Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini

Face and politeness: new (insights) for old (concepts)

Abstract The article re-examines Erving Goffman’s concepts of face and face-work and their roots in the ritual and sacred essence of the social order as expounded in the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Both Goffman and Durkheim are referred to in Brown and Levinson’s classic work on politeness but the originality of their ideas has become somewhat diluted. Using three of Goffman’s early essays, the article argues that his observations on the interactional order and his sophisticated notions of face and face-work could be the starting point for a re-appraisal of politeness and its fundamental role in the social order.

Requests and status in business correspondence.

Abstract The purpose of this study is the identification of possible linguistic variations in business correspondence containing requests which are attributable to the influence of the interpersonal variables of power, social distance, imposition and, in particular, status. In order to minimise interference from personality traits, a set of 32 authentic texts written by or to the same managing director of a joint-venture were selected from a larger corpus of over 200 documents containing requests. Syntactic, lexical and structural variations have been found between two main text-types of documents, relational and routine correspondence. Moreover, the varying pattern of influence of interpersonal variables seems to support a non-additive model of politeness as proposed by Holtgraves and Yang (1992).

Managerial Sensemaking and Occupational Identities in Britain and Italy: The Role of Management Magazines in the Process of Discursive Construction

Processes of discursive construction in a British and an Italian personnel management magazine are analysed to show the ways in which the magazines, both as genre forms and providers of narratives and discursive resources, provide ‘story boards’ for their readers which are helpful to them when it comes to making sense of the tensions and dilemmas associated with their managerial roles. Tensions and occupational dilemmas generally associated with personnel management work are identified and variations found in the discursive constructions associated with the two magazines are related, with reservations, to cultural and institutional differences between British and Italian human resource management

Politeness at work: issues and challenges

Abstract In this article we will attempt to address some of the issues that arise in researching politeness in the workplace, especially, though not exclusively, in the context of multicultural and multilingual encounters. We propose to look at debates around the nature of politeness and their relevance for research in work settings and to discuss the contribution made to these debates by analyses of politeness in the workplace. Finally, we will discuss some of the methodological problems that field researchers will face when conducting research on the field, especially in intercultural work contexts. These will include, for example, issues such as the choice of methodology/s, confidentiality, the nature of the involvement of the researcher, making use of multi-method approaches, the comparability of analytical categories across different languages and culture. Finally, we suggest, very briefly, some directions for further research.

Discourse(s), social construction and language practices: In conversation with Alvesson and Kärreman

This piece seeks to extend a conversation that Alvesson and Kärreman started in 2000 from the pages of Human Relations and are continuing in their 2011 article; a conversation that is of great interest well beyond management and organization studies. Through a linguistics perspective that is attentive to the peculiarities of the discourse vocabulary but also seeks to probe aspects of its conceptual import, I will explore the significance of understandings of discourse circulating within the social sciences. I will continue with reflections on select difficulties raised by ‘social construction-unlimited’ before highlighting some of the benefits of a social semiotic approach to ethnographic research centred on the concept of indexicality. I will conclude with an invitation to ‘bring the researcher back’, in an embodied engagement with the field that can help put discourse in ‘its right place’.

‘So what problems bother you and you are not speeding up your work?’ Problem solving talk at work

Problem solving (PbS) can be readily described as one of the key activities regularly performed by professionals in any workplace setting. Despite its importance, however, there is relatively little (socio)linguistic research which looks at the complex ways in which problems are constructed in discourse. This article sees the enactment of a ‘problem’ as a discursive phenomenon with fluid boundaries. It draws on business meeting data recorded in multinational companies in Europe and focuses on excerpts identified by the participants as having a PbS function. The data show that problem solving processes and practice are anchored to the structure of the organizations, the local history and employees’ shared perceptions of professional practices and hierarchies in their workplace. The analysis also shows two focal points in the PbS talk of the participants in this study, namely identification of a problem (what the problem is) and its ownership (whose problem it is). These, however, are not predetermined starting points but rather locally constructed in relation to the status, expertise and shared/past history of the interactants.

