Investigating Workplace Discourse

Almut Koester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134218929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Exploring the characteristics of different types of workplace conversations, including decision-making, training, briefing or making arrangements, this enthralling account pays particular attention to interactions with a more social focus, such as small talk or office gossip.

Presenting a range of approaches to analyzing such workplace discourse, Almut Koester argues for a combination of quantitative corpus-based methods, to compare specific linguistic features in different genres and qualitative methods involving a close analysis of individual conversations, to explore such issues as politeness, power, conflict and consensus-building. A corpus of conversations recorded in a variety of office environments both in the UK and the USA is used throughout to demonstrate the interplay between speakers accomplishing tasks and maintaining relationships in the workplace.

1
Workplace discourse

An overview

1.1 Introduction

This book is concerned with the analysis of naturally occurring talk in workplace environments, such as the following extracts from longer conversations:

Example 1.1

1	Dave	[ … ] Basically I’ve used their o:ld. price list,
2	Val	Right,
3	Dave	And … I’ve made a few changes.
4	Val	Yeah,
5	Dave	An’ then there’s the cover.
6	Val	Right,
7	Dave	So that– ↓ I got sent down a few things, I got that up this morning, Uh … This … She wanted to know, if we’ve done this before, I went through the … file, it didn’t look like it had. [ … ]

Example 1.2

Example 1.3

1	Carol	Be nice if there was some place where you could print it out and the date would show up every time, … ↓ But anyway …
2	Beth	↑ Oh it’s right here Carol. Revised. Seven, one, ninety-seven.

(from the Cambridge International Corpus © Cambridge University Press)

We can easily recognize Example 1.1 as taking place at work, as the speakers are obviously focusing on a particular task. In the second extract, on the other hand, the conversation addresses topics outside work (activities at the weekend) and looks like a typical example of small talk. The only indication that this conversation takes place at work is the reference to Monday (when the speakers will be back in the office after the weekend).

In the third example, the speakers are again engaged in a workplace task; however it is different from Example 1.1 in a number of ways. In Example 1.1, the discourse is fairly one-sided in that one speaker does most of the talking, while the other merely produces back-channels such as right to show understanding. In contrast to this, Example 1.3 seems much more interactive, as both speakers contribute more or less equally to the discourse. Another difference is that while the speakers in Example 1.1 remain task-focused throughout, in Example 1.3, the comments in turns 14 and 15 (about the size of the item on the computer screen) are not actually necessary in order to accomplish the task. These turns share some features with the small talk extract in Example 1.2, such as laughter and expressions of interest or surprise (Really! Boy it’s tiny up there). The function of these two turns seems to be to express subjective evaluations and show solidarity with the interlocutor, rather than get the job done.

These examples demonstrate some of the variation found in workplace conversations. First of all they show that people engage in a range of workplace tasks, for instance in the first extract a speaker briefs a co-worker about a job, and in the third example the two participants discuss how they can set up a particular procedure. While there is considerable variation in the types of spoken interaction occurring across different workplaces, many interactions have similar goals, and can therefore be said to be instances of the same ‘genre’. The genre in Example 1.1 could thus be described as ‘briefing’, and in Example 1.3 the speakers seem to be involved in some kind of decision-making. This book attempts to show that genre is a significant factor influencing the linguistic choices made by speakers, and it will explore key differences between some of the most common spoken workplace genres.

The above extracts also show that discourse participants may be more or less task-focused in their interactions with one another at work: in Example 1.1, the speakers remain task-focused throughout, while Example 1.2 consists entirely of small talk; Example 1.3 again deals with a workplace task, but contains some elements of relational talk. Clearly then, a comprehensive exploration of workplace discourse should take account of such variation in task-orientation. Particular attention will be paid in the following chapters to investigating the way in which linguistic choices reflect not only speakers’ goals in getting a job done, but also their attention to relational aspects of the encounter. The aim of this book is therefore to examine the linguistic and interactive devices which people working together use jointly to accomplish a variety of workplace tasks, as well as to build, maintain and negotiate workplace relationships.

