Negotiating the culture order in New Zealand workplaces

Abstract

In many societies the relative social status of different social and cultural groups results in hegemonic relationships or an ‘order’ which manifests itself as sets of taken-for-granted societal norms or ideologies which influence behavior, including linguistic behavior. I label this concept the culture order, and propose it as a potential sociolinguistic universal. Drawing on the research of the Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) team, I provide evidence of some of the complex components of the New Zealand culture order. Using a social realist theoretical framework, and an interactional sociolinguistics approach, I identify a number of areas of contrast in the discourses instantiating the Māori and Pākehā culture orders (e.g. meeting norms, ways of criticising others), as well as discourse norms apparently shared by both groups (e.g. the Modesty Maxim; see Leech 2014). The complexities of these similarities and differences are discussed as well as their implications for hegemonic relationships. (Culture order, workplace discourse, sociolinguistic universals, egalitarianism, meeting norms)*

‘It's not acceptable for the husband to stay at home': Taking a discourse analytical approach to capture the gendering of work

“…We have chosen three examples here to show how throughout the interviews, the ‘trailing spouses' frequently mobilize and orient to several gendered and gendering discourses relating to work, and how they thereby normalize the underlying gender order on which these discourses — and the gendered notion of work which they construct — are built. As Holmes () maintains, ‘[t]he gender order acts as a societal level constraint to which members of society orient in their interactions, whether they conform to or contest it' (p. 34). However, it is noteworthy that in our data, the women which we spoke to largely conformed to and accepted the gender order and drew on a range of gendered and gendering discourses usually without questioning and challenging the underlying assumptions.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology special issue edited by Lønsmann, Hazel, and Haberland () draws attention to the transience of communities—how communities may form and dissolve, with shifting norms of language use as participants from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds negotiate their communicative practices on the go. Contributors to this special issue focus primarily on contexts where participants are brought together through cross‐border mobility, such as multinational corporations (Lønsmann ; Millar ) and international higher education (Moore ; Mortensen ), and in this sense, they extend the concerns of sociolinguistic work on intercultural communication (Angouri ; Holmes ). For the purpose of this review, however, an important implication of this attention to transience is how spatial mobility must be understood in terms of a more general movement of individuals and communities through time as well.…”

Context Matters: Exploring the Influence of Norms, Values, and Context on a Māori Male Manager

“…Holmes (2018) introduces the concept of “culture order” to help understand the norms in society which constrain how people “construct their ethnic or cultural identity,” as a parallel to the concept of “gender order” (Connell, 1987; Matthews, 1984). The concept of the culture order acknowledges inequalities and “taken-for-granted societal norms or ideologies which influence behaviour, including linguistic behaviour” (Holmes, 2018, p. 33).…”

“…Respect for hierarchy and whānau (family)/group orientation are core components of what Holmes (2018) identifies as the Māori culture order. Holmes (2018, p. 34) defines the “culture order,” as the norms and expectations to which everyone in society orients and which constrain the ways in which individuals construct their ethnic or cultural identity. This article explores the influence of respect for hierarchy and whānau/group orientation on the way one Māori male manager interacts in executive team meetings.…”