in detail.

1.1 The field of workplace discourse

Despite the significance of the workplace for both individuals and societies as a whole, linguists in general, and sociolinguists and applied linguists in particular have relatively recently turned their attention to it as a research setting. The field grew exponentially in the 80s and the 90s drawing on work already in place in Sociology and, later, (Discursive) Psychology and Conversation Analysis (CA) (see also Clift, 2016) paradigm (see Section 4.3).

Conversation Analysts turned to institutional talk (see Cameron, 2001: 162 for a discussion of the term; Drew and Heritage, 1992; Boden and Zimmerman, 1991) around the 70s and significant work saw the light of day in the 90s (e.g., Drew and Heritage, 1992; Heritage, 1995). The majority of studies were concerned with the frontstage encounters involving professionals and service users, what Sarangi and Roberts call the public face of the workplace (1999a: 21). This provided the field with a good understanding of the features and architecture of talk in a range of professional settings. More recently, studies broadened the remit of the enquiry and a whole range of terms were introduced into academic jargon to indicate affiliation to different theoretical and methodological traditions in the analysis of interaction. These typically attempt to go beyond the sequential architecture of conversation which has been the canonical focus of CA work. Terms such as ‘professional discourse’, ‘discourse in the professions’, ‘business discourse’ (and variants) are used to differentiate the early studies and those which are focused on research of the frontstage from those that study the backstage, where all the participants are in their work setting (see Sarangi and Roberts, 1999a: 22 for an extensive discussion).¹

Sociolinguists also started engaging with the workplace as a research setting from the 70s onwards. The work of John Gumperz and the interactional sociolinguistic (IS) approach to the analysis of social interaction is particularly relevant to the concerns of workplace discourse analysts (Section 4.3). John Gumperz’s research focused on the analysis of (intercultural) encounters. His systematic and influential work brought to the fore issues of miscommunication as well as the negative social evaluations projected on the individual when expectations of linguistic behaviour are not met. IS shares with CA a focus on the detailed analysis of interaction. Unlike CA however, it places this in its wider socio-cultural context. It is influenced by ethnography and seeks to understand the situation through the participants’ eyes. It is interpretive and draws on the researcher’s analysis and understanding of the context. IS has been widely used in workplace sociolinguistic research and it is the approach I have adopted and fully discuss later on. IS provides the tools to unpack contextual presuppositions that figure in hearers’ inferences of speakers’ meaning (Schiffrin, 1994: 105) and as such connect the moment of the interaction with its societal context.

Outside the immediate remit of CA and IS, the 90s saw a meteoric rise in the number of studies on, broadly put, workplace discourse (written and spoken). Drawing on the analysis of language as used in different settings, this work attempted to capture the subtle negotiation of meaning between the speakers in professional contexts and contributed to establishing the field within other discourse analytic approaches. And it is at that time that linguists start drawing on developments in organizational theory, sociology, and business studies but the connections were, and still are, patchy. Bargiela-Chiappini (2009) provides an excellent overview of how the interest in business discourse brings together (and separates) scholars from various disciplinary areas.

This early work has been particularly influential and provided the underpinning for what is now seen as an established field drawing on theory and method from Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics. To name but few, Clyne’s work (1994) has been particularly significant for the development of a line of enquiry in workplace interaction. Clyne drew on the analysis of audio recorded data and focused on the interactions between multilingual staff in blue collar positions in Australia. His work showed the complexity of the linguistic environment and the importance of pragmatic norms in the way things are done at work. Gumperz and Roberts (1991) also addressed the multiple skills involved in ‘successful’ interaction (see also Sarangi and Roberts, 1999; Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1997; Boden, 1994), and Wodak (2012) made a case for the workplace as a site of struggle where power hierarchies are negotiated, perpetuated, and (sometimes successfully) challenged and resisted. Following the agenda Hymes introduced in the 70s, all this work underlined the significance of pragmatic norms for communication and the limitations of understanding language as a mere set of rules. From a sociolinguistics perspective, Holmes’s work (e.g., Holmes and Stubbe, 2003; Holmes et al., 2011) has had significant conceptual and methodological impact on the development of the field. Her work on the relationship between language use and social structure in the workplace as well as on power and politeness, the gender order and more recently the culture order (Holmes, forthcoming) has led to a number of studies on public and private enterprises and provided the field with a robust analytical framework. The New Zealand Language in the Workplace project has been and remains a significant resource for anybody interested in workplace studies. Holmes’s work has influenced both a number of workplace discourse analysts and ESP professionals in using interactional data in the classroom (Holmes et al., 2011).

