Bernadette Vine

Multiple Discourse Analyses of a Workplace Interaction

This article explores the contributions that five different approaches to discourse analysis can make to interpreting and understanding the same piece of data. Conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, politeness theory, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology are the approaches chosen for comparison. The data is a nine-minute audio recording of a spontaneous workplace interaction. The analyses are compared, and the theoretical and methodological implications of the different approaches are discussed.

Leadership, discourse and ethnicity

This book is about workplace discourse and it examines the relationships among leadership, ethnicity, and language use. Taking a social constructionist approach to the ways in which leadership is enacted through discourse, the book problematizes the concept of ethnicity and demonstrates the importance of context—particularly the community of practice—in determining what counts as relevant in the analysis of ethnicity. The chapters analyze everyday workplace interactions supplemented by interview data to examine the ways in which workplace leaders use language to achieve their transactional and relational goals in contrasting “ethnicized” contexts, two of which are Māori and two European/Pākehā. The analysis pays special attention to the roles of ethnic values, beliefs, and orientations in talk.

Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics

This article seeks to bring to the fore the processes by which leaders co-create leadership through collective talk within the workplace. Co-leadership has recently been recognized as an important aspect of leadership practice, especially at the top of organizations, yet it remains under-theorized and empirically under-explored. Guided by the desire to integrate concepts that have emerged from leadership psychology with discursive leadership approaches, this exploratory empirical study applies a specific form of discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, to three different organizational contexts. Because interactional sociolinguistics focuses on the ways in which relationships are seen to be negotiated and maintained through talk, it is well placed to analyse leadership, a relational process involving leaders and followers that is predicated on asymmetrical power relations. The analysis demonstrates how successful co-leaders cooperate, dynamically shifting roles and integrating their leadership performance to encompass task-related and maintenance-related functions of leadership.

Women managing discourse in the workplace

Despite the fact that women are increasingly reaching the highest levels of management in business organisations, negative stereotypes persist concerning their ability to handle the discourse of leadership. Drawing on a large database of recorded material collected from women in a variety of New Zealand workplaces by the Victoria University of Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, this paper illustrates the value of both qualitative and quantitative analysis in challenging such stereotypes. The analysis indicates that effective women managers adapt their style with sensitivity and skill to the specific setting and refutes misconceptions about the ability of women chairs to handle workplace humour, making them sociolinguistically very proficient communicators in the workplace.

Pragmatic Markers at Work in New Zealand

Research on New Zealand English has suggested that pragmatic markers such as eh and you know are associated with informal speech, while I think has been found to be more frequent in formal registers (Stubbe (Te Reo, 42:39–53, 1999); Stubbe and Holmes (Language and Communication 15:63–88, 1995)). New Zealand workplaces are considered to be relatively informal, but does analysis of pragmatic markers in workplace data support this? In this chapter, the use of these pragmatic markers is explored in white-collar data from the Wellington Language in the Workplace corpus, with a particular focus on the ways speakers may utilise them to strategically index informality in order to achieve their interactional goals.

The Wellington Language in the Workplace Project: Engaging with the Research and Wider Communities

The Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) team has been collecting data in New Zealand workplaces since 1996 and has amassed a rich corpus which provides a valuable resource for engaging with local communities at a number of levels. Our research is community-based and engagement with workplaces has helped shape our research objectives and understanding, as well as assisting research participants to develop a fuller appreciation of the importance of effective communication. Our research has also been shared with the wider business community through newsletters, non-academic journals and other media channels, as well as through workshops and seminars. Further practical applications of the research have involved teaching materials and resources aimed at helping both native and non-native speakers improve their communication at work.