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Langua ge and culture at work. An introduction
It’s a cultural thing.
(Martin, expatriate1 partner at a large international financial corporation in Hong Kong)
Introduction
This book aims to explore language and ‘culture’2 at work. More specifically, it takes as a starting point a dilemma that we, as researchers of professional communication, have encountered in many of our previous projects in a range of different workplaces in Hong Kong. When talking to our participants about their experiences at work, most of them mentioned ‘culture’ in one form or another. Especially those working in so-called ‘multicultural’ workplaces often stated that they thought ‘culture’ had a huge impact on their behaviour and, more specifically, on how they interacted with their colleagues and clients. Just as Martin did in the quote above, they used ‘culture’ as an explanation for their own behaviour and also for their frustration over the behaviour of the people they work with. The following quotes are just two more examples of this:
Trying to get the democracy going in the office doesn’t work a 100 per cent because I’m working with Chinese people.
(Janet, expatriate owner and CEO of a language learning centre in Hong Kong)
What takes an hour in the West will take a week in China […]. Hong Kong is similar but to a lesser degree, really frustrating.
(Roger, expatriate self-employed entrepreneur in Hong Kong)
These snippets are indicative of a larger pattern we saw in our data: our participants often explained perceived differences in workplace practices as reflections of what they considered to be their colleagues’ culturally influenced perceptions, beliefs and assumptions. Among the issues that participants listed as being impacted by what they call ‘culture’ were misalignments of expectations and practices relating to face and politeness, decision making, leadership, identity, gender and issues regarding work–life balance. We discuss these topics in more detail in subsequent chapters. These claims, however, were often in sharp contrast to participants’ actual behaviours at their workplaces. Not only was the picture that emerged from observing their actual practices much more complex (for example, regarding the ways in which decisions were made), but sometimes what people were actually doing was at odds with what they claimed to be doing. In light of this observation, it is thus perhaps not surprising that ‘culture’ was much less of an issue than perceived in people’s everyday workplace encounters.
This book takes this discrepancy as a starting point and aims to critically analyse language and ‘culture’ at work by proposing a way of making sense of these differences, and suggesting a possible way of productively combining participants’ perspectives with insights gained from analytical inquiry of actual behaviour. Exploring this discrepancy and trying to find ways of bringing both perspectives together, we argue, is analytically rewarding and leads to new insights about the relationship between language and ‘culture’ at work.
So, what is ‘culture’?
‘Culture’ is an inherently complex concept which has been defined and approached in vastly different ways by researchers from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including for example, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, international business studies and applied linguistics. Among the most widely cited conceptualisations are the so-called compositional approaches, which generally view culture as something that is manifested in all aspects of social life – with different levels or layers of ‘cultures’ capturing more easily observable rituals and practices, as well as hidden values, beliefs and assumptions. The most prominent scholars of these approaches are Geert Hofstede and Edward T. Hall (Hofstede 1980, 1997, 2001; Hall 1959, 1966, 1976), who have proposed the metaphors of culture as an onion and as an iceberg, respectively, to capture this multi-layered nature. Although their works have received much criticism – especially for the relative static and restrictive nature of the dimensions they have developed along which the values and behavioural practices of different cultural groups can be compared (e.g. McSweeny 2002; Cardon 2008) – their frameworks are still frequently used in research and intercultural development.
More recent trends, however, take a critical stance towards these essentialist views of culture and move away from such static conceptualisations of ‘culture’ as something that people have or belong to. Rather, they understand ‘culture’ as a dynamic process and something that people do (Street 1993). They do not view ‘culture’ as a given, a priori variable to explain people’s behaviour. Instead, scholars have begun to explore how ‘culture’ is constructed, negotiated and shaped in interaction (e.g. Piller 2007; Ladegaard & Jenks 2015). This more ‘dynamic view of culture’ (Sarangi 1994: 416) is based on an analysis of the ‘use of language by actual people from different cultures doing actual things with language in actual social situations’ (Cheng 2003: 10), rather than relying on anecdotal evidence such as that provided in the earlier quotes from our participants. These approaches take a critical look at how ‘culture’ is actually enacted in an interaction, and question whether ‘culture’ is relevant and whether we, as analysts, need to refer to this concept to make sense of our observations (Scollon & Scollon 2001).