Further on the ESP and Applied Linguistic front: this line of enquiry is often not placed under the workplace discourse umbrella, which however I consider an ideological decision more than anything else. It is important for the diversity in the field and the potential for further cross-fertilisation between studies under, traditionally put, Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics. Teaching language for business purposes and identifying the needs of employees seeking work in a new country or context have been and are still addressed under the Language (broadly) or English (more narrowly) for Specific Purposes fields (ESP/LSP). The developments in Communicative Language teaching and the debates on syllabi for adult learners have drawn considerable attention and are still reflected in current scholarship (e.g., Serafini et al., 2015). Already in the 80s and 90s (e.g., Hutchinson and Waters, 1987), research foregrounded the dynamic nature of language needs for work purposes, put emphasis on the complexity of the ‘target situation’, and contributed to bringing the classroom closer to workplace practice. Scholars also focused on materials used in the classroom environment and addressed the mismatch between language used in the classroom and naturally occurring talk. The early research on textbook material (e.g., Williams, 1988) is significant in making a case for opening the classroom to business practice and helping the learner to go beyond set materials (Angouri, 2009). This line of enquiry is well established in Applied Linguistics and remains topical given the international character of the modern workplace and the significance of language for integration and career development. The opening of the classroom to the way organisations operate (Bargiela-Chiappini and Zhang, 2013) and the attempt to bring language teaching closer to other fields of enquiry were beneficial for the use of diverse and mixed method approaches to the designing of materials and learning activities. In recent years, practitioners and researchers alike have called for greater dialogue between those who teach and those who research workplace talk (e.g., Chan, 2009; Bremner, 2010; Bowles, 2006). Despite the interest from both groups, there is still only limited interaction. Bao (2013) makes a convincing claim for a constant dialogue between textbook material and real life, so that the materials designer allows space for ‘writer-user interaction’. This interaction can clearly be facilitated by dialogue between researchers and practitioners. Yet, time and again research shows that teaching resources and classroom practices continue to be at odds with the reality of the workplace (see Chan, 2009; Riddiford and Newton, 2010). This underscores the potential as well as the need for multidisciplinarity, a theme I revisit throughout the volume.

Overall, workplace discourse studies vary in both theoretical positioning and the ways in which data is analysed. However, there is agreement that talking work is doing work (Section 3.7). The inseparable bond between talk and action is not new for linguists (the work on speech acts is well known to the anticipated readers of this book) and in the context of the workplace, the employees negotiate their own and others’ professional and social selves while also constructing or resisting powerful ideologies which shape and are shaped in every workplace setting (Section 3.2). Further work however is still needed to focus on how employees negotiate ways of doing and how this become (or not) dominant in their work setting (see conclusions).

1.2 From culture to metacultural: theoretical affinities and overall aims

This book takes a critical sociolinguistic approach to the study of interaction and is influenced by the post-structuralist (Chapter 2) agenda. Post structuralism puts emphasis on the multifaceted relationship between language and culture. The widely cited linguistic/cultural turn (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000) in social sciences is a good illustration as it is concerned with discourse as social practice (Chapter 3) and explores the dynamic relationship between the individual and the group – or the agency of the individual in relation to structures and dominant ideologies in their context. This is also apparent in current scholarship in workplace discourse, which has moved away from seeing culture and language as distinct, fixed, or stable things.