1.2 Institutional, professional and workplace discourse

Workplace talk occurs in a wide range of settings from talk between co-workers, as in the examples above, to interactions in service encounters or health-care settings, to international business communication. It will not be possible to cover all these types of interaction in any kind of detail, but this chapter attempts to provide an overview of previous research in this area and of the kind of discourse that has been investigated. But first we need to examine what is distinctive about workplace discourse, and why it warrants special investigation.

1.2.1 The characteristics of institutional talk

The term ‘institutional talk’ is frequently used in the literature to refer to interactions in all kinds of workplace setting. Institutional talk differs from ordinary conversation in a number of ways (Drew and Heritage 1992:3–65, Schegloff 1992a, Heritage 1997). According to Drew and Heritage (1992:22), the distinctiveness of institutional discourse is reflected in three dimensions of interaction:

1 Goal orientation: ‘an orientation by at least one of the participants to some core goal, task or identity … conventionally associated with the institution.’

2 ‘Special and particular constraints on what one or both of the participants will treat as allowable contributions to the business at hand.’

3 ‘Inferential frameworks and procedures that are particular to specific institutional contexts.’

Participants’ goal orientation is reflected in a number of features of workplace talk, for example in the recurrence of particular types of discursive activity which can be associated with specific workplace practices, such as instruction-giving, decision-making, briefing. Institutional encounters may also have an overall structural organization consisting of a number of phases, each of which plays a particular role in terms of the overall goal of the encounter. It is noticeable that task-oriented talk tends to be more structured than talk in which participants are not focused on a workplace task. Such conversations often begin with the initiator announcing the purpose of the encounter, e.g.:

Uh … just wanted to tell you about my … conversation with ↑Tony.

Such explicit signalling of discourse goals is less common in casual conversation, where speakers do not have such clear transactional goals, and a specific reason for engaging in talk is not needed. Because task-oriented workplace conversations are often highly structured, they lend themselves particularly well to genre analysis, which has been applied to a variety of institutional contexts (see Chapters 2 and 3).

Constraints on what can be said or done can be manifested in a number of different ways. In some institutional settings (e.g., the courtroom, the classroom) specialized turn-taking systems are in operation; but even in less formal settings where this is not the case (e.g., in most interactions between co-workers), participants’ orientation to the institutional context may be displayed in the details of talk (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998). According to Heritage (1997), institutional interaction often involves the reduction of the range of interactional practices compared to ordinary conversation. For example, in many professional–lay interactions (e.g., doctor–patient), it is the professional who tends to ask the questions, although no official turn-taking rules exist.

The institutional context and the constraints it imposes can also be reflected in lexical choice, most obviously when technical or professional jargon is used. But the link between lexical choice and the institutional context can also be more subtle, for example using we instead of I and thereby speaking as a member of an organization, or through a variety of ‘institutional euphemisms’ (Drew and Heritage 1992:3–65, Heritage 1997). Recent corpus-based research on spoken Business English (McCarthy and Handford 2004) confirms that such institutional discourse is indeed distinct from casual conversation in terms of the relative frequencies of many lexico-grammatical items.

The distinctive inferential frameworks of specific institutional contexts can be reflected, for example, in turn design and adjacency pair structure, that is the action a turn is designed to perform and the way in which it is responded to (Heritage 1997). Adjacency pairs have been identified in conversation analysis as the basic unit of interaction, consisting of a first pair part, which sets up the expectation (or ‘conditional relevance’) for a matching second pair part to be produced by the addressee (see Levinson 1983:284–370). In the following extract from a conversation in the sales office of a small US business, an adjacency pair is produced by the president, Chris, and his sales manager, Joe:

Example 1.4

Chris Haven’t seen much in the way of sales the last half of the week.

Joe .hh Well, a lot of the media, the– the orders have been very difficult getting out. Stuff is– is jammed.

Joe responds defensively to Chris’s initiating comment that sales have been low, and attempts to explain this situation in terms of problems that have arisen. It is because of the institutional context and the roles the speakers play within it (Joe, as the sales manager, is expected to ensure that sales are kept at a certain level) that Chris’s comment is heard as a kind of ac...