These differences between earlier essentialist notions of ‘culture’ and more recent constructivist approaches are also captured in Holliday’s (1999) distinction between ‘large cultures’ and ‘small cultures’. Simply put, large cultures refer to ethnic, national or international groups, while small cultures capture ‘any cohesive grouping’ (Holliday 1999: 237). However, rather than relying on size as a distinguishing criterion, large and small cultures have a different focus. Small cultures are closely related to the activities and practices that take place within a particular group and are not, unlike large cultures, interested in ‘the nature of the group itself’ (Holliday 1999: 250). Large and small cultures thus present different paradigms: the notion of large culture is primarily concerned with identifying and describing differences ‘between ethnic, national and international entities’, whereas the notion of small culture is interested in exploring ‘social processes as they emerge’ (Holliday 1999: 240).
The relationship between small cultures and large cultures is a complex one, with some researchers arguing that large cultures are a reification of small cultures (Holliday 1999). After reification, as Holliday (1999: 242) maintains, ‘culture appears large and essentialist, and indicates concrete, separate, behaviour-defining ethnic, national and international groups with material permanence and clear boundaries’. As a consequence, when making claims about culture (e.g. Janet’s claim about how ‘the Chinese’ do not favour a democratic approach to decision making), interlocutors draw on notions of large culture and treat ‘culture’ as something people have, rather than as dynamically and collaboratively constructed. This notion of large culture tends to become relatively fixed in people’s minds and runs the risk of leading to over-generalisations and stereotyping (see also Moon 2010). In making such statements about specific cultures, participants simultaneously contribute to constructing ‘another culture’ and ‘their own culture’, which are typically placed in opposition to one another (cf. Chapter 5 for further discussion). Thus, statements like the earlier quotes are important sources of information about the processes involved in the production and constant negotiation of ‘culture’ and, we would argue, should thus be considered in research. The subsequent chapters illustrate how these different conceptualisations of ‘culture’ as relatively static or dynamically constructed might be brought together, and what can be gained from such an endeavour. We show how participants’ perspectives on ‘culture’, cultural characteristics, and cultural differences might be fruitfully combined with discourse analyses of the specific practices that construct and enact ‘culture’ on the micro-level of interaction.
Researching ‘culture’ at work
One of the challenges that research on language and culture faces is capturing the complexities of ‘culture’ and, more specifically, accounting for the differences in the ways researchers and lay people conceptualise and use the term ‘culture’. Although, as we will show in the subsequent chapters, much is to be gained from conceptually and methodologically combining these often different notions of ‘culture’, researchers have not yet found systematic ways of doing so. Instead, most studies on language and ‘culture’ have largely engaged in different paradigms, each associated with its advantages and pitfalls.
Three strands of scholarship are particularly relevant to our conceptualisations of ‘culture’ that we build on and develop in this book. First, because our study is situated in the workplace context, research in the broad field of organisational and management studies should be acknowledged. This research largely builds on lay people’s understandings of ‘culture’, and often describes and compares the (perceived) behaviours of members of specific cultural groups. It typically uses critical incidents, narratives and survey results to explain instances of miscommunication between or differences in the behaviour of members from different cultural groups (e.g. Dekker et al. 2008; Christie et al. 2003; Fink et al. 2006).
A second relevant strand is communication-based studies on intercultural communication. Although not all of these studies deal with workplace communication, their focus on the analysis of real-life interactions in intercultural encounters makes them relevant to our research (for a systematic overview see Sarangi 1994). Within this strand, two specific approaches are particularly noteworthy, namely interactional sociolinguists (e.g. Gumpertz 1982; Gumpertz & Tannen 1979) and cross-cultural pragmatics (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). In contrast to organisational and management studies, these approaches provide analyses of data from real-life interactions or use Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs),3 and therefore may offer insights into the actual or perceived communicative practices of participants. Many of these communication-based studies, however, have been criticised for overemphasising potential cultural differences as the cause of communicative problems (see e.g. Roberts & Sarangi 1993).
The third strand of research that is relevant for this book is recent work conducted in sociolinguistic, pragmatic and discourse analytic studies, which offer a more dynamic, multifaceted outlook on ‘culture’ (for an overview see Senft et al. 2009). Although a small number of these studies are situated in workplace contexts, their approach to ‘culture’ is similar to our own. These studies do not assume that ‘culture’ is an important contextual variable in an interactional encounter unless participants themselves are orienting to it. This approach to ‘culture’ does, however, face some difficulties, such as issues regarding the identification of specific linguistic manifestations of participants’ orientation to ‘culture’, as well as difficulties in addressing and systematically incorporating the concerns and experiences of those people who work in intercultural contexts.
A possible way to reconcile these different strands of research and to build on their respective strengths while minimising the effects of their weaknesses is to approach the topic of ‘culture’ at work by taking a dynamic perspective. This can be done by exploring how ‘culture’ is constructed and e...