Further, workplace discourse analysts have had a strong interest in ‘culture’ since the beginnings of the field and particularly in its complex relationship with language. Language, in the field, is seen as social, situated, and political. It is understood as diachronically and synchronically evolving and negotiated between users in different contexts and domains of human activity. Simultaneously, the thinking around the concept of ‘culture’ followed a similar trajectory. From linearity and positivism, recent work focuses on the constructed and negotiated ways of doing that distinguish communities. Moving away from a macro, top-down approach, which was concerned with the essence of phenomena, recent work focuses on fluidity and complexity. Language and culture are commonly seen as practices, performed in organisational settings. In this context, the ontological boundaries between language and culture become fuzzy and it is debatable whether they actually exist or not.

While the ontological differences between the two concepts are difficult to delimit, and not an exercise I am interested in (see in Sharifian, 2011), in line with the linguistic anthropology tradition I see language as the “principal, exemplar medium, and site of the cultural” (Silverstein, 2004: 622). I take a practice approach and I am interested in the dynamics of interaction in the local context. I align with the work that argues for a shift from culture to the cultural (e.g., Dhamoon, 2006) to mark a focus on the process of meaning negotiation in the situated space of interaction. This shift puts emphasis on the individual without ignoring the importance of dominant meanings that pre-exist a specific moment in the here and now of talk. Interactants draw on recourses beyond the immediate discourse context to make meaning from what is said (or not) in a workplace event. Any interaction draws on conventions assumed as shared, given or agreed upon as well as on individual stances and meanings that participants put forward. I discuss the theoretical issues related to this position later on (Chapter 4).

It is important to clarify from the outset that I am not using the term ‘cultural’ as an adjective describing the properties or traits of a ‘culture’. To the contrary I take a processual stance and see cultural as pertinent to the interactional work we all do in a particular socio-political and historical context. So by analogy to Street’s (1993) ‘culture as a verb’, I see cultural as better suited to focus on the agency of the speaker and the significance of power negotiation in a given context. To push further this agenda, I prefer the use of the term metacultural (discourse) to emphasise the process of meaning negotiation and dissociate from the strong connotations of homogeneity and stability that come with the everyday use of the ‘cultural’.

I see metacultural discourse as situated and emergent, negotiated by participants in workplace events which are historically conditioned and embedded in a particular socio-political context. I argue that the concept of ‘culture’ in its range and potential for essentialised meanings, is a resource mobilised to explain and justify the positions claimed/projected by the speaker and the relationship with the social order. Interactants take a reflexive stance and draw on dominant meanings available to them in constructing professional roles and identities. By using the term ‘metacultural’ I provide a lens that allows us to engage with what people do when essentialist meanings of culture are made relevant.

Through the data discussed in Chapter 8, I draw on interaction and aim to discuss:

1. a) how shared practice and meaning is negotiated in the here and now of interaction as an ongoing process and the ways in which employees talk the organisation into being (Heritage, 2005) while also negotiating their professional roles and areas of responsibility. Examining this process draws attention to the multiple and interacting systems of meaning available to the employees in any given setting.
2. b) the form and function of essentialist meanings of culture when topicalised in interaction. This looks into the ways in which metacultural discourse emerges, is interactionaly achieved and becomes a resource in the context of the participants. This involves meta-talk in business events as well as in interview contexts where the employees co-produce narratives for and with the researcher.

I align with the critical sociolinguistic tradition and the approach and frameworks I draw upon prioritise the perception of the speaker over that of the analyst. These two positions are well discussed in the literature under ‘first’ vs. ‘second’ order terms. I expand on this further in later sections.

1.3 First and second order approaches to culture

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Transcription conventions
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: talking ‘culture’ at work
• Part I A prismatic view of culture
• Part II Doing research in intercultural professional settings
• Part III Doing culture and identity in workplace interaction
• References
• Index