“Race talk” in Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study of Two Texas Chambers of Commerce

This dissertation takes an interpretive, discursive approach to understanding how organizational members create meanings about race, and other identities, through their everyday communication practices in the workplace. This dissertation also explores how these everyday discourses about race might reproduce, negotiate, or challenge ideologies that maintain the dominant position of Whiteness in United States racial hierarchies. I draw from data collected during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork (from Jan-Aug 2014) with two chambers of commerce in a large Texas city: an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) and what I call the “North City” Chamber of Commerce (NCC). The AACC explicitly identifies with a racial group, while the NCC identifies with a geographic region (“North City”) associated with a White affluent identity. Discourse analysis of audio and video recorded data gathered during fieldwork illustrates that, in this community, there are two prevalent discourses about race. One form of ‘race talk’ – practiced by Asians, minorities more generally, and White people who work with minority groups – can be characterized as explicitly addressing race as constitutive of professional identities. A second form of race talk, practiced by White NCC members, can be characterized as not explicitly discussing race and therefore implicitly invoking White identity as constitutive of professional identities. Overall, these forms of race talk illustrate how Asian identity is constructed as foreign, local, and diverse, and White identity is constructed as an invisible, non-raced identity and as an authentic, Texan identity. Furthermore, these forms of race talk reproduce boundaries between White and non-White businesses and position Whiteness as the normal, taken for granted professional identity, and minority identities as marked, ‘other’ identities in the business community

Metadiscourse and the management of relationships during online conflict among academics

This study analyzes how members of an online academic committee use metadiscourse to manage communication norms and relationships during conflict. Data analyzed include 67 listserv posts among academics developing a solution to a conference scheduling conflict. Discourse analysis highlights how tensions between the group&rsquo;s leader and group members escalate throughout the interactions. Conflict began when participants opposed the group leader through positively evaluating the content of their leader&rsquo;s email, yet re-formulating their leader&rsquo;s proposed communication process. When the group leader ignored members, the members escalated opposition through negatively formulating the leader&rsquo;s actions, taking overt negative affective stances, asking the leader to change his decision, and withdrawing from the committee without resolving conflict. Analysis of group&rsquo;s metadiscourse illustrates that group members withdrew not because they disagreed with the leader&rsquo;s solution, but because they oriented to their leader as repeatedly violating academia-specific communication and relational preferences: the group leader attempted to conduct a top-down, closed conversation, while group members preferred an open discussion among equals. These findings highlight the need to attend to community-specific communication and relational preferences, particularly when online interactions are the primary form of relational maintenance.</p

Cultural Difference as a Resource for Arguments in Institutional Interactions

Biographical Note Natasha Shrikant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She uses ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze relational, institutional, and/or political ramifications of identity-negotiation in interaction. Her work focuses on negotiation of racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, and political identities in institutional contexts. Acknowledgments My deepest thanks to Jone Brunelle, my research assistant who transcribed this data and helped identify sections for analysis, and to Menno Reijven who graciously sent me relevant literature on argumentation. I would also like to thank Gonen Dori-Hacohen and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper presented at the 2019 International Communication Association annual conference. Last, this paper was greatly improved by feedback from the anonymous Communication Monographs (CM) reviewers and the CM editor, Dr. Paul Schrodt. Abstract This article analyzes how institutional members orient to cultural difference during arguments in meeting interactions. Membership categorization analysis (MCA) of twenty-one hours of audio-recorded conversations from eight months of fieldwork with an Asian American Chamber of Commerce illustrates that participants orient to cultural difference as a resource when building, supporting, or opposing arguments about institutionally related activities. Participants constructed cultural differences between cultural categories or participants oriented to cultural difference as a taken-for-granted fact and used this fact to support their arguments. Overall, this study contributes to theorizing intercultural communication through illustrating how cultural difference is a discursive phenomenon. MCA of participants&rsquo; interactions reveals nuanced, complex ways that cultural difference routinely constitutes institutional life.</p

Interactional approaches to discrimination and racism in everyday life

Everyday interaction can be a source of pervasive racism and is therefore an important context for exploring racism and prejudice. This chapter highlights the role that everyday interaction plays in perpetuating or resisting racism by reviewing the insights of interactional approaches, such as membership categorization analysis (MCA) and conversation analysis (CA). We show how these, and related, approaches reveal how racism and discrimination are constructed in language and social interaction, for example through covert and overt references to race, ideological functions of discourse, denials of racism, and negative evaluations of minority groups. This review highlights the benefits of language and social interaction as a lens through which to understand racism and discrimination as the accomplishments of mundane social practices. </p

Language and Social Psychology Approaches to Race, Racism, and Social Justice : Analyzing the Past and Revealing Ways Forward

Issues of race, racism, and social justice are under-studied topics in this journal. This Prologue, and our Special Issue (S.I.) more broadly, highlights ways that language and social psychology (LSP) approaches can further our understanding of race, racism, and social justice, while suggesting more inclusive directions for their theoretical development. Acknowledging the inspiration from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, we begin by discussing our deeply-held personal and emotional connections to recent societal events, including police violence against innocent Black civilians and the prevalence of anti-Asian hate. What follows, then, is: a historical analysis of past JLSP publications on these issues, a proposal for more intersections between LSP and communication social justice research, and an overview of the BLM movement together with the four articles that follow. We conclude by advocating for individual and institutional practices that can create socially-just changes by LSP scholars in the academy.</p

Taking a detour before answering the question: Turn-initial okay in second position in English interaction

10.1016/j.langcom.2020.09.005Language & Communication7647-5