9. BUSINESS AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT

Although business settings have been a site of language contact for many years, the field of “language in business” has changed substantially during the past two decades. The proliferation of topics and approaches has contributed to shaping what is now an eclectic disciplinary field, methodologically diverse. Thus, this review of the field will necessarily move beyond sociolinguistic approaches and theories of variation and change. In particular, the globalization of the workforce and the growth of multinational and multilingual corporations have strengthened the perception of English as the “lingua franca” of international business, though some recent research challenges aspects of this perception in multicultural corporate settings. Intercultural communication, especially recent developments in that field, including its “discursive turn” and its current preference for qualitative studies, has made a significant contribution to the study of multicultural/multilingual business interaction. In the concluding section, we discuss three particular areas of development: (a) the growth in the use of new media and the analysis of that use and its impact on business discourse in context; (b) the shift from the analysis of written to spoken discourse and from simulated data to naturally-occurring corporate language; (c) and the increasing need to study the language of the multilingual workplace. We argue for redressing the balance of research into business as a site of language contact in favor of less well-represented languages and cultures through indigenous discourse studies, and we note in particular the increasing frequency and importance of work involving Asian languages.

Interruptive strategies in British and Italian management meetings

This paper reports the findings of research which examines the contrasting roles played by interruptive strategies in British and Italian management meetings. Much of the work on interruptions originates within conversation analysis (Bennett, 1981; Kennedy and Camden, 1983; Jefferson, 1973, 1984, 1986, 1993; Schegloff 1987; Roger et al., 1988, etc.) and has focussed on either gender or power or both (Zimmerman and West, 1975; West, 1979; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Dindia, 1987). Most of these studies involve dyadic conversation. Little research has been done on business discourse (Drummond, 1989), and relatively few studies have attempted cross-cultural and/or cross-linguistic comparisons (Murata, 1994; Makri-Tsilipakou, 1994). Defining what is to count as an interruption in sequences of natural language data involving speech overlap is a complex matter, especially if interruptions are seen as indicators of power. Our research attempts to define what we call interruptive strategies and their pragmatic significance in British and Italian management meetings, which are task-oriented and multiparty speech events. Power relationships are an important variable, and this paper examines the cultural and linguistic differences which the respective use of interruptive strategies by British and Italian managers reveals

Liminal ethnography: understanding segregated organisations

Purpose – The paper aims to discuss liminal ethnography as a new approach for conducting research in segregated organisations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper proposes liminality as a conceptual key to understanding both the condition of the organisational ethnographer and that of her interlocutors. Conversatio is the novel hermeneutical method that is discussed in conjunction with liminal ethnography.Findings – Liminal ethnography as outlined in the paper emerged as an approach from preliminary contact with the organisational reality of the monastery as a type of total institution. Similarly, conversatio suggested itself as a method that maximises limited face to face contact with interlocutors whose access to the external world is restricted by a behavioural code enshrined in a Rule.Research limitations/implications – Paradoxically, the restrictions imposed on the researcher provided inspiration for the analytical approach proposed by the paper therefore initial limitations such as restricted acc...

Introduction: Politeness Research In and Across Cultures

This volume includes essays on face and politeness in a wide range of cultures. While previous monographs on politeness have tended to concentrate on one or sometimes two languages, the present volume utilises data drawn from as many as nine languages, including some ‘key languages’ in politeness research such as English and Japanese, as well as some lesser-studied languages, such as Georgian. Before introducing the goals, methodology and contents of this collection, we will briefly discuss ways in which ‘culture’ is represented in contemporary politeness studies, in comparision with its theorisation in other fields (Levi-Strauss 1955, Hodder 1982). This selective retrospective will place the present volume in the context of current debates on politeness.