Janet Holmes

• Professor at Victoria University of Wellington

The Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) team has devoted considerable attention over the last few decades to researching workplace communication. We have focused especially on the insights that discourse analysis can provide regarding similarities and differences between the two major ethnic groups in New Zealand in “ways of doing th...

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the...

The enactment of biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand has varied greatly over the time since colonial settlement, and it is still a debated and evolving concept. In this article we examine practices adopted by one Māori Chief Executive Officer in two different workplaces at two different points in time to illustrate this process in action. Our ana...

When the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project began in 1996, our main goal was to explore authentic workplace interaction. We were also conscious that workplace communication held a great deal of potential for applying the results of our work in the real world. With these two aims in mind we began to research workplace discourse. This chapt...

The themes identified in this volume represent the cutting edge of applied linguistics research in professional contexts and hence provide a reliable indication of future directions for research in this area. The integration of practitioners’ perspectives and the space assigned to their voices also suggest the direction of applied linguistics. Othe...

Contrastive pragmatics encourages a focus on variation in the ways that different groups enact their distinctive cultural values and norms. In New Zealand, Pākehā (European-based) ways of doing things are the norm, taken-for-granted and rarely questioned or even noted unless someone “breaks the rules”. For minority group members, however, including...

In all organisations it is important to provide guidance to newcomers and junior staff in order to facilitate ongoing professional development and interactional competence. This guidance can take many forms, from very explicit feedback in sanctioned contexts to subtle and implicit mentoring in unremarkable talk. Using naturally-occurring interactio...

The concept of encounter between Māori and Pākehā which has been the focus of so much historical and anthropological research also provides a rich source of insight for sociolinguists interested in the details of everyday workplace talk. Exploring the concept of ‘the culture order’ we discuss ways in which workplace narratives may provide evidence...

Workplace transitions provide rich material for understanding intercultural interaction. Research on transitions has typically focused on the sociocultural effects of moving between nations and/or on examples of career change. Boundary crossing at this macro level has provided insight into how newcomers negotiate novel cultural expectations. As wor...

Although transitions are an omnipresent feature of working lives, they remain underrepresented within the field of workplace discourse. In this chapter, we argue that transitions form a distinct category of talk bound by a range of relevant constraints, from wider societal ideologies through industry and organizational-specific norms to micro-discu...

This collection provides a kaleidoscopic view of a range of identity struggles in the workplace context. It features twenty-two case studies that present an eclectic mix of workplaces in different socio-cultural contexts. They include, among others, household workers in Peru and Hong Kong, female professionals in India and the UK, social workers in...

This chapter explores some of the ways in which sociopragmatic research has made an increasingly valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between language and gender over the last few decades. We use the term sociopragmatics to cover research which examines the relationship between social context and discourse, and we focus in...

The 'tall poppy syndrome' (TPS) is one example of a societal constraint whose function in Australasia is to enforce society-wide ideologies such as egalitarianism and the gender order. The TPS acts as an enforcement mechanism which keeps self-promoting discourse in check. While carefully managed selfpromotion is permissible in some contexts, there...

In the workplace, indirect reports often co-occur with narratives which are one component of the process of socialising newcomers. These particular narratives establish and reinforce professional norms (albeit indirectly) by offering a form of sense-making. In this paper, we discuss data collected on two New Zealand building sites where a core acti...

Power in meetings may be enacted in many ways, ranging from democratic and collaborative through to authoritative and didactic, with the exact positioning on this continuum typically under the control of the chair. By contrast with the focus of most previous research on the behaviour of institutionally ratified chairs of intact teams, this paper ex...

Power and Politeness in the Workplace has become established as a seminal text for courses in language and professional communication. This Routledge Linguistics Classic is here reissued with a new preface from the authors, covering the methods of analysis, an update on the Language in the Workplace project and a look at the work in the context of...

In the field of language and gender, there is a widely accepted origin narrative in which Robin Lakoff's seminal article is identified as the inaugural publication that launched investigations of a relationship between men, women, and language. Following its publication, there was a veritable explosion in language and gender research, with pragmati...

Sociopragmatic skills are crucial to communicative effectiveness at work, yet relatively few studies have evaluated the effects of classroom-based support in developing both cognitive control and social competence in these areas of language proficiency. Learners often have difficulty negotiating culturally appropriate content in particular speech a...

How people talked to the elderly was the focus of a flurry of research in the later decades of the twentieth century. Since then, despite a steady rise in the number of elderly people throughout the world, the topic seems to have been somewhat neglected. Much of the earlier research focussed on the ways in which doctors, nurses, and caregivers talk...

Significantly expanded and updated, the second edition of The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality brings together a team of the leading specialists in the field to create a comprehensive overview of key historical themes and issues, along with methodologies and cutting-edge research topics. Examines the dynamic ways that women and men develo...

The process of apprenticeship is one means of entering a new profession. Along with the technical skills entailed in learning a new job, apprentices need to acquire proficiency in appropriate ways of communicating in order to construct a convincing professional identity. Data collected on a New Zealand building site provides evidence of the extent...

