Organising multilingually : setting an agenda for studying language at work

This paper brings together IB and Sociolinguistic research on the use of language in multilingual organisations and organising. We problematise core categories and underlying assumptions that have been widely adopted in this field of research and to argue for a holistic and context sensitive approach. Special attention is paid to the notion of national language and the multinational organization. Scholars have started to argue for new ways of researching language in organisations and to call for more processually oriented categories and meanings such as organising and languaging. Current core categories such as monolingual/multilingual, small/large and national/multinational often remain static, structural and binary and hence are not in sync with the fluidity and change of human activity nor with the promise of the broader linguistic and discursive turns in social sciences. We argue for multidisciplinary enquiry in this field of research. We propose theoretical and methodological advances and close the paper with a future agenda for studying the dynamics of language in multilingual settings

Interpersonal pragmatics and workplace interaction

This paper explores the connection between interpersonal pragmatics and linguistic research on language in the workplace, including consideration of the role that Janet Holmes (and the LWP team) has played within the field. We provide a critique of relevant literature and illustrate the issues we raise with data from meeting talk. We foreground the importance of interpersonal aspects of workplace communication and discuss the theoretical and methodological affordances of frameworks that have been dominant in the field. We close the paper with reflecting on the current state of the art and ways forward for researching language at work

Organising multilingually : beyond binaries and static oppositions

During the past 15 years, research on language diversity and multilingualism in international business (IB) and international management has been burgeoning. Language has moved from being the ‘pariah’ of the 70s and 80s to a key area of concern for businesses that have become acutely aware of the significance of ‘efficient’ communication for the global marker. Companies have adopted a range of strategies in order to manage the growing diversity of languages. To this end, they have introduced one-language policies (typically but not always English), recruited speakers with ‘native competence’ in target languages, or they have started to work with external or internal translators or interpreters as well as other stakeholders in local networks. What is understood as ‘efficient’ in that context however and how much language strategies contribute to that effect is still open to debate

Discourses of cultural heritage in times of crisis : the case of the Parthenon Marbles

The paper focuses on the commodification and politicisation of cultural heritage using as a case study the ongoing debate on the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the UK to Greece. Greece has been in the throes of a severe financial crisis for over six years with the ever imminent threat of Grexit, leaving or staying in the Eurozone, constantly disputed. In parallel with this ongoing turmoil, discourses in the media concerning Greek antiquity have been persistently prominent within and without the country. In this context, the paper aims to problematise the complex nexus of relationships between the financial crisis, national identity and cultural heritage. We combine the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) and Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) and apply our framework to the controversy surrounding the Parthenon Marbles reignited by the press release for the movie ‘The Monuments Men’ in 2014. The paper draws on data from an online forum and investigates how the users negotiate pro-/anti-return positions and make the financial crisis relevant in the argumentation process. The intricate and incestuous relationship between heritage and national identity becomes more intense and contentious in times of crisis. The analysis of the data shows that history, identity, value, and debt are recontextualised in relation to the Parthenon sculptures. The analysis identifies an underlying process of value trade off and brings the current political and economic environment to the fore. We close the paper by foregrounding the implications of our study and provide directions for further research

'I have her image of bringing me cherries as an offer' : Exploring belonging and trust in cross-border business collaboration through storytelling

This paper explores the role of narratives as resources for enacting group membership and community building in the case of one company, a Greek- Turkish partnership, SforSteel. We pay special attention to the function of iterative stories and specifically one that indexes the origin of the partnership. The analysis shows that the story, and its episodes, act as significant interactional resources for partners to claim a shared regional identity, that of people coming from the area of Trabzon in the Black Sea region. By negotiating a common origin, the partners simultaneously strengthen their long-term relationship and continuously reconnect the past to the present. The strong long-term relationship has a symbolic status and constitutes a condition for being accepted in this community. Through the analysis of this story our discussion addresses the importance of iterativity and the foundational relationship between community and trust

Is talking work doing work?

Workplace Socio/linguistics grew exponentially in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. From scattered research groups and the workplace as a(nother) domain for linguistic research, it evolved to a research field addressing how individuals operate in different local linguistic, national, organizational, occupational and team contexts and turned a critical gaze to the workplace as a site of struggle where power hierarchies are negotiated, perpetuated, and (sometimes successfully) challenged. Workplace sociolinguists have shown that talking work is a critical part of enacting professional roles and responsibilities. We focus on a core workplace activity, namely decision making, and we show how it is done in the context of the iconic business email. We pay special attention to the way formality and use of global and local languages are negotiated between employees with varying professional roles, expertise, hierarchical status and years of experience. Our data shows that language is strategically used to include or exclude access to decision making processes. A “business language” is a context specific set of resources negotiated between workplace communities and a mechanism for claiming, projecting and resisting group membership

‘Hope it’s useful’: Negotiating first and second order accounts in discourse-based interviews

Framework: Although participatory approaches highlight the expertise of the participants and assign them responsibilities over the research process, there is less systematic discussion about the participants’ actual involvement in practice especially in the analysis and interpretation of the data. Despite the claims of equal partnership, the participant is often still perceived as the subject revealing hidden yet simple inside knowledge (first order account) around which the researcher, as a neutral outsider, builds complex theories by drawing on his/her scientific expertise (second order account). Goal and method: Our goal is to investigate how first and second order accounts contribute to a multi-layered analysis of the interview encounter by challenging binary thinking. We also explore the way interactional sociolinguistic methodology can inform participatory research by analyzing the way first and second order accounts are negotiated between interviewer and participant. We present the analysis of a discourse-based interview extract from our ongoing and completed work on the discourse analysis of formality in workplace emails in multinational companies in Greece. Findings: The results illustrate iterative processes of negotiation of meaning in situ and in line with the participants’ temporary and social roles. They highlight the importance of collaborative framing of the interpretation of and theorization from data in which the participants are co-creators. Shifting from static and purely essentialistic or constructivist understandings of the interviewer and participant to a holistic approach, this paper frames the interview encounter as an interactional domain of activity that can better capture the complexity of the lived experience.

“I just sit, drink and go back to work” : topographies of language practice at work

The paper explores the in situ negotiation of in/exclusion in and through language in a multilingual professional setting, paying special attention to the relationship between language and space. We argue that multilingual practices and material space are co-constitutive; individuals enact group membership and professional roles spatiolinguistically and re/produce in/visible social and material boundaries. Despite the well-established literature on in/exclusion, the ways in which it is negotiated in asymmetrical, emplaced, workplace encounters is still underexplored. We introduce a topographies of practice framework and show how professional asymmetries are enacted in and through language choice and language use in the multilingual workplace. We take an Interactional Sociolinguistic approach and report on the analysis of 23 h of interactional data and 42 h of ethnographic observations from a professional, multilingual kitchen in Finland. We show patterns that are un/marked in the data and constitute the norms in this particular workplace. We argue that topographies of practice are topographies of in/exclusion enacted in and through situated encounters; we pay special attention to the role of employees who are legitimised to cross visible and invisible boundaries and we close the paper with recommendations for future research