Meredith Marra

Having a laugh at work: how humour contributes to workplace culture

Work is one important source of an individuals social identity, and workplace interaction is a crucial means of instantiating that identity. As one component of workplace discourse, humour can provide insights into the distinctive culture which develops in different workplaces. Using a community of practice framework, this paper explores the potential of humour analysis for identifying characteristics of workplace sub-cultures which develop within different organisations. In particular, patterns of variation in the frequency, type and style of humour used in meetings in four different organisations is examined. The dataset is taken from the larger corpus of the Victoria University of Wellington Language in the Workplace Project.

Relational practice in the workplace: Women's talk or gendered discourse?

This article explores the concept of relational practice, the wide range of off-line, backstage, or collaborative work that people do which goes largely unrecognized and unrewarded in the workplace ( Fletcher 1999 ). The analysis identifies a range of different ways in which people do relational practice in workplace discourse, and critically examines the proposal that, as subtle support work, relational practice is considered “womens work.” Drawing on the large Wellington Language in the Workplace database, it explores a variety of ways in which such relational work is manifested in workplace discourse; the analysis focuses on specific instances of relational practice, illustrating how such support work is backgrounded and typically discounted in New Zealand workplaces. The implications of the analysis for the gender/power dynamic are explored. Discussed in particular is the hypothesis that manifestations of relational practice differ in distinct communities of practice, and the validity of the equation of relational practice with “feminized” discourse is questioned. This article is based on a plenary paper presented at IGALA2, the second International Gender and Language Conference, held at Lancaster University in April 2002. It has benefited from comments received there as well as from other colleagues. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to the editor for helpful suggestions for improving it. We express our appreciation to other members of the Language in the Workplace team who have been involved with the projects development, data collection, processing, and transcription, including Maria Stubbe (research fellow), Bernadette Vine (corpus manager), and a number of research assistants. We also thank those who allowed their workplace interactions to be recorded. This research is supported by a grant from the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology. More information on the project can be viewed on our website, 〈www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/lwp〉.

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.

Humor and leadership style

Abstract Drawing on authentic workplace interactions, this paper examines the ways in which effective leaders use humor as a discursive resource to construct particular aspects of leadership style. The conventional wisdom in leadership studies suggests that humor is an important tool for “good” leaders who inspire and challenge their subordinates. The management studies literature suggests a basic distinction between a traditional transactional style, which is rule-driven and task focused, and a more favored transformational style, where leaders encourage creativity and innovation, and are characterized as inspirational. Using data collected in a range of New Zealand organizations, this paper explores and illustrates the wide range of functions served by humor, and the ways in which humor contributes to aspects of the construction of leadership styles. Our analysis supports recent proposals that many effective leaders combine aspects of both transactional and transformational styles of leadership.

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.

Corporate meetings as genre: a study of the role of the chair in corporate meeting talk

Abstract Meetings are the backbone of organizational life and as such constitute an important component of workplace discourse. We expand here upon earlier work which suggests that a meeting constitutes a distinct genre, taking informal rather than formal meeting talk as our focus. To further explore the genre theory perspective, the analysis draws on theoretical and analytical tools deriving from work on “activity types” (Levinson, Activity types and language, Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1979]) by concentrating on the role of the meeting chair which is characterized as a structural device for managing these interactions. Acts that index “chairing” are analyzed as discourse types (Sarangi, ATs, DTs and interactional hybridity: The case of genetic counselling, Harlow, 2000) enacted in the context of the corporate (informal) meeting activity type. We analyze data from two comparable data sets, one recorded in Europe and one in New Zealand. Despite the effect of local context on the instantiation of the meeting event, there seem to be generalizable features (e.g., the chairs function in openings and closings and the agenda) which make meetings recognizable to participants. The findings indicate striking similarities across the organizations, lending support to the existence of a meeting genre, and emphasizing the significance of the chair role which shapes and is shaped within the context of the genre. We close the paper by discussing how the activity- and discourse-type approach can contribute to the study of spoken business genres.

Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces

Abstract In New Zealand, as in many other post-colonial societies, biculturalism is a one-way street: Māori New Zealanders are more likely to be bicultural than are Pākehā New Zealanders. Consequently it is Māori norms, including discourse norms, which are more likely to be ignored in most New Zealand workplaces, with the potential for misunderstanding, and even for offence and unintended insult. Our research in Māori and Pākehā workplaces suggests that unintended impoliteness can subtly infiltrate the core activities of workplaces, namely workplace meetings. We illustrate this by examining differences in the ways in which Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders open and close meetings, and the ways in which Māori and Pākehā make critical comments about the behaviour of workplace employees, relating these discourse moves to considerations of politeness and impoliteness. Our data suggests that while Māori meeting openings tend to be direct, explicit, and elaborated, Pākehā meeting openings are brief and minimal. On the other hand, Māori critical comments in the workplace tend to be indirect, implicit and generalized, while at least in some Pākehā workplaces, criticism can be direct, contestive, and confrontational. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the tendencies identified are based on exploratory research, and that further research is needed to confirm or contest our tentative generalizations.

Effective Leadership in New Zealand Workplaces: Balancing Gender and Role

‘Workplace leadership’ is a gendered concept. As a public rather than a private domain, the workplace is typically male-dominated (e.g. Kendall and Tannen, 1997; McConnell-Ginet, 2000), and in most societies, men occupy the most powerful positions in companies and organisations (e.g. Hearn and Parkin, 1988; Sinclair, 1998). Until very recently, the prevailing stereotype of a leader, chief executive officer, and even senior manager has been decidedly male (e.g. Marshall, 1995), and the female voice in these public contexts has often been silenced.

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.