Language and food are universal to humankind. Language accomplishes more than a pure exchange of information, and food caters for more than mere subsistence. Both represent crucial sites for socialization, identity construction, and the everyday fabrication and perception of the world as a meaningful, orderly place. This volume on Culinary Linguist...

The skills involved in contributing competently in workplace interaction include enacting attentive listenership and providing appropriate feedback to the talk of others. These sociopragmatic skills are often overlooked, and when non-native-like listener feedback does attract attention, cultural differences are commonly cited to account for differe...

W artykule omówiono wkład pięciu różnych podejść w ramach analizy dyskursu w interpretację i zrozumienie tego samego materiału empirycznego. Podejścia wybrane do porównania to analiza konwersacyjna, interakcyjna socjolingwistyka, teoria grzeczności, krytyczna analiza dyskursu i psychologia dyskursywna. Dane empiryczne stanowi dziewięciominutowe nag...

Many aspects of New Zealand English (NZE) have been well described, especially the distinctive vocabulary, phonology, and some syntactic differences in relation to other varieties of English. Building on earlier research describing pragmatic features of NZE, and identifying ways in which politeness is expressed in New Zealand (NZ) workplace talk, t...

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 practi...

Masculinist gender norms and majority group ethnic norms are always covertly relevant as important systemic characteristics of interaction at work, subtly influencing people's unconscious interpretations of what is considered appropriate in the workplace and influencing evaluations of the ways in which individuals do gender, ethnicity and leadershi...

Narratives are often overlooked in workplace talk, but they contribute in crucial ways to relationship building and identity construction in workplace interaction. In this article we analyse narratives told by skilled migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds during a workplace internship conducted as part of a Workplace Communication course....

Focusing on the communication challenges facing migrants with professional qualifications, this chapter describes how linguists can work with lay-people to identify and research areas of mutual concern, presenting research which is paradigmatically "applied linguistics applied" (Roberts 2003). The research was designed around a course aimed at prov...

Socio-pragmatic skills have been identified as important components of communicative competence in the workplace, yet relatively few studies have undertaken an evaluation of the effects of classroom-based support in developing both cognitive control and social competence in these areas of language proficiency. This paper reports on a collaborative...

Research on language maintenance and shift among ethnic minorities in New Zealand is still relatively sparse. Although the need for such research has been repeatedly invoked by those involved in discussions of New Zealand s incipient language policy, there are many communities about whose patterns of language use very little is known. This paper ev...

This paper analyses the ways in which professional migrants from different cultural backgrounds, using English as an Additional Language, manage the demands of constructing a positive professional identity while also negotiating the complex relational aspects of workplace talk. The well-established methodology of the Wellington Language in the Work...

Many aspects of the use of the Māori language are highly controversial in New Zealand, and humour is one way in which the sensitivities relating to the language can be negotiated in everyday workplace contexts. This article examines the use of the Māori language by Māori and Pākehā participants during humorous episodes at staff meetings in a Māori...

This paper explores a specific dimension of intercultural interaction by examining how leadership is enacted specifically through talk by two Maori male managers in New Zealand professional organizations. Any effective leader must be able to provide strong direction to his or her team, as well as having well-developed relational skills, and example...

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This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in...

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in...

Sort of is a syntactically flexible pragmatic particle serving a variety of functions in conversation. At a general level sort of functions as a device facilitating the smooth flow of the discourse, providing the speaker with verbal planning time. At a more specific level it serves both as an imprecision or approximation signal (epistemic modal mea...

In New Zealand, as in many other post-colonial societies, bicultwalism is a one-way street: Maori 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...

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 desir...

One important function of narratives in workplace interaction is the valuable contribution they make to the construction of complex social identities. These identities typically include a professional or workplace identity, but may also include other facets of self. In the New Zealand workplace, a mainstream 'white' identity can be considered the u...

The workplace is an important social site for gender performances, and talk is one means through which individuals enact gendered roles, adopt gendered stances, and construct their gender identity in the process of interacting with others at work. Exploring this claim, this article identifies two important themes that have emerged from research on...

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IntroductionApproaching the AnalysisIdentity Construction in Maori and Pakeha Women's NarrativesIdentity Construction in Maori and Pakeha Men's NarrativesDiscussionConclusion

There is a long research tradition associating humour with creativity, although relatively little research which focuses on the use of humour among professionals in particular workplaces. Addressing this gap, this paper analyses ordinary everyday workplace interaction in a range of New Zealand white collar organizations in order to examine claims a...

Gatekeeping involves monitoring boundaries and is typically accomplished through discourse, especially in organizational contexts. Using data from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, this paper examines how gatekeeping is interactionally achieved in ordinary, everyday workplace talk, and in routine encounters between people in the cou...

Communication is an important component in the construction of workplace identities, including leader and group identities. Micro-level analysis of everyday workplace discourse provides valuable insights into the way leadership is constructed and how workplace culture is created, maintained, and changed. In this context, leaders and managers are in...

