Language And Culture At Work

Language and Culture at Work provides an overview of the complex role that culture plays in workplace contexts. Eight chapters cover the core aspects of culture at work, comprising: Face and politeness Decision making Leadership Identity Gender Work-life balance The authors draw on a significant corpus of authentic workplace data collected in numerous professional and medical settings involving participants from a variety of different socio-cultural backgrounds (including Chinese, Filipino, Indian, British, Dutch, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Australian). Using in-depth analyses of authentic interactions and interviews, the book proposes a new integrated framework for researching culture at work from a sociolinguistic perspective. This is key reading for researchers and recommended for those working in the areas of sociolinguistics, communication studies, discourse analysis and applied linguistics. It will be of particular interest to students of professional and workplace communication, intercultural communication and intercultural pragmatics.

This book provides an overview of the complex role that culture plays in workplace contexts. In eight chapters, the authors cover the core aspects of culture at work from making decisions and negotiating power to gender and identity. Drawing on insights from a range of studies, they propose a new integrated framework for researching culture at work from a sociolinguistic perspective, and they apply it to the significant corpus of authentic workplace data they have collected from numerous settings in the UK, Hong Kong and New Zealand. This is key reading for researchers and recommended for advanced students of workplace and intercultural communication, sociolinguistics and discourse studies.

From language classrooms to outdoor markets, the workplace is fundamental to socialisation. It is not only a site of employment where money is made and institutional roles are enacted through various forms of discourse; it is also a location where people engage in social actions and practices. The workplace is an interesting research site because of advances in communication technology, cheaper and greater options for travel, and global migration and immigration. Work now requires people to travel over great geographical distances, communicate with cultural ‘others’ located in different time zones, relocate to different regions or countries, and conduct business in online settings. The workplace is thus changing and evolving, creating new and emerging communicative contexts. This volume provides a greater understanding of workplace cultures, particularly the ways in which working in highly interconnected and multicultural societies shape language and intercultural communication. The chapters focus on critical approaches to theory and practice, in particular how practice is used to shape theory. They also question the validity and universality of existing models. Some of the predominant models in intercultural communication have been criticised for being Eurocentric or Anglocentric, and this volume proposes alternative frameworks for analysing intercultural communication in the workplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.

Offers some theoretical innovations in teaching foreign languages and reports how they have been applied to curriculum development and experimental courses at the upper secondary and college levels. Approaches language learning as comprising several dimensions, including grammatical competence, change in attitudes, learning about another culture, and reflecting on one's own. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Based on the #1 New York Times bestseller The 5 Love Languages®(over 12 million copies sold), Dramatically improve workplace relationships simply by learning your coworkers’ language of appreciation. This book will give you the tools to improve staff morale, create a more positive workplace, and increase employee engagement. How? By teaching you to effectively communicate authentic appreciation and encouragement to employees, co-workers, and leaders. Most relational problems in organizations flow from this question: do people feel appreciated? This book will help you answer “Yes!” A bestseller—having sold over 300,000 copies and translated into 16 languages—this book has proven to be effective and valuable in diverse settings. Its principles about human behavior have helped businesses, non-profits, hospitals, schools, government agencies, and organizations with remote workers. PLUS! Each book contains a free access code for taking the online Motivating By Appreciation (MBA) Inventory (does not apply to purchases of used books). The assessment identifies a person’s preferred languages of appreciation to help you apply the book. When supervisors and colleagues understand their coworkers’ primary and secondary languages, as well as the specific actions they desire, they can effectively communicate authentic appreciation, thus creating healthy work relationships and raising the level of performance across an entire team or organization. Take your team to the next level by applying The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace.

In this book, Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart delineate the relationship between “language in particular” and “culture in general” by focusing on language as both social practice and a means of classifying and interpreting the world. A traditional linguistic approach to a focus on language is illuminated by their anthropological emphasis on the embodiment of relationships and experience. In the book, the body is placed in the foreground for understanding language in culture, which helps in turn to understand how it enables us to adapt to the world of lived material experience. Written in an accessible style and drawing on an extensive corpus of primary field research from Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Japan, Taiwan, Scotland, and Ireland, Strathern and Stewart present a world anthropology which links together European, North American, and Asia-Pacific approaches to the topic. Students and scholars alike of sociocultual anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and linguistics will benefit from this engaging work on how the various components of our culture are informed and shaped through language.

First published in 2004. A collection of the pioneering work from The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Together with changes in the nature of modernity, globalisation is restructuring society. The sovereignty of the nation-state is undermined, the structuring of identity is realigned and a sense of individualism (which involves a freedom of choice re institutional alignments) prevails. English emerges as the global lingua franca. At the heart of these developments is the knowledge economy within which work is organised according to principles quite different from those of the Taylorism that prevailed in the industrial economy. Language and culture play a crucial role in the elaboration of the shared meaning that is crucial for learning within team working. The book argues that creativity is enhanced by the use of multilingualism within working practices. It concludes with an overview of how our understanding of language is also changing.