The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace

Bernadette Vine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317425809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace provides a comprehensive survey of linguistic research on language in the workplace written by top scholars in the field from around the world. The Handbook covers theoretical and methodological approaches, explores research in different types of workplace settings, and examines some key areas of workplace talk that have been investigated by workplace researchers. Issues of identity have become a major focus in recent workplace research and the Handbook highlights some core issues of relevance in this area, such as gender, leadership, and intercultural communication. As the field has developed, applications of workplace research for both native and non-native speakers have emerged. Insights can inform and improve input from practitioners training workers in a range of fields and across a variety of contexts, and the Handbook foregrounds some of the ways workplace research can do this. This is an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate students interested in learning more about workplace discourse.

Part I
Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

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1
Interactional Sociolinguistics

Cynthia Gordon and Joshua Kraut

Introduction

Interactional sociolinguistics (IS) is a primarily qualitative, interpretive approach to the analysis of discourse. Pioneered by Gumperz (1982a, 1982b) to investigate linguistic and cultural diversity and to address unequal access to economic, political, and other opportunities, IS has been applied and developed by scholars worldwide and across disciplines to provide important insights into workplace communication. IS studies of workplace interaction explain not only how and why instances of cross-cultural miscommunication occur and how communicative differences contribute to the creation of social inequalities, but also yield myriad other insights. Among them are how culture affects workplace discourse; how gender and language shape workplaces (including how language impacts women’s advancement); how professional identities and relationships are discursively created; how leadership is enacted and power is negotiated; how routine encounters such as meetings (and those that are especially high-stakes, such as interviews) are constructed; and how various discursive strategies are used at work (including code-switching, humour, personal narratives and other aspects of “small talk”, forms of address, and [in]directness). In short, the theories and methods of IS facilitate exploration of the conversational features and strategies through which essential workplace activities are accomplished.

In this chapter, after introducing fundamental methods and concepts of IS, we give an overview of four groups of key studies, each of which centralizes different scholars and geographical and cultural contexts: Gumperz and his colleagues (mostly in the United Kingdom); Tannen and her students (largely in the United States); Holmes and her team (in New Zealand); and the work of various scholars who have adopted IS to examine workplace talk elsewhere around the world (such as in Brazil and Hong Kong). In the conclusion, we recap contributions IS makes to our understanding of workplace communication, and suggest future research directions.

Methods and Key Concepts of Interactional Sociolinguistics

The methods and key concepts of IS were developed by anthropological linguist John Gumperz. Conducting fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s, Gumperz observed vast linguistic and cultural diversity, especially in modern urban areas, in “gatekeeping encounters” (a term borrowed from Erickson 1975) both everyday (such as service encounters) and high-stakes (such as employment interviews). He approached these interactions with a linguist’s ear and an interest in social justice; specifically he wanted to understand why members of minority and immigrant communities struggled to access needed resources (such as job training and employment), and the role of language in this struggle. Gumperz thus sought to uncover how and why miscommunication occurs in intercultural encounters by illuminating inferential processes and how the linguistic and social are reflexively related; in so doing, he also sought to ameliorate intergroup relations, and ultimately promote social justice.

To achieve these goals, Gumperz developed the multifaceted data collection and analysis processes of IS; these capture and explicate the complexity of communication as a cultural phenomenon. The foci of analysis are naturally-occurring conversations that are audio- (and sometimes also video-) recorded and systematically transcribed. Ethnographic observations contextualize recorded data; they provide interpretive touchstones for analysis of conversational features and interactional patterns by illuminating typical practices and recurrent difficulties, and by providing a deeper understanding of the particular social context in which language is used. Analysis is also shaped by a kind of post-recording interview that involves playing the recording for one or more of the participants, or for others from the cultural group of one or more of the participants, to gain their insights into what transpired. This uncovers different participant and cultural perspectives that enrich analysis.

In order to be analysed, recordings must be transcribed in detail. Ochs (1979) and others have observed that transcription is not simply methodological, but also analytic. It entails selective decision-making regarding how fine-grained a transcript should be: whether or how it should represent phenomena such as simultaneous talk, pauses, and paralinguistic features such as laughter and intonation; how to integrate (if at all) gestural and other visual elements of interaction; how to arrange participants’ utterances on the page (or now screen); and how to make interpretations such as what counts as a conversational turn. These choices shape the object of analysis, highlighting some features and obscuring others. Due to the impossibility of any transcript (no matter how detailed) to capture the full richness of social interaction, scholars who use IS typically repeatedly re-listen to their recordings throughout analysis. This facilitates attention to conversational elements that are especially difficult to transcribe, yet are central to Gumperz’s theorizing.