Until recently, relatively little explicit attention has been paid to gender differences in patterns of language maintenance and shift. This paper examines evidence from research based on census data, questionnaires and interviews, that, in general, among both first-generation and second-generation immigrant groups in New Zealand and Australia, wom...

Getting along well at work involves a variety of sociolinguistic and pragmatic skills. Drawing on a database of over 300 interactions collected in a range of New Zealand professional workplaces, this article identifies some potentially problematic areas for those who are expected to communicate in English at work, although English is not their firs...

This paper investigates the ways in which leaders in ethnically diverse workplaces in New Zealand construct themselves as effective leaders in interaction with subordinates, whilst also taking account of the politeness norms of their specific workplaces. Case studies of two leaders, one from a Pākehā and one from a Māori workplace, illustrate that...

This paper examines the distribution of word-final /z/ in New Zealand English. This feature has attracted little attention in previous research, but it appears to be a feature which distinguishes between the English of Pakeha and Maori New Zealanders. The research reported in this paper describes the distribution of word-final /z/ in a sample of 6,...

This paper examines the constraints on the realizations of /t/ in New Zealand English. On the basis of a detailed examination of the speech of two similar speakers from the New Zealand ICE corpus, a series of allophonic rules is provided. It is then shown that the distribution of allophones for these speakers is not the same as for other speakers w...

Leadership is primarily a communicative activity, and humour provides leaders with a valuable communicative resource for reconciling the competing transactional and relational demands which face them. This article examines the ways in which Māori leaders use humour in everyday workplace interaction, and focuses in particular on the use of humour to...

While meeting management strategies have been investigated by a number of researchers, the ways in which participants' ethnicity and associated cultural norms may influence the discourse patterns of meetings is still relatively under-examined. Using data from New Zealand meetings, this paper investigates how Pākehā majority group norms typically le...

This article argues that it is time to put women back at the centre of language and gender research. Following a discussion of some issues with social constructionist and postmodernist approaches to the analysis of gendered social interaction, a case is made for identifying general (often repressive or constricting) patterns based on analyses using...

Workplaces constitute one of the more interesting sites where individuals ‘do gender’, while at the same time constructing their professional identities and meeting their organisation's expectations. Drawing on interactional data recorded in New Zealand professional organisations, this paper focuses in particular on how participants manage and inte...

Humor serves a wide range of functions at work, one of which is to foster collegiality. An analysis of interactions in New Zealand workplaces showed that one of the most important functions of humor was the construction and maintenance of good relations with fellow workers. Such workplace collegiality is often constructed and maintained through ext...

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 manag...

‘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...

Workplace narratives are one means of satisfying the complex demands of identity construction at work. Following reference to the relevant literature, this article discusses the range of narratives identified in our extensive New Zealand corpus of workplace interactions, distinguishing between more socially-oriented ‘workplace anecdotes’, and more...

This paper explores the way people ‘do mentoring’ in the workplace. Using examples from our extensive database of interactions, recorded in a number of New Zealand workplaces, the analysis identifies a variety of discourse strategies used by those in positions of responsibility in mentoring colleagues. The mentors in our corpus draw from a wide rep...

The studies in this volume explore needs analysis in the public, vocational and academic sectors, in contexts ranging from service encounters in coffee shops to foreign language needs assessment in the U.S. military. In each chapter, the authors explicitly discuss the methodology they employed, and in some cases also offer research findings on that...

After first considering some of the challenges of defining and measuring the concept of politeness, the analysis draws on data from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project to illustrate the value of complementary quantitative and qualitative approaches to the issue of what it means to be polite at work. Using the concept of relational prac...

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The ceiling isn't glass - it is a dense layer of men"! Anne Jardim, The New Yorker 1996. Leadership is a gendered concept. Although an increasing number of workplace leaders and managers are female, until relatively recently, the prevailing stereotype of a leader, chief executive officer, and even senior manager has been decidedly male (Marshall 19...

This paper reviews research relating to Māori varieties of English in New Zealand. Research on linguistic features of Māori English is first summarized, and then some of the ways in which Māori and Pākehā conversationalists use English differently in relation to a number of speech functions are explored. The structural features reviewed include pho...

,Narrative is a powerful,means,of constructing different kinds of social identity, including ethnic identity and, in the workplace, professional identity. While organizational,management,researchers,have,explored the importance,of organizational stories, and some communication researchers have used narrative to examine women’s experiences at work,...

This book aims to appraise sociolinguistic work devoted to the form and function of storytelling and to examine in detail the ways in which narrative constitutes a fundamental discursive resource across a range of contexts. The chapters presented here bring together some of the most recent work in the theory and practice of narrative analysis from...

Abstract There is extensive literature describing the characteristics of a good leader in the area of organizational communication and business management. However, the research tends to be based on secondary, survey or reported data, typically interviews and questionnaires. Moreover, the predominant image of a “good” leader tends to be a charismat...

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 exa...