Gumperz (1982a) maintains that pitch, tone of voice, and other paralinguistic features (such as tempo, pausing, and intonation), along with linguistic features (such as lexical choice and code-switching), function as signalling mechanisms in interaction; these “contextualization cues” indicate how speakers intend their utterances to be interpreted. “Conversational inference” is Gumperz’s term for the intricate (yet seemingly automatic), context-bound process of interpretation that listeners use to assess how speakers mean what they say. That each participant draws upon a set of culturally-shaped “contextualization conventions” to signal and interpret meanings explains why and how many instances of intercultural miscommunication occur. In other words, cultural knowledge and expectations profoundly shape interaction.

Gumperz’s (1982a) now classic example of one such instance is drawn from a service encounter in a workplace context: the cafeteria line of a major British airport, where Indian and Pakistani cafeteria workers served meals to native Anglo-British baggage handlers. The cafeteria servers felt they were being discriminated against; the baggage handlers perceived them as uncooperative and discourteous. Gumperz demonstrates how members of the two cultural groups differently used and interpreted intonation. When the Indian and Pakistani servers offered a serving of gravy, for instance, they used a flat intonation: “Gravy”. However, the native British conventions for making a polite offer involve rising intonation: “Gravy?” The servers were thus perceived to be rude by the baggage handlers, though this was not their intention. Remarking this seemingly trivial difference in use and interpretation of intonation and explaining it to members of both groups of workers actually helped improve inter-group perceptions and relationships.

Also integral to IS is the notion of “frame”, as discussed by anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972) and sociologist Erving Goffman (1974, 1981), and linked into IS by Deborah Tannen ([1984] 2005) and Gumperz (e.g., 1999). Tannen and Wallat (1993, 59–60) define a frame, or what they call an “interactive frame”, as “a definition of what is going on in interaction, without which no utterance (or movement or gesture) could be interpreted.” Returning to the gravy example, the baggage handlers expected rising intonation from the servers, which for them would construct a “polite service” frame wherein an offer was extended (e.g., “Would you like gravy?”), but the servers’ flat intonation (polite in the context of Indian and Pakistani contextualization conventions) was interpreted as a declaration, and consequently as rude.

Tannen and Wallat (1993) identify “frame” as a key concept for understanding the challenges a paediatrician faces in a particular kind of workplace talk: a video-recorded examination of a cerebral palsied child where the child’s mother was also present. Tannen and Wallat demonstrate how the physician uses what Gumperz (1982a) calls contextualization cues to indicate which frame she is interacting in at any given time, or who she is talking to and how her utterances should be interpreted, as well as to construct alignments among participants (or what Goffman [1981] calls “footing”). For instance, she uses a high-pitched teasing voice in the “social encounter frame” with the child (and the child responds with giggles); she uses a flat tone of voice and medical terminology in the “examination frame” when reporting her findings to medical residents who will later view the recording for educational purposes (which the mother and child ignore); and she speaks conversationally in the “consultation frame” with the mother (and the mother demonstrates her understanding or lack thereof). Through how the physician speaks and how she behaves nonverbally, such as keeping a hand on the child while reporting her findings, she indicates what she is doing at that moment, such as teasing the child, reporting technical information for an absent audience for whom she is a teacher/mentor, or explaining a symptom to the mother. In doing her work, the physician thus continually adjusts not only her “register” (i.e., by using lexical items, syntactic structures, and so on in audience-appropriate ways), but also the framing of the encounter, including participant alignments.

Tannen and Wallat (1993, 60) also demonstrate how frame shifts frequently resulted from mismatches in the physician’s and mother’s “knowledge schemas”, or their “expectations about people, objects, events and settings in the world.” For instance, when the mother interprets her child’s “noisy breathing” as “wheezing”, a sign of ill-health, the paediatrician puts the examination of the child on hold, and consults with the mother to explain that noisy breathing is normal for a cerebral palsied child. This is an important way participant expectations shape the framing of interaction.

Tannen and Wallat’s analysis not only illuminates the complexity of a physician’s workplace discourse as she interacts with a patient, family member, and absent medical students, but also lays the groundwork for future studies in IS by integrating the concepts of frames, schemas, and participant alignments into Gumperz’s theory of conversational inference. Key studies have utilized these concepts (and others from IS and discourse analysis more broadly, as we will discuss) to investigate how workplace situations, relationships, and identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction, particularly “behind the scenes” as co-workers communicate with one another.

Key Studies

Foundational Studies by Gumperz and Colleagues (the United Kingdom)

Workplace discourse has constituted a privileged analytic site since the genesis of IS, as it involves numerous gatekeeping encounters, such as interviews and intake sessions, where speakers from ethnic and linguistic minority groups ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical and Methodological Approaches
• Part II Different Workplace Settings
• Part III Key Areas of Workplace Talk
• Part IV Identity and the Workplace
• Part V Applications